Review: Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

I’ve read a few other books by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and loved them. This Accident of Being Lost and Islands of Decolonial Love are collections of short stories and poems that explore different aspects of connection, love and belonging from an indigenous perspective. These works showcase a writing style that is deeply personal, beautiful in its emotional intensity and particularity.

In The Theory of Water, Simpson leaves the realm of fiction and poetry to speak more overtly politically. While I found this premise interesting, I felt flat-footed: despite the title, this book is not a work of political or philosophical theory but a personal memoir. Simpson looks back on the process of grieving the loss of Doug Williams, an Elder and friend who guided her in reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. When writing figuratively — such as in her metaphor of sintering, that joining and mutual transformation of snowflakes that could form a basis for radical communal movement — Simpson’s prose is evocative and compelling, even in this non-fictional form.

However, her engagement with political theory left me disappointed. Works seemed haphazardly referenced, and were summarized subjectively: I recently read X and it made me think of Y. Her approving references to Gramsci and Aimé Césaire appeared carefully worded to give the impression they were opponents of communism, rather than committed communists with specific disagreements with specific communist parties. Her epistemology was also too irrationalist for my tastes (“Cyclical time comes from land. Linear time is a European construct that overlays cyclical time — a mechanism to organize the world in a homogeneous way to facilitate, of course, capitalism.”) Still, I found it interesting to see how she incorporated radical Black authors like Cedric Robinson into her vision for the radical indigenous movement.

Perhaps if I had gone into the book expecting a memoir, I would have appreciated it more for what it was than been disappointed for it not being what I wished for.

Review: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The Safekeep explores political themes through a sapphic romance. However, it neither satisfyingly interrogates its political tensions nor weaves a compelling love story. The point of failure is the same for both aspects of the novel: the mutual understanding between the two main characters is just not believable.

The protagonist is a small-minded and reclusive Dutch woman, Isabel, who cares for her family home like a shrine: her parents are dead and her brothers have moved out, leaving her alone to tend the garden and obsess over the silverware. Early hints suggest to us that there is more to the house than Isabel would prefer us to know: her family moved into it during World War II fully furnished and touched with signs of its former inhabitants. We later learn that it was vacated because the Jewish family who lived there was sent to a concentration camp, then evicted for non-payment of the mortgage.

Isabel’s brother finds himself needing to travel internationally, and places his new girlfriend, Eva, in the “family home” while he is gone. Isabel treats her horribly, mocking her manners and her appearance and controlling her actions, while Eva remains peppy and full of life and keeps trying to break through Isabel’s hard exterior shell — a manic pixie dream girl, but queer. Because Isabel lacks any redeeming qualities, Eva’s patience and interest in her appears unmotivated. When they suddenly initiate a romantic relationship, it feels unearned, inscrutable, forced. Romantic chemistry springs from two hearts recognizing each other, whereas in this novel, hatred melts into love without that moment of genuine mutual discovery. The sensuously written passages of hazy, heady new love felt flat. What did each woman see in the other?

In the third act, the reader learns that Eva is the daughter of the dispossessed Jewish family, and the lone survivor of the camps in her family. She concocts a Hollywoodesque scheme of seducing Isabel’s brother to reclaim her home, or at the very least, reclaim some of her family’s dinnerware. Conveniently for the plot, the scheme is surprisingly successful, and Eva’s sojourn at her family’s former home is interrupted only by Isabel’s stumbling across her diary, where Eva had recorded the reclaimed dinnerware.

This reveal explains Eva’s patient persistence in befriending Isabel, but a mystery remains for the reader: what was this intense love actually founded on? We are told that Eva really did inexplicably love the abusive Isabel — it was not a mere ploy. Despite their relationship being founded on deception, we are told Isabel still loves Eva. The two women work out their pain in a series of emotional confrontations that explore the hurt of being kicked out of one’s home and not belonging anywhere. Isabel maneuvers to get the house put in her name — rather than her brother’s — and invites Eva to live with her. And so they live together happily ever after. The closing words of the book are in Hebrew: “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).

The novel is a study of dispossession. Published in 2024 and written by an author who spent her childhood in Israel and who has spoken about her opposition to the Israeli government, it is impossible to read this story without thinking of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Isabel’s fierce attachment to her house as her ancestral right despite the living dispossessed inhabitant’s desperate desire to return home renders her a symbolic stand-in for Israel. On the other hand, Eva’s suffering in the Holocaust and in the callousness and antisemitism of the Netherlands post-War is distinctly Jewish. The Israel-Palestine conflict is thus transfigured into one between Israel and Jews. The resolution of this political tension is shallow and Utopian: if the two sides simply fall in love they can share a home together.

But where does the mutual recognition for this unification come from? The answer is as unclear as the basis for Isabel and Eva’s love.

I could see an alternative restructuring of the story in which Eva’s motivations are revealed earlier on. Rather than reserving her intentions for a climactic reveal towards the end, her affections for Isabel could then be developed more transparently. Perhaps the romance could grow as they tend the garden together, connecting with each other as they connect with their shared land and construct something new. I would find it more believable from a character perspective, and perhaps from a political perspective, than an inexplicable attraction between two souls.

Review: The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War 2, and divided up the USA between Germany and Japan. The title refers to the within-world author of a banned book that imagines what would have happened if the Allies won.

This premise is overtly political, however I was overall disappointed in its exploration of political topics. Nazi ideology was simplified into genocidal hatred of Jewish people and Black people, and the desire to ever expand their territory. But the ideology of fascism is broader than that, and shifts as the needs of the fascist party do. What would a victorious Nazi party transform into? Moreover, how would American culture adapt to occupation by German and Japanese fascists? (We should remember that US racial segregation laws were the inspiration for Nazi regulations around race, disability, and other methods of categorizing people.) These questions were not explored.

One of the most important pillars of fascism is irrationalism and mysticism, both of which were missing in Philip K. Dick’s imagined Nazism. This absence was rendered starker by mysticism being the philosophical guidance of the protagonists: the American and Japanese characters continually consulted the I Ching to aid in decision-making. In fact, the author himself used the I Ching to determine key plot points. The climax of the book revolves around characters discovering the plurality of worlds, the absence of a singular truth. Our world, the world of the novel and the world of the novel within the novel are all suggested to co-exist. In sum: history is subjective, constructed; truth is what you make of it; Nazism is bad, but irrationality and mysticism are very, very good.

