Review: Survival by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the 1970s, Atwood surveys Canadian literature and identifies a few of its central themes and tendencies. In doing so, she helped bring self-consciousness to the literature of this frigid, confused, often-violent child of Britain, nudging it toward a distinct national identity.

Atwood identifies “survival” as the idea coursing through Canadian literature (in contrast to the US’s “frontier” and England’s “island”): survival against Mother-Nature-the-Monster (having discovered that Canada’s natural bounty was nothing like the idyll pictured from the shores of England), survival against the dominance of its southern neighbour, survival of the francophones in a sea of anglophones.

Survival is precarious in these works. Most of its characters succumb to some travesty or other. Atwood attributes this pessimism to a victimization complex, which she breaks down into four stages: denial of victimhood, resignation to the inescapability of victimhood, belief in the possibility of overcoming victimhood, and some fourth stage of transcendence (more of a theoretical possibility than something typically achieved, in reality or in literature). Most Canadian literature lingers in the second phase.

The book is well-structured; each chapter investigates a particular facet (nature, animals, settlers and immigrants, family, women, francophones, artists, death, failure), critiquing poems and novels that touch on these topics or motifs. Each chapter comes with a shortlist of 3-4 key works and a longlist of perhaps a dozen referenced works. Atwood’s writing is colourful, wry, and incisive, and her tour through CanLit is well-paced and enjoyable.

Having surveyed the previous century or so of writing, the work is now over half a century old. It was highly influential in shaping Canadian literary criticism, and thus the Canadian publishing industry broadly. It is therefore undoubtedly dated. I thought this was particularly true of the chapter on artists: with the advent of CanCon laws and funding for the arts (not to mention self-consciousness as a nation or the ease of distributing media across the globe), the lack of audience is no longer so existential for Canadian artists. Canada has also changed. Now several generations later, our identities as and associations with settlers and immigrants have shifted. Indigenous literature was absent from Atwood's investigation due to its near-total exclusion from the publishing industry. A modern revision would presumably investigate ideas of indigeneity and settler-colonialism founded on Indigenous literature that has since made it to print.

Still, I found it very easy to see themes of survival and the ways it ripples through other topics in many of the Canadian works I have read lately. Ducks is all about survival in the bleak capitalism and soul-crushing misogyny of the oil sands, first as a bare survival but then transitioning to an insistence on thriving and overcoming victimhood. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic narrative; survival means navigating a sparse and hostile world to find meaning in life. Study for Obedience picks up on many of the family themes Atwood discusses, with the brother taking the position of domineering patriarch. To this protagonist, survival means finding a way to coexist as a Jewish woman and an immigrant with the backwards villagers.

This is, obviously, a book about Canadian Literature from front-to-back. But I think it holds interest outside that narrow scope too. By honing in on this niche, Atwood demonstrates the value — or even the necessity — of literary critique and literature for developing a cohesive community identity. This work therefore may be of interest for someone hoping to develop other national or political identities. Second, although dated, Atwood hits upon some very persistent aspects of the Canadian identity. Those interested in learning who Canada really is, or taking a good look at themselves in the mirror, may also wish to pick it up.

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” 

In this work, Joan Didion recounts her grieving process in the year following her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack. Reflecting on those first few months, she realizes that many of her decisions and ways of thinking were not based on reality, like sleeping alone in her apartment that first night “so that he could come back”, or arguing against a tracheostomy for her critically ill daughter, so that “she could be fine in the morning, ready to eat, talk, go home.” These moments give the book its title: A Year of Magical Thinking.

Grief does not always take the same path. Magical thinking is not a part of every journey. Many of the particulars of Didion’s experiences — the casualness with which she considers buying a house in Hawaii or flying to Paris or eating out every night — will not reflect most people’s realities. But most paths cross some of the same trail markers. Didion shares the cycles her mind looped through in that first year of her grief: rumination over the last few months with her husband, fixation over the last moments of his life and trying to piece together what happened and what he experienced, the haze of the first few weeks or months spliced with a few laser sharp memories. 

Didion weaves her own recollections with quotes and passages from others struggling with grief, emphasizing how common an experience it is, for all it is devastating. Like me, she is the type of person to relentlessly research a topic, and so she also bolsters her narrative with things she gleaned from medical and psychological journals. While virtually everyone will experience loss at some point in their lives, it is nevertheless an intense and often lonely emotion to go through. These writing choices help place her very personal account in the broader context of human experience.