Still, there were a few aspects of the novel that I thought were fun. Several story lines revolve around the art world, where Americans scavenge and counterfeit their own culture and history to satisfy buyers with stereotyped, fetishized views. It was a good exploration of how imperial subjugation shapes one’s relationship with one’s culture, and reminded me a little of A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. However, I preferred Martine's handling of this theme: her fantasy world was distant to our own, which allowed for richer exploration. Dick's novel leans on the shock of, "what if people did to us what we did to other cultures?"

Dick captured wonderfully the awkward tension of social situations where individuals of conflicting political persuasions are confronted by their differences but feel the need to maintain social ease. For example, I enjoyed the scene of the American comprador dining at the house of a curious, possibly radical, Japanese couple. This scene was narrated through the perspective of the American, who misses the subtext to the conversation, and this irony heightened the suspense. The scenes between Juliana and her undercover Nazi lover were also well done; here, suspense was driven by concern for her safety at the hands of a violent man. Maybe it is unsurprising that this facet of the novel was deftly portrayed while its political philosophy remained shallow: Americans have a simplistic understanding of Nazism, but ample experience keeping the peace during family Thanksgiving dinners with political opponents.

Review: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

In this memoir, novelist and marathon runner Haruki Murakami reflects on his relationship with running. As a runner myself, I enjoyed recognizing common ground in our experiences: an approachable form of exercise initially picked up to support a long, healthy life became a source of enjoyable routine and self-improvement. We have both also found in running a way to practice coming to terms with disappointment, failure, and personal limits. 

There are also substantial differences: Murakami is much more focused on competitive running (marathons, triathlons, and one ultramarathon), while I enjoy running more as a way of exploring and relating to my urban environment, and I have never run an official race nor much farther than a half-marathon. Of our differences, the reflections I found most compelling were those on how aging shapes his relationship with running. I am a decade or so younger than he was when he wrote this book, and so these passages present a peek into my future. For now, I will continue with my 35 kilometers per week while I can.

Overall, however, I was disappointed in the book. A good memoir either offers the reader a rare glimpse into an unknown world, or finds a way to make the author’s particular experience general. Jesse Thistle’s memoir is an example of the first, showing the reader how Canada’s social system traps homeless people in a cycle of poverty, crime and addiction, and how hard it is to emerge from it. Examples of the second approach include The Message, Born to Run, and to a lesser extent, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. These works interleave personal reflection with science, history, and sociology to connect their own experiences with the broader human experience. 

In contrast, Murakami’s narrative is very internal — many passages read like stream-of-consciousness — and I found the result a bit overly self-indulgent. Although I haven’t read Murakami’s novels, this memoir made me less interested in doing so. I find he essentializes “talent” too much (“what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have[?]. It’s pretty obvious: talent.”), views education too hierarchically (“the pupil has no idea what the real point of this sort of practice is.”), and writes strangely about women he sees (the "aggressive challenge” “emanating” from the “small, slim” girls with “blond hair in a ponytail” that “run like the wind.”). I found the prose to be unremarkable, although it is possible the fault lies with the translator. However, I am suspicious of a writer that claims “the fear I feel when I weave in and out of traffic on my sports bike with its skinny tires and my bike shoes strapped tight in the straps is something you can’t understand unless you’ve gone through it.” Isn’t the task of a novelist to make us deeply emotionally understand an experience we have not gone through? 

Altogether, this is a memoir better suited to the Murakami fan than to the casual runner.

Review: Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

“You should listen to me,” is the implicit argument being made by a narrator to the reader, especially a narrator who speaks as intimately and as conscious of the reader as the one in Study for Obedience. “Why?” is the natural question for the reader to ask back, and this question drew me through the first couple chapters. The narrator’s story-telling — a mix of far too much detail mixed with vague handwaving or elided rationale — quickly clued me in to her unreliability, but what story was she trying to tell me, and what really happened?

For a little while, I thought the narrator was like Amy, from Gone Girl, making herself out to be the perfect victim, while secretly carrying out a nefarious plot. The narrator is so meek, so self-deprecating, so unworthy of interest that I thought for sure it was a cover. But this aspect of her nature seems indeed to be true. The narrator is a victim of abuse, raised to serve her older siblings. She may also have been sexually assaulted (in a characteristic linguistic loophole, she tells us that there had been “no assault that had been reported, investigated, and brought to trial”). Now middle-aged, she leaves her life in the city to be a house-keeper for her brother in a tiny, traditional, rural village. She finds ways to make her devotion to her brother a matter of exercising her own agency. It’s a character and setting alien to me: very conservative, hierarchical, punishing, sexist, and so internalized that the character sees virtue in the ways she subsumes herself to these values.

The narrator is Jewish, although that word and its cognates never appear. Her identity can be pieced together from the stereotypes others apply to her and from the shape of the vague history she tells of her ancestors (“an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.”), who fled the land in which she now lives during the Holocaust. She shares the grinding loneliness and fear of moving through the world as a Jewish woman. The villagers treat her as an outsider, no matter how much she tries to integrate. They accuse her of witchcraft, responsible for the many strange events that occurred after her arrival.

But the reader has to wonder about the actual cause of all these events. The narrator emphasizes to us the improbability of so many rare events coinciding:

Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople.

There is also the unignorable fact that the narrator — for motives she does not reveal to us — wove together “herbs and grasses I knew so well by sight though not by name” into “shapes of some significance to me”, and then dropped them off in the middle of the night to select locations in the village, murmuring “quiet words of devotion” and then nervously waited for the effects to take place. The narrator’s value system is far from sympathetic. She works without scruples for a corporate law firm set on ruining the environment and the lives of those who try to protect it. She sides with her brother against the employees who accuse him of sexual harassment. Are her beliefs just the result of her childhood conditioning, unquestioning service to those higher up the hierarchy? Or is she a bad person?

 At this point, we should consider the epigraph the author chose for the novel: “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” Now the reader is placed in a predicament: is the narrator innocent of all the strange occurrences, merely a worn-down victim of abuse, obedient to a fault, mistreated by her antisemitic neighbours? If so, how do we explain these strange events and the narrator’s woven dolls? Or, is the narrator murderous? Did she cause (some portion of) these events? If so, the reader must accept the existence of magic, and is placed in uncomfortable company with the narrator’s antisemitic neighbours. (And if we choose this answer, the meek, unworthy neighbour recalls Gone Girl’s murderous heroine after all.)

The book ends with a surreal confrontation — for some reason, the townsfolk are all wearing matching white tracksuits when they summon her about the woven dolls — and although it is unclear what exactly transpired, the narrator demands her right to live, as a survivor of horrific violence against her people as well as someone now personally implicated. She receives it. The novel ends with her caring for her sorrysack brother in their home: “I am living, I claim my right to live.”

This novel wasn’t for me. I want to grasp events in all their spatiotemporal particularity; the narrator sands down all the details of history and geography until the village could be anywhere in Eastern Europe, and until its history of Jewish oppression becomes myth-like. I turn to novels to understand the human experience, but despite hearing this narrator’s entire story, I still have no idea who she is; there is no cathartic moment where truths and lies are revealed. The author invites us to contemplate these ambiguities, but rather than finding the result to be profound, I thought it made the treatment of these serious topics superficial, empty.

Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven has a fun premise but a messy execution. A deadly pandemic hits Toronto and wipes out 99% of humanity. The narrative unfolds across multiple timelines in the decades before and after a fictional SARS-like virus emerges, all revolving around the lives of film star Arthur Leander and his connections. Twenty years after the pandemic, civilization has collapsed, and mankind lives on in small clusters of families scattered about the land. There is no electricity and people live by hunting in the forests and scavenging relics of the past.

The novel contrasts characters who drift through their lives with those who purposefully construct meaning. Arthur’s best friend, Clark, who had originally wished to become an actor, works as a coach for business executives. For his work, he interviews a woman about one such executive, and she gives a diagnosis of the ills of the modern era:

“[Adulthood]’s full of ghosts. … I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that. … But I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

This quote captures the main themes explored as we get to know our broad cast of characters. Arthur is one of these “sleepwalkers”: he escapes his birthplace of the tiny island off the coast of British Columbia for the big, anonymous city of Toronto, but leaves university to become an actor. His career progresses in a blur of parties and fortune. He falls into a relationship with Miranda: she needed a refuge from her abusive relationship, he liked that she was from his place of birth and unconnected to Hollywood. He just as quickly falls into an affair with the woman who becomes his second wife, and then soon after, begins a relationship with his third wife. Other characters at varying times also avoid confronting the real world in front of them, or the unhappiness within themselves. Frank, the brother of the paparazzo who tried to save Arthur’s life, spends the first days of the pandemic writing public relations fluff for a wealthy philanthropist, allowing him to put off thinking about the world changing and what his place in it will be. 

Miranda, on the other hand, is far more conscious of her goals and decision-making. Following her divorce, she pursues a career in shipping because the office environment is a calm and serene contrast to her cramped and chaotic student apartment she had shared with her abusive boyfriend. She creates an extensive graphical sci-fi novel for nobody — or rather, for her own personal satisfaction, not money or fame. Her comics share their title with this novel, and survive long past her own death. The paparazzo, Jeevan, treats his job with mercenary-like detachment, but plans to become a paramedic: he wanted to be the type of guy people turn to in a crisis. Although his plans derail in the wake of the outbreak, he finds purpose in settling down and starting a family, and rebuilding society.

The climax fits into this theme disjointedly: twenty years post-apocalypse, a prophet has arisen and is violently bringing “salvation” to the world. Over the course of the novel, the Prophet captures and kills several characters we become familiar with, before ultimately being assassinated by a member of his own movement who we barely know. Although the Prophet is the main antagonist in the post-pandemic scenes, his character is underdeveloped. His belief that everything happens for a reason leads him to conclude that the pandemic was divine intervention. This teleological definition of purpose is different from the purposiveness explored through the other characters. Religion and radical movements are of course sources of meaning and purpose in life, but this angle was explored simplistically. I wondered if the author had plotted out one storyline, and then not course-corrected this plotline when her character exploration took her into different thematic territory. 

Indeed, I wondered why the author centered the story around a pandemic at all. The major themes were most compellingly developed in the prepandemic timelines, while the apocalypse felt like an unnecessary narrative frame. The sleepwalker theme as well as the author’s other comments about interpersonal connection (e.g., Arthur’s relationship with his friend, V—“I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter”) and of being known or observed (small island life, urban anonymity, paparazzi spying) were interesting, and explored well. The post-apocalyptic world, on the other hand, is surprisingly boring. The author has clearly thought deeply about her world — there is extensive detailing of logistics — but never did I feel curious to learn more.

Perhaps it is because it is a rather sterile world. The characters necessarily focus on survival and logistics rather than lofty questions about the meaning of life. But even in stressful and existential situations, humans connect and bond with each other. This connection is mostly absent from the author’s post-pandemic plotlines. People’s emotions are instead explored through their connections with objects — old comics and magazines, items scavenged from the beforetimes, a snowglobe carried about — lending these passages a nostalgic and detached tone, and one that often shifts into a critique of consumerism.

I think the author’s underestimation of the emotional needs of humans even in desperate situations also limits her handling of the Prophet. His rise is portrayed as incomprehensible and he and his followers are one-dimensionally zealous. Naturally, writing in the early 2010s, the author would have had no knowledge of the reactionary and fascistic movements that gained steam after the 2020 pandemic outbreak. But much older works have better captured similar vitriolic and religious reactions to plagues, as well as the more positive emotional responses that arise in their wake.

The novel tells the stories of creatives: actors, writers, photographers, musicians. The last few days of civilization are told by television news and newspaper columns. There is something missing entirely: politics. No government body guides behavior or organizes responses. The characters do not remark on this absence — except for noting the failure of the national guard to save them. Nor do we see nascent political bodies form in the ashes of civilization. Excluding the authoritarian orders of the Prophet (and perhaps the Conductor’s benignly dictatorial control over the travelling orchestra), everything appears to be managed through easy, unanimous, anarchistic consensus. Perhaps the author believes that with self-actualization taking a back seat to basic survival, political disagreement vanishes. The right-wing attacks on science and the state in response to COVID stay-at-home orders shred that belief. Indeed, reading the novel with all the hindsight of the 2020s, it is surprising that the Prophet does not appear to be capitalizing off the fears and anxieties of his followers. Politics is how humans collectively determine purposeful activity (or, as it were, “sleepwalk” into climate change or through pandemics). Collective negotiation of purpose is far more challenging than individual determination of purpose, and so its absence is notable. 

The novel is now an HBO TV show. The author often composes her scenes as if they were television shots. While this style is not particularly literary, I imagine it made for a more straight-forward adaptation. The unevenness and holes in the themes that plague the novel may also translate better to a series of cohesive television episodes.

Review: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

The author is too charmed by her main character, Agnes (Anne) Hatheway. This is not uncommon in literature, but I think there are some interesting insights into how this particular version of the trope reflects our times.