Grief confronts Didion with aspects of herself she had not previously considered, such as her need to always be right (“For once in your life just let it go.”), or her positive thinking (“I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation.”). In mourning her husband, she also mourns her own former self: “When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.” The version of herself her husband saw is forever gone.

Didion’s account is also a tribute to her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and to their relationship. As it should be—what is so painful about grief is the end of a specific relationship, the loss of that shared experience. Exploring that emotion requires exploring what he meant to her. Both worked from home, and Didion speculates that it was because they were “unusually dependent on one another” that her grief was “pathological.” Prolonged grief disorder, as it is now known, was added to the DSM two decades after this book was written.

Didion struggles to let go of her husband: to acknowledge “that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day”, feels like “so distinct a betrayal.” Avoiding that acknowledgement becomes a way of keeping him alive. Her grief comes and goes in waves, once catching her by surprise in the middle of a story. She calls on his voice inside her head to make the deadline (“You’re a professional. Finish the piece.”). Eventually, she does make it through to the other side.

For those looking for advice on how to move on from loss, Didion offers no clear answers. Such ready-made solutions may help little anyways: knowing that one needs to let go “does not make it any easier to let go.” She describes grief as “passive”; in contrast, “mourning, the act of dealing with grief, [requires] attention.” The writing of this book was undoubtedly part of this mourning process: the active examination of her emotions and thought patterns and her search for their meaning must have helped her process them and recognize herself in her new identity as a widow. Writing is so much a part of how Didion relates with the world that this approach must have seemed natural. Other writers have sought this method too — I was reminded of Ti Amo, a similarly intensely personal reflection on grieving a husband based on the author’s own experience. Non-writers will have to find their own path. But if this book fails as an instruction manual, it does perhaps provide solace that this particular pain is shared, an opportunity to see the self in another person.

And for non-grievers? Didion warns us that conceptually being aware of grief and its inevitability does little to prepare you for it. This book is therefore no vaccine. Still, it remains compelling as a study of how a person examines their own emotions and finds rational explanations for seemingly irrational thoughts — magical thinking.

Review: Biology as Ideology by Richard Lewontin

Lewontin has a few ideas he wants everyone — scientists and those outside the profession alike — to incorporate into their worldview. First, that genes do not dictate our social behaviour (i.e., against sociobiology); instead, the gene-organism-environment relationship is dialectical, with each influencing and defining the others. Second, science is a political activity: our worldview influences our experimental designs and our interpretation of the world around us.

This is the third work I have read by Lewontin, and all of them make this same case, relying on similar examples and arguments. The Dialectical Biologist is the oldest, and is a collection of several essays and chapters. The rhetoric is a little rougher around the edges, and it is at times more focused on the particular target at hand than on a general framework for understanding science. And yet, because this iteration is also written with passion and urgency, it is the one I would recommend for the scientist eager for a polemic. The Triple Helix is the most detailed and carefully constructed from a scientific perspective; the author tours us through the scientific literature to understand the relationship between the three strands of the helix: gene, organism, environment. This is the one I would recommend for scientists in general, though the political threads are more muted. 

Biology as Ideology is a Massey Lecture, intentionally written for a broad audience, and it fulfills that purpose wonderfully; I would recommend it for a general audience. The ideas are polished and woven together elegantly yet conversationally. The examples are well-chosen to be illustrative and approachable. If I have a critique, it is that the author leaves unsaid what should be done now that the reader (or listener) has this newfound appreciation for dialectical biology and the political ideology of science. The worldview Lewontin introduces us to is not (only) about more accurately describing the world, but about changing it, yet that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Review: This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The author seems to have put a lot of herself in this book. Or, at least, there are some intensely intimate passages that feel so neurotically and emotionally particular, and so I imagine the author has to have drawn a lot of these lines from the contours of her soul. Maybe she embellished a bit here, amplified a bit there, and twisted in strands from people she's known over these threads. Is it strange to move through the world when so many people know these pieces of your heart? Or, rather, imagine that they know these pieces of your heart?