This fictionalized version of William Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, is supernaturally intuitive, able to discern a person’s thoughts just by holding their hand. She is wise in the ways of plants and flouts social norms; these traits portray her as above the crude pragmatism and small-mindedness of the rest of the villagers. She passes gracefully from manic pixie dream girl to goddess mother, birthing her first daughter in the serenity of the forest.

The author has no problem subjecting her heroine to strife. Agnes’s beloved nymph-like mother dies in childbirth early in Agnes’s childhood. Her step-mother is cruel and her in-laws treat her little better. Her youngest daughter is born sickly, and needs special care. Her son dies.

The author is, however, unable to portray a real change in Agnes. At the end of the novel, Agnes is who she is at the start and throughout each of these challenges: plant-wise, norm-flouting, guided by intuition. She has climbed out of the depths of her mourning of her son, and discovered that her husband, too, was grappling with grief; and yet she has not confronted herself, her fears, her weaknesses, and transformed, in the way we expect of a novel’s heroine. Agnes is a fantasy: an ideal of womanhood and femininity that is all intuition, emotion, and connection with nature. 

This is a seductive fantasy, and so it is not surprising the author is disinclined to confront it — a necessary critique if Agnes is to undergo a character transformation. At first blush, this fantasy appears as a challenge to patriarchy: women are granted special powers, special knowledge, that men could never have. Agnes’s nurturing care and herbs are favourably contrasted to the cool, distant, and ineffective male plague doctor, for example. But underneath, there is nothing liberatory about it. Agnes achieves material wealth through the literary successes of the husband she chose based on her magical visions. This provides her a degree of emancipation, but it is granted by a man, and denied to other women. Reverence of the magic of reproduction does not challenge a system that (often violently) controls how women reproduce.

The novel foils Agnes’s intuition against masculine rationality. The author is, of course, limited by historical fact: women were overwhelmingly denied access to literacy and education. There are examples of female characters learning their letters; Agnes’s eldest daughter learns accounting and writing and takes over the running of the household. But it is not shown as liberatory, or really even useful beyond the domestic sphere. Indeed, this example serves only to show how cycles of teenage rebellion repeat, as the daughter despairs of ever being able to escape her home, just as Agnes once did. Agnes’s intuition is ultimately as useful as anything that can be taught in books. Her plant knowledge appears similarly innate — there are allusions to mentors who taught her falconing and bee-keeping and other such skills, but they happen off-page; to struggle with systematizing knowledge, or to portray trial and failure of such witchy skills might dampen the fantasy.

We could contrast this with Virginia Woolf’s thought experiment about the importance of education and training in A Room of One’s Own. Conveniently, she picks a near-identical character: William Shakespeare’s sister. Woolf emphasizes the lack of education that makes up women’s oppression:

She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.

Indeed in Woolf’s view, motherhood is a source of oppression, not power.

So is Hamnet rooted in the past? A pre-Woolf vision of feminine empowerment? Not at all. Indeed the book ought to be read in the context of modern debates over motherhood: natural versus medicated births, the trauma arising from one’s “birth plan” not being followed, the way caring for a special needs kid shapes your decision-making. Agnes, it goes without saying, is on the side of natural births and at-home births (or, at-forest births, as it were). She fits in with the spirituality of the “wellness industry”. 

In place of character growth, the author focuses on lushly painting intense emotions. She wields language unusually to do so; the entire novel is told in the present tense. She leans heavily on lists of three — a pattern so distracting that the reader should try her best to put it out of mind and simply allow the redundant adjectives to wash over her. Her unique style is very effective for those dreamlike moments of life, like the depths of grief, where even the smallest experiences feel sharp yet disconnected from ordinary life. It is also effective when the narrative shifts from following Agnes to following inanimate things: some of the most memorable passages trace the journey of a plague-carrying flea and a news-laden letter. Her choice of style is less effective when narrating the more routine aspects of life, like business negotiations. In these scenes, the prose heightens the importance of everything yet weighs it down in its excess of lush detail. It is sensuous prose, relishing in being and feeling.

And so we have a novel that emphasizes intuition and feeling. We have a superhuman, who inherits her elevated sensitivity from her mother, and passes it on to her children. We have a book that revels in the magic and beauty of motherhood. It is a heady combination. It is also a familiar combination. The name that we gave to that 20th century movement that celebrated irrationality over reason, Übermenschen, naturalism and a fantastical version of maternity is, of course, fascism.

Review: Lenin, A Study on the Unity of His Thought by György Lukács

This work is of interest for two reasons. The first is for providing a snapshot of how Lenin and the USSR were received by Marxists of other countries in the early 1920s. As Lukacs himself writes in his 1967 postscript, "As a document of how a not inconsiderable group of Marxists saw Lenin's personality and mission, his place in the course of world events, it is therefore certainly not without interest." The October Revolution changed the course of history, and it is interesting to see how socialists interpreted it at the time. 

The second is for the Postscript itself, which is a candid reflection of how the author viewed his influential work, the hits and misses. I find it valuable to see how admirable thinkers reflect on their work and mature over time.

As a work that outlined the unity of Lenin's thinking, I found it lacking. I would have liked to see more of an intellectual development traced out, and maybe a critical balance sheet tallied up, while this work represented more of a snapshot of his final positions, and was so laudatory that I had to roll my eyes a few times. Overall, the work seems more aimed at criticism of the failures of other parties to bring about a revolution, than of really presenting the unity of Lenin's thought. Lukacs targets the opportunists (and sometimes the revolutionary utopians) of the West, pointing to Lenin's "thinking through each question radically to its very end: in radically transforming his theoretical insight into practice." (Then again, it is often more meaningful to define something in opposition to something else, as opposed to as an abstract thing. This is probably even more true of Lenin, whose writing was particularly polemical against strains of thought he identified as incorrect.)

There were some concepts defined concisely and clearly (revisionism and labor aristocracy, for example). But these exist elsewhere too. Your time on this earth is scarce, and there are probably other books you would get more out of. Like Lenin himself, Lih's Lenin Rediscovered (for understanding Lenin as a theoretician and practitioner of Marxism contra opportunists and ultras), or Losurdo's Class Struggle (for a dialectical approach to the challenges of constructing socialism in an underdeveloped country).

Review: Collapse by Vladislav Zubok

This was a disappointing read. The author gives little of the context necessary to understand the economic difficulties and political situation at the start of Gorbachev’s leadership (see, instead, Socialism Betrayed). The narrative centres on the personalities involved in the USSR’s collapse instead: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and US President Bush Sr (there was a surprising focus on the reactions of the United States — at times we got a near hourly breakdown of White House activity. Countries outside the West were nearly entirely absent from the book, perhaps due to Zubok's choice of sources.).

For all the author’s insistence that Gorbachev was a “neo-leninist” with strong sympathies with the intelligentsia, there was little intellectual curiosity about the philosophical debates and philosophical influences undergirding the USSR’s 1980s reforms (contrast again with Socialism Betrayed). Indeed, the author makes the USSR appear like a one-man show, when CPSU debate and governance was far more distributed.

When the narrative wasn’t honed in on the relative charisma of the key political players or regaling colourful gossip, it detailed nationalist sentiment and account balances. These aspects I found to be informative: separatism ended up being the final mode of collapse — if not the root cause of the collapse — and nationalism continues to drive geopolitics in Eastern Europe. Utopian socialists often insist upon the possibility of non-capitalist reforms, but the hard currency problems Gorbachev had to deal with, particularly in the wake of crashing oil prices, drove decision-making and concessions. While I remain persuaded that the USSR’s collapse was not inevitable (a position Zubok also takes), through Zubok’s book I gained a better appreciation for just how difficult the economy was to keep going (due in no small part to the catastrophic reforms implemented). However, it is also notable what Zubok chooses to exclude: the "second economy" that was so crucial of a factor in the USSR's collapse in Keeran and Kelly's account was nearly absent from Zubok's telling. 

Somewhat by chance, I read this work back-to-back with Isabella Weber’s book on China’s economic reforms, and the comparison between the two approaches is illuminating. The CPSU liberalized the finance industry and media before most of the rest of the economy, and as a result, quickly lost control of both the economy and of political legitimacy. The CPC retained control over media apparatus, banks, and key sectors of the economy, and as a result, was able to steer the economy through their desired reforms without lasting threat to their leadership. This exercise is, however, left to the reader. Zubok is more interested in ensuring that, counter to some Western narratives (including the Nobel Peace Prize committee), the reader understands Gorbachev to be a bumbling idiot.

Zubok's work leaves something to be desired as a reference. He is often too credulous of works that should be suspected of having clear bias, like memoirs by American politicians. Several citations I tried to follow lead to a chain of "as quoted in" references. He is sometimes sloppy when it comes to economics. In one egregious example, he writes that "the tax on alcohol procured one-third of Soviet GDP", which is nearly mathematically impossible.

Zubok tends to lose the forest for the trees. I was hoping for a political and economic analysis, but found myself having to construct this for myself from the very extensive material Zubok relays. Still, his beat-by-beat recounting of the last three or four years of the USSR's existence did give me a better understanding of the overall shape of that era of history.

Review: Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer

A quirk of reading a book digitally is that the ending can really sneak up on you. At one point, I checked the progress bar and was shocked to discover barely 5% of the book remained. Well, I guess that was the climax, I thought to myself. That moment encapsulates the lacklustre experience of reading this novel.

The story is told through five pairs of eyes. We already know how two of these tales end; the fates of the Psychologist and the Lighthouse Keeper are revealed at the end of Book 1. Although their ends are fated, the unfolding of their journeys is not without merit. Both characters grapple with questions of belonging and identity and purpose, and the relationship between the gay ex-Priest and the half-indigenous child brimming with curiosity was sweet.

Through the other characters we follow three paths of responding to the alien world of Area X: to leave and seek a full life beyond, or to accept the strangeness of it all, either through a slow Understanding and ultimate relinquishing of the self, or through a bright burst of faith and acceptance. These journeys clash with my own epistemology; the characters discover scientific knowledge is fallible, that what matters and is knowable comes from Being. I’m not opposed to reading works that challenge me philosophically and emotionally, but I didn’t find Vandermeer’s case to be convincing. Setting a story in a fantastical setting means the world can work according to any logic — or lack of logic — you want it to. Some of the other Goodreads reviews complain about the dearth of answers to the mysteries of the world Vandermeer introduces in the trilogy, and I think this is really the root that these other readers are grasping at: Vandermeer rejects the material world and the human ability to conceptualize it. If you approach the world scientifically (as his characters start out doing), it is a nihilistic and unsettling worldview, for all that the novel ends with what appears to be hope, peace, and acceptance.

I am curious to what extent the author has really found a sense of acceptance for the philosophy he develops in Acceptance. My hunch is that the nihilism of it troubles him too. First, this third instalment, having set up the New Frontier in book 1 and having burned down the legitimacy of the Old World in book 2, meanders without clear aim. The three characters from the later timeline find themselves in Area X but without clear goals, and just wander about until it eventually ends. Second, these first three books were published in quick succession all in 2014, with a surprise fourth book coming out only in 2024. As disappointed as I am with this trilogy, I have queued up the fourth one out of curiosity for how the author revisits or revises these themes after the turmoil of the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Review: Riot. Strike. Riot. by Joshua Clover

The introduction of this book was promising — and is worth reading on its own — but the rest of the book failed to deliver. Clover sets out to investigate why social resistance movements to oppressor classes shifted from riots (pre-17th century), to strikes (until the 1960s or so), and then to riots once again.

His most important contribution is to clearly show that mainstream definitions of strikes and riots are woefully inadequate. Rather than strikes representing organized and peaceful protest while riots use violence to channel inchoate anger, Clover demonstrates that strikes also often turned to violence to make their demands met. Rather, Clover delineates them based on who participates and where. In Clover’s telling, riots are made up of citizens acting at the site of consumption (originally typically the market or port, now usually the public square) while strikes are made up of workers acting in their capacity as producers at the site of production.

Unfortunately, his framing of history as "Riot-Strike-Riot-prime" (an allusion to Marx’s M-C-M’) is overly cute, and restricts analysis rather than aiding it. Facts are thrown together when convenient, rather than building a convincing, scientific argument. Evidence for his thesis is sometimes drawn from history, sometimes from literature, and there is very little in the way of social survey of economic trends and social unrest, which I would want to see as proof of his thesis. Clover neatly sidesteps questions of generalizability to real social relationships between economic mode of development and social mode of conflict by stating he restricts his focus to the west. If riots are the mode of social conflict of pre-industrial production, strikes are the mode of conflict of industrial production, and strike-prime is the mode of conflict of off-shored post-industrial production, we should see these modes shift both across geography and across time. Clover resists testing his thesis, preferring to enjoy the vibes. (The vibes are indeed enjoyable. His writing is a pleasure to read; there are many fun turns of phrases, reminding me of Christian Thorne.)