The unifying themes of these short stories are love in the digital age and being indigenous while settler capitalism destroys the planet. In the first theme, Leanne explores modern experiences like the strange intimacy of online friendships, the overthinking that comes with 15-minute gaps between messages, the way interactions can be quantified and analyzed, the way the real world and the digital world bleed into each other. In the latter theme, Simpson shows rich examples of indigenous connection to the earth, not the sappy stereotyped "Mother Earth is so powerful. The water is so sacred" kind of platitudes settlers want to uplift (to quote a sarcastic line from the final short story), but what it means to feel connection to a place and to your ancestors, the struggles of weaving in modern living and tradition, and sharing these experiences with people.

Not every story or song was to my tastes, but the highlights were meaningful to me.

Review: Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo

Losurdo’s most important intervention in this work is to reframe the idea of Western Marxism as “a product of defeat” — to borrow a phrase from Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, to which Losurdo is directly responding. Writing in the 1970s, at the peak of the socialist national liberation movements, Anderson explains:

The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, cause and consequence of its corruption inside Russia, is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period. Its major works were, without exception, produced in situations of political isolation and despair.

As Losurdo argues, this period was not a failure of the spread of socialist revolution, but a striking success. It was simply not recognized as such by Western Marxists due to their lack of appreciation of the demands of social construction (necessary for satisfaction of economic needs and evasion of neocolonialism) and their expectation that the state should “wither away” more rapidly (impossible when it is needed for construction of a new society). Having taken on idealistic and dogmatic characteristics, Western Marxism neglected the historical and geographical context of these early socialist revolutions.

The final section in the book presents Losurdo’s argument for how “Marxism in the West can be reborn” and is also valuable. Losurdo argues that Marx and Engels saw the path to communism as a long and gradual one. Interestingly, he also highlights that Marx anticipated that the bourgeois revolution would extend political rights more universally; history instead showed that these gains came through the pressures exerted by worker-led and anti-colonial revolutions. These revolutions faced conditions of economic underdevelopment and imperial pressure, and achieved neither universal political emancipation nor economic emancipation. Western Marxism criticized these nations for not quickly delivering on the promises of later stages of communism envisioned by Marx:

The concrete history of the new post-revolutionary society, which seeks to develop itself among the tentative contradictions, difficulties, and errors of every kind, is defined en bloc as a degeneration and betrayal of the real movement in the name of the remote and utopian futures, an attitude foreign to Marx and Engels and which deprives Marxism of any real emancipatory project.

To take such an attitude means arbitrarily amputating the plural temporalities that characterize the revolutionary project of Marx and Engels. It means a temporal amputation that is simultaneously spatial. It concentrates exclusively on the remote future, read in a utopian vein, and leads to the exclusion of the vast majority of the world and humanity that has begun to take the first steps toward modernity and has sometimes even stopped at its threshold. And so the essential condition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West is the transcendence of this temporal and spatial amputation of the revolutionary project it has carried out.

Western Marxism criticized without being part of “real struggles” — a practice Marx mocked. Its leading figures instead yearned for an immediate rupture with the state of things, while refusing “to take up the problems arising from taking power” (Part V, 5 — also an essential section). Losurdo’s ultimate conclusion is that “Overcoming doctrinaire attitudes, the willingness to measure oneself against one’s own time, and philosophizing rather than prophesying are the necessary preconditions for Marxism’s rebirth and development in the West.”

Published in Italian in 2017 and in English in 2024, this book is both the most recent of Losurdo’s works to be translated into English and one of his final works before his death in 2018 at the age of 76. Perhaps aware that he had not much life ahead of him, this book reads a little rushed, although I agree with his overall thesis, the need for this critique of Western Marxism and his prescription for a path forward. This hurriedness is unfortunate, because his argument has been rather summarily dismissed by Western Marxism.

A more unavoidable critique would have taken the form of an intellectual biography and critical balance sheet of Western Marxism, as Losurdo provides for Nietzsche in his paradigm-shifting Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel. Instead, Losurdo engages very briefly with each thinker — many of whom fit awkwardly into the Western Marxist canon, like Arendt. His critiques tend to follow the pattern of a quote by a Western Marxist praising Western Liberalism juxtaposed against the materialist, realist, ambitious and optimistic positions taken by revolutionary figures in the anti-colonial movement (Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, etc). Again, I don’t think Losurdo is wrong to criticize these writers for ignoring colonialism, but I find his attacks rather superficial and unsystematic, particularly compared to some of his other works. 