The final section of my copy had an Afterword, in which the author reflected on how well his work stood up to criticism and time. It is easy to get nothing wrong if you don’t say all that much in the end.

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 Chih 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 Chih is our protagonist, rather than the characters featured in the stories Chih collects. This fourth book therefore carries on in the vein of Into the Riverlands (Book 3), which was the first to bring Chih 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: Chih 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: 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: 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)

Review: Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy by Yves Engler and Owen Schalk

Washington’s role in destabilizing and otherwise interfering in democratic governments in the imperial periphery has been well-documented (see, for example, Manufacturing Consent, Washington Bullets, or The Jakarta Method). Canada has curated an image as a friendlier, more peaceful version of its southern neighbour, while aiding the US in its regime-change efforts (or sometimes playing a leadership role in such efforts, as in the anti-Venezuelan Lima Group). Canada’s role in geopolitics is under-explored, and Canadians should be more informed of the real foreign policy of their state. Engler and Schalk aim to address this need, but I found the book disappointing.

One of the most important tasks for a work of this sort is to draw out the tactics and repeated themes underlying western interference in global south politics. In Manufacturing Consent, the authors present their propaganda model, then show its application through several examples of American interventions. In Washington Bullets, Prashad presents a manual for regime change, and explores how intervention has shifted from one of “boots on the ground” and assassinations to economic warfare and lawfare, again providing a slew of examples from American interventions. Excepting three paragraphs or so in the brief conclusion to his work, the authors provide no such structural analysis to the events they recount. 

Another angle for a work of this sort is to educate the reader on a small handful of examples with enough context that the reader really understands the conflict. Vincent Bevins takes this approach in The Jakarta Method, using a combination of archival research and witness interviews to show the reader how Washington pushed for regime change in Indonesia in the 1960s, and then applied this same method to later interventions. In contrast, Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy covers 22 conflicts in 210 pages, providing just a cursory summary of each event.

The result is essentially a listicle in book form. The authors seem to hope to convince via a fire-hose of facts rather than providing their readers with the structure and context needed to remember or recognize Canadian regime change operations. And even this approach could serve a useful function in being a repository of resources for deeper research, however the small handful of references I investigated out of curiosity were of low quality. (Clicking through the footnotes did introduce me to Canada in the World by Tyler A. Shipley, which seems to be a more promising read.)

The real prize for a Canadian writer would be to put forward something like the “manual for regime change” or the “propaganda model” but for Canada. Is there a difference at all between Ottawa’s approach and Washington’s approach? How does Canada distribute its aid dollars and diplomatic resources differently? Does its media apparatus — just as concentrated in the hands of billionaires as the US, but also with a prominent public broadcaster — manufacture consent any differently? Canada’s focus appears to be drawn towards the locations of its mining operations, but protecting its corporations alone cannot explain its involvement in countries like Ukraine; is its goal in geopolitics the same as the US’s, or are there slight differences? Canada is far less likely to deploy troops abroad: is military capability and expense the sole explanation or is there more to it? The answers to these questions are not in this book.

Review: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The various currents of American identity jump out of this novel’s pages, and then sing you to sleep with flowery, melodramatic Victorian prose.

The first of these currents is puritanism, sharply criticized by the narrative for its hypocrisy and unneighbourliness. That this streak remains within American culture despite the novel’s consistent place in school reading lists suggests the critique doesn’t quite land. Do readers laugh at the townsfolk who snub the lovechild of an adultress until she becomes a rich heiress (I certainly did), but not see themselves in these small-minded, selfish folk (I certainly didn’t)? 

Another current is the pride and tenacity in standing up for one’s beliefs, no matter the social opposition — even if it demands braving the Atlantic to reinvent oneself. This theme, too, the author weaves into his work with intention. Adulteress Hester Prynne’s quiet rebellion in transforming the scarlet letter she is forced to wear into something beautiful, her refusal to cover the letter in shame… these passages are touchingly written, heroic.

Combining these two currents together, there is a deep mistrust in the state — which is, after all, composed of people, who tend towards being cruel puritans. Highlighted secular institutions are the prison and the cemetery. Elections are pompous, revered, capricious rituals. Social interventions callously and sanctimoniously try to part mother and child. Through personification in Hester, the virtues elevated by the narrative are individual charity and truthfulness to oneself.

Some currents perhaps less intentionally flow from the author’s pen. The noble savagery of the indigenous neighbours is an artifact of the author's era. There is a heavy christian morality that coats every character’s emotions — particularly that of guilt. It weighs so leadenly on the characters that I find the novel almost not worth reading for its lack of insight into human psychology, the focus of the novel.

Review: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy by Joseph Stiglitz

This book works as a corrective for people who think that government policy has little impact on wealth equality, but who also care about wealth inequality as morally bad. I'm not sure exactly what audience that is. Some elected democrats, I suppose, and some of their more dedicated but privileged voters. And that is, of course, who this book is addressed to. (Stiglitz wrote this report in 2016, presumably imagining a Clinton administration. In 2024, his discussion of recession recovery, inflation rates, etc, seems already somewhat dated.)

There are many entirely reasonable policies presented here. Capital gains rates should indeed be taxed at a higher rate. Worker bargaining needs to be strengthened. Patent laws are stifling innovation and hurting the general public, who cannot afford life-saving medications, or who have to pay exorbitant costs for it due to laws that block the public sector bargaining for a discount. Addressing these issues would indeed lead to a better economy for the majority of Americans. Though (perhaps because of this work and works like it) there is nothing particularly novel about these recommendations nor the way in which they are advocated.

There is very little role for the State to play in Stiglitz's path forward, other than simply tweaking the rules here or there. I, for example, would argue that if a business is too big to fail, it should be a state owned enterprise, while Stiglitz thinks such banks merely need to have better wills, and maybe be held to a higher level of scrutiny. I also think there should be a public retirement savings plan and many other such public programs, subsidized and well-governed, while Stiglitz believes the main responsibility of a public program is to encourage better market competition and that they should not be subsidized or otherwise given "unfair" advantages.

The analysis is overall flawed for three reasons, one economic, one political, and one philosophical. First, Stiglitz believes that "The American economy is not out of balance because of the natural laws of economics. Today's inequality is not the result of the inevitable evolution of capitalism." This is stated without further justification, as an axiom on which the rest of the book rests. Capitalism necessitates inequality, and sharpens inequality. If everyone has equal wealth and opportunity, there would be no workers for capitalists to hire, or no capitalists for workers to sell their labour to. Because owning capital means you can make money by having money, and without working, inequality naturally rises. Stiglitz takes aim primarily at the financial sector for not doing its job of providing liquidity for investing in production. This is, of course, not the job of the financial sector. The financial sector, like the manufacturing sector and every other private sector, has as its task the goal of accumulating capital. That is what it means to live under capitalism. The finance sector has done a fantastic job of accumulating capital. Stiglitz's proposals, such as implementing a tax on all financial trades, are no more than a game of whack-a-mole of trying to curb the less useful innovations in accumulation of capital.

Second, Stiglitz appears to be uninterested in how policy changes. There is, of course, a hand-waving towards how the government is primarily composed of the wealth, and how the private sector has captured the bodies that regulate them. These issues are to be solved with, for example, easier voter registration and holidays on election days (which are, I agree, policies worth fighting for!). But why would people with political power fight to disprivilege themselves? There is little evidence presented that they would, and Stiglitz seems convinced that simply reasoning with his audience and presenting them a few statistics would be enough for them to willingly sign over a few extra million dollars of their own wealth each year.

Finally, Stiglitz's analysis is ahistorical. In his telling, past efforts were all simply misguided policy decisions. "We now know" that "[supply-side economics] is incorrect and outdated", that "developed economies can rise without lifting all boats," that by "giving into such threats" that businesses would move elsewhere if we did not deregulate we "lost doubly" by hurting the economy and worsening income inequality, and that "the arguments put forward by advocates for capital tax breaks--that they spur investment--is wrong." But these were known before. Each of these policy changes were sharply criticized and opposed at the time. These critics have been proven correct, to little fanfare or reward. But Stiglitz seems uninterested in pursuing why we made these erroneous policy changes. And without asking that question (is it because of who had political power? is it due to fundamental assumptions about economics that must be revised, such as whether capitalism inherently breeds inequality?) how do we know we are not making incorrect policy decisions once more?

Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

At its best, this book sparkles with those moments that are so recognizable but so hard to express: the suffusion of love you feel on accomplishing a goal with a person you love, the despair of failed creative work and brushing off a bruised ego, the self-consciousness of being 22 and feeling like you should know more than you do, the awkward tearfulness of knowing a long-term relationship of your twenties has run its course. These vignettes are marked by the vulnerable honesty Zevin allows her characters to express.

However, these moments come a little too few and far between. Rather than lingering in these emotionally intense everyday events, Zevin relies too much on rare and traumatic life events or inexplicable lack of communication to add drama to the novel and redirect her characters' lives. Seemingly for no reason other than to ensure Sadie and Sam are at odds while creating their game, Both Sides, Zevin has Sadie create an entire fiction in her mind about how Machiavellian Sam is and then rather than having a conversation with her supposed best friend about it, the relationship simply deteriorates for over a year. Sadie keeping her relationship with Marx a secret from Sam feels similarly unnecessary. With so much secrecy and resentment between the characters, I began to doubt the veracity of their friendship. Perhaps it was merely mutual respect for each other's brilliance, shoe-horned into a friendship because society does not have a better model for this sort of relationship, but I do not think that was the story Zevin aimed to tell.

It isn’t just the characters that lack honesty with each other: Zevin withholds information from the reader for no real purpose but for heightened melodrama. We learn two thirds of the way through the novel that apparently the two characters had each been grappling with romantic interest in each other the entire time. Why not weave this tension into the story, allowing the reader to incorporate this information into their understanding of the characters? The same holds true of Sadie's secret abortion, something we only much later learn inspired her design for her first published game, Ichigo. Perhaps the intention is that we, the reader, only discover this information at the time that the friends discover this information about each other. But the result is that we feel like we don’t really know either of the characters.

Part of this unfamiliarity is the narrative perspective; we switch from person to person, from past to present to future, without much change in narrative voice (I felt a renewed appreciation of David Copperfield’s adult reflections on stories told through the eyes of his child self). Even side characters like a hospital nurse, become point of view characters. But I never really felt “in” someone’s head; there was a lot of “Sadie felt” or “Sadie worried” type of story-telling.

It’s a very millennial book. There’s nostalgia for the 90s and 00s — those pre-internet days where you could create without being self-conscious of the critics online and struggle in puzzles without being able to look up solutions, when low graphics expectations enabled three kids to pull together a game over the course of 8 months. But at the same time, it was very conscious of the discourse of the 2010s and 2020s, although without adding much new (with the exception of Sam’s defense of charges of cultural appropriation). It makes sense, the author is a millennial, its highest accolades have come from millennials.

I discovered the author’s husband is in the indie film industry, and this made a lot of the videogame aspect of the book click for me. Where my gaming experience comes from highly competitive or mechanics/puzzle-driven games, the videogames of the novel seem to be completely void of mechanics, with discussion focusing on themes and artistic choices and plot — much like auteur film creation. It was in the discussion of the design process, in the characters’ reactions to critics, in the complex relationship between the characters and the works they create, that I thought the author brought the most new insight to the table, likely because she herself is so immersed in this world.

Perhaps because the landscape of a relationship that spans romance, collegiality, and friendship has so much potential, I found the creation and resolution of the love triangle to be rather facile and cliche. One of the guys dies, but don’t worry, his DNA lives on. My “script doctor” of the book would be to streamline the plot (the mass shooting and the witnessed suicide seemed overly dramatic, and the author had little new to add to these conversations), rewrite the character arcs that rely on people not being honest with each other, and have the three characters recognize that love for each other can be multi-faceted and complex and doesn’t need to fit into a box (just like Ichigo's identity).

Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Let’s start with the world for this story. It deserves some space in this review: the author devotes a considerable amount of this 160-page novella into exploring the repercussions of the premise she sets up. It’s also novel and intriguing: it is some unspecified time in the future, humans have headed off climate devastation and other environmental concerns, and entered a post-scarcity world. A few hundred years ago, robots gained sentience, and chose to separate from human society, vanishing into the wilderness of the Earth.

How did humans manage to steer the violent, brainless beast of capitalism away from total climate destruction? Unclear. How did humans achieve a new society where all human needs were met? Unclear. How did humanity react to the rebellion of the labourers they had been exploiting? Apparently peacefully, magnanimously, without a shred of the brutality and exceptionalism of our colonialist (and capitalist) past.

These are pressing questions—our challenges are to save our environment and overthrow our still-imperial power structures—and the book dwells on none of them. The world is fleshed out with paragraphs of detail about buildings made from mushrooms, and cell phones that last a lifetime, solar power and bicycle-based transportation. It’s a cozy, non-threatening world unconcerned with how it came to be, a fantasy of how lovely things will be once we finally have the ugly parts solved.