For new readers, I’d recommend instead Liberalism: A Counter-history or Democracy or Bonapartism? as entry points into his works. For those that want a more systematic presentation of Losurdo’s support for national liberation movements and defense of actually existing socialism, I would recommend Class Struggle instead — in particular, his insistence on technological progress and on the consideration of class struggle as the struggle for recognition are ideas touched on in this book but better developed in that work.

For readers familiar with his work, you might be surprised how little new you find in these pages. There are passages remixed from all three books recommended above, as well as from his 2004 essay on Arendt (“Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism”), his 1999 essay “Flight from History?”, and his book on Stalin. There’s nothing wrong with this — I, too, revisit ideas and examples over and over. But I think a remix should add up to more than the sum of its parts and your most vital blows must land on your targets.

Review: Ducks by Kate Beaton

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is Kate Beaton’s 2023 autobiographical comic book relaying the her experience graduating university in 2005 and working in the oil sands for two years. Anna Wiener blurbed the book, and I thought it was an appropriate choice: both Wiener and Beaton wrote memoirs detailing their experience as women in the male-dominated gold rushes of their particular eras and locations — Wiener in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and Beaton in Alberta in the 2000s.

Both memoirs resonated with me personally. I graduated university not too long after Beaton. I considered the oil sands — many of my classmates were pulled into its gravitational orbit — but I couldn’t bring myself to so directly be part of the environmental devastation they wreck (a realization Beaton describes coming to in the novel). Unlike Beaton, I was fortunate to not have student debt, and so I had more of a choice. Instead, I left home for a different black hole: 2010s Silicon Valley.

A troubling question woven throughout the book is how working at the oil sands changes people. Beaton describes her experiences with sexual harassment and rape. Many of the men around her dehumanize her, treat each other with callousness and cruelty, and turn to drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. Would the men she knows and loves back home turn into these hateful men too, if they were here? I remember coming to a similar realization in my early 20s. On the social media platforms built by 2010s Silicon Valley, I discovered the manosphere and its denizens' dehumanizing and transactional perspective of women and relationships. A similar troubling question writhed through my mind: which of the men around me were secretly retreating to the anonymity of the internet to post such hateful things? 

Both the Alberta oil sands and the Silicon Valley tech scene were places people went to make money. For both places, these workers — mostly men — left their homes to be somewhere where they had no community, to work long hours. That uprooting is hard. Its concentration in an area produces a culture that supports this form of sacrifice — often a toxic one. Beaton skillfully portrays this with empathy, without condoning or shrugging off the horrors. We see the difficulty of being separated from your wife and kids, and the small actions of recognition — like sharing cookies during the Christmas Eve night shift — that can make all the difference in such wrenching times.

Beaton also beautifully builds the tension arising between the desire to stay home and the desire to leave. It is familiarly Canadian: I have family in Cape Breton, and relatives who also left the Maritimes for Atlantic Canada. Her portrayal of the growing, gnawing sense of bleakness and isolation leading up to her sexual assault and the numb confusion afterwards were so moving that I put the book down for a while.

Beaton explores community and identity well. Her connection to Cape Breton is strong, and she finds other Cape Bretoners to form a community-away-from-home, who share some of her experiences. An interesting reflection comes towards the end where she is interviewed by a Globe and Mail reporter about her experience in the oil sands, and feels that the reporter is looking for salacious quotes about the awful men who work the oil sands. She is indignant: these people were her people too, in a way; the Toronto office worker hasn’t grappled with the fact that the men in her community would also be transformed by the oil sands.

The book touches on many political topics: environmental destruction, theft of land from indigenous people, illiteracy, sexism, the back-breaking and carcinogenic nature of manual labour, social inequality, and how the profit motive exacerbates all these problems. They don’t quite all tie together right, their linkages remain murky. In part, the genre of memoir acts as a limit: the author is constrained by their own slow-growing awareness of these issues. Still, it is a touching story with some memorable illustrations, and a time capsule of a very Canadian experience.

Review: Socialism Betrayed by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny

Why did the USSR collapse? The question is of major political importance. If the problem is inherent to socialism, socialism cannot be the solution to the ills of capitalism. If the cause lies somewhere else, it must be understood and avoided if a socialist project is to succeed. The book’s authors, who are Marxists, argue that although the USSR was in need of reforms, these were far from fatal flaws; instead, its demise was due to right-deviation policies adopted by Gorbachev in 1986.

Philosophically, the authors trace two threads of Soviet thinking. The first thread, to which the authors are most sympathetic, connects Lenin, Stalin, and Andropov. This strain placed the proletarian class at the forefront while hoping to eliminate class devisions through the building of socialism. Had Andropov’s reforms continued past his untimely death, the USSR would likely have continued (the authors point to remaining socialist states as illustrative proof). The second strain is represented by Bukharin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and reflects petite bourgeois ideology that favours compromise with capitalism and downplays the importance of the proletariate in favour of a unified mass.

The strengths of the book are the authors' familiarity with socialist debates and their ability to situate policy decisions in this context, as well as their detailed presentation of the problems facing the Soviet Union by the 1980s. The discussion of the “second economy” — extralegal or illicit trade outside the planned economy — was particularly thorough and convincing as a contributing factor. The authors also provide clear, compelling rebuttals of several typical alternative explanations for the USSR’s collapse. The work is well-organized and strikes a good balance between historical detail and general themes such that their arguments are generally well-supported without getting lost in minutiae. 

The weakness of the book is that it remains unclear how the USSR should have navigated their difficulties. Although the second economy is elevated as one of the most important points of failure, I am not convinced that the relatively small and measured reforms the authors advocate would have solved this problem. Closer comparison with China, Vietnam and Cuba’s economic policies would have done much to strengthen their case. In particular, to what extent can capitalist relations be re-introduced into a socialist system to address certain economic problems without causing instability or unwanted excesses and crises? However, I did appreciate the authors' point that the goal is not only to develop the productive forces but also to "perfect the relations of production." The authors overly lean on the word "revisionism" to build their case for Gorbachev’s missteps, and I think scrubbing their argument of this bit of Marxist jargon would have led to a sharper critique. Additionally, the question of national identity remains murky. Although the authors show how national differences led to fracturing and although they emphasize the importance of understanding nationalism, it remains unclear what specific actions could have ameliorated the situation, or why it arose when and where it did. The solution appears to be to simply not allow nationalism to develop — but this is easier said than done. Quelling nationalism is not so dissimilar to chauvinistic oppression, and oppression can provoke its own destructive reaction. Similarly, self-determination and democracy are closely related, and a socialism that does not also strive to perfect democracy—rule by the people—is just as bad as one that does not strive to perfect the relations of production. Finally, while the authors engage with Western scholarship on the USSR's collapse, there was little treatment of Eastern — particularly Chinese —scholarship, possibly due to a language barrier.

Overall, this is an essential read, if not quite complete. The definitive study on this crucial question remains to be written.

Review: The Iliad by Homer

The experience of reading an ancient text is one of discovering something both new and familiar at the same time. Familiar, because these characters and stories and motifs are woven through so much of our culture. New, because to read the original work is different from seeing the ripples it casts.

The Iliad tells the story about the Trojan War, but only a brief slice of it in the middle. The story of Paris and Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships, is referenced only briefly. The poem ends before Achilles is taken down by an arrow to his vulnerable heel. There are no men sneaking through fortifications via wooden horses; in fact, the walls of Troy still stand at the end of it all. The audience would likely have been familiar with all these stories, but they are not the story The Iliad wants to tell.

The Iliad opens with the scene of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. Agamemnon has taken for himself Briseis, a slave woman Achilles captured in a raid in their war against Troy. There are clear parallels with Paris taking Helen from Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, kicking off the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. As a result of this quarrel over Briseis, Achilles sulks by the seaside for most of the rest of the book, and in his absence, the Trojans press their advantage to the devastation of the Greek forces. These battles occupy the bulk of the poem.

In a dire moment, Achilles’ beloved comrade, Patroclus, offers to put on Achilles’ armour and scare off the Trojans, but divine trickery leads him to overextend, and he dies at Hector's hands. Achilles is swept into a vengeful rage, and