Of course, all stories must have a conflict; this novella revolves around the main character’s search for a purpose in life. Dex switches careers from garden monk to tea monk — a sort of therapist — but finds this too doesn’t quite fulfill them. Their desire to be surrounded by the cricket sounds of the countryside rather than the bustle of urban life goes unquenched: crickets went nearly extinct during the mysteriously averted climate crisis. In a search for life’s meaning, they spontaneously decide to travel through the wilderness, reserved for only robots. They meet a robot, Mosscap, who has struck up a hobbyist’s curiosity in humans. The two journey together, discussing their two societies, and, eventually, Dex’s search for purpose in life: 

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! … You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. 

But just living isn’t enough for Dex. The world is post-scarcity, it is no longer a question of survival but about thriving, and they see their mortality approaching in the distance:

All I have is right now, and at some point, I’ll just end, and I can’t predict when that will be, and—and if I don’t use this time for something, if I don’t make the absolute most of it, then I’ll have wasted something precious.

I found myself wondering why such a detailed, fantastical world was created to explore the rather introspective and everyday question of one’s purpose in life. Is it to contrast mortality with immortality in terms of meaning in life (a theme in Circe)? No, the robots who first gained consciousness chose to be mortal, we learn, and so when their time comes, their parts are reassembled into new robots, the “wild-built”. The link between the world and the central conflict is finally revealed when Mosscap argues:

But when we woke up and said, We have realized our purpose, and we do not want it, you respected that. More than respected. You rebuilt everything to accommodate our absence. You were proud of us for transcending our purpose, and proud of yourselves for honoring our individuality. So, why, then, do you insist on having a purpose for yourself, one which you are desperate to find and miserable without

But it’s an unpersuasive argument, it comes unearned: we have no idea how humanity accommodated the robots’ demand for self-determination. Human history has zero examples of oppressed peoples being handed their autonomy because they peacefully demanded it. So our answer to this search for purpose, the unifying element between world and conflict, is this event we are supposed to be proud of that we never see in the pages.

Perhaps a longer fantasy epic, dealing with these world-shaking events and later linking them to Dex’s own individual search for meaning, would address this issue. But I think the flaw in the novella goes deeper. For all the pages are filled with cozy passages about cooking dinner and growing plants and watching stars, Dex’s world is very empty. They have no family that relies on them, no lovers, no friends (excepting Mosscap). They do not even seem to have a sense of duty and responsibility to the clients that come to Dex with their heavy hearts. The world is nearly perfect, extinct crickets aside, and so there is nothing Dex is building towards or trying to fix. (Maybe Dex should find meaning in reviving extinct crickets?)

Finding purpose in your life is not trivial, but it is these pursuits — loved ones, science, social welfare — that help me answer this question. Dex does not find an answer — it is enough just to exist, but it is rational to want more, and good to define your own purpose. And here the theme truly ties in with the setting: a sleepy, cozy village, filled with petty bourgeois farmers market stands, and a Proudhonist yearning for bucolic individualism. The resulting story is soporific. The hard problems will be solved (by who? how?), and what remains is just what you want and define for yourself.

Tl;dr: 30-something with professional ennui discovers the joys of hiking.

Review: When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques

The Western punditry can’t make much sense of China. It has elections, but they don’t look anything like the Presidential horse race the US hosts every four years. It has capitalists and markets, but these too don’t look like the western equivalents: there are state owned entities and communist party cells and capital flow restrictions everywhere. It has adopted industrialization, international trade and the internet, but these institutions of modernity did not bring with them the value system that the West recognizes as modernity. What gives? This book is a corrective to the prevailing level of discourse. 

The strengths of Jacques’ book is its recognition that “modernity” (values, and the political structures that reflect them) can take multiple forms, and that a non-Western version of modernity becoming the (economically, demographically) dominant form is not necessarily a travesty. The first few chapters of the book stand out in particular: Jacques examines the history of China and Japan, with the latter providing a comparison point of an industrialized country that has tried to align itself more closely with “Western” conceptions of modernity despite lacking European roots. Jacques emphasizes the influence of Confucianism on popular understandings of the relationship between the State and the governed, and the continuity in philosophy between pre-1949 China through to the present day — another strength of the book. 

However, Jacques ignores the impact of Marxism-Leninism in shaping not just Mao-era China but also present-day China. Marxist figures and quotes are frequent reference points in public speeches. But perhaps more indicative of the influence of Marxism-Leninism is programs like the extreme poverty eradication program, in which communist party members act as guides to local political efforts:

The targeted phase of poverty alleviation required building relationships and trust between the Party and the people in the countryside as well as strengthening Party organisation at the grassroots level. Party secretaries are assigned to oversee the task of poverty alleviation across five levels of government, from the province, city, county, and township, down to the village. Most notably, three million carefully selected cadres were dispatched to poor villages, forming 255,000 teams that reside there. Living in humble conditions for generally one to three years at a time, the teams worked alongside poor peasants, local officials, and volunteers until each household was lifted out of poverty.

This is a method of poverty alleviation alien to neoliberalism, similarly strange to welfare states and not particularly Confucian, and yet remarkably effective: in 2021, China announced it had eliminated extreme poverty. Because Jacques’ picture of the guiding principles of 21st century China is essentially neo-Confucianism, I think his model for China’s growth and future decision-making as world power is incomplete.

In place of really understanding the philosophical traditions guiding the countries—both those of the West and those of China—Jacques turns to psychologizing the countries. Even economic factors, like level of development, fade to the background. The root of trade disagreements is found in hundreds of millions of people acting in unison out of shame or pride based on their sense of national identity. It’s not to say that these factors are not important; China’s resolution to gain independence following its “century of humiliation” and the role the Declaration of Independence plays in the US’s self perception as a fighter for freedom are undoubtedly relevant. But one can’t help but feel there’s several variables missing. 

Finally, while Jacques tactic of using a sort of “neutral, outside observer” lens for understanding China and Japan is instructive, that he does not do the same for the United States limits his analysis. (I’m a scientist, I like controlled experiments.) What, for example, would a “neutral, outside observer” say about racism in 21st century USA?

Overall, although Jacques’ book is a corrective to a far worse sort of analysis, it leaves much to be desired. Written originally in 2009 (it is peppered with references to the ‘08 recession), it reads a bit dated, and China/West relations have changed a lot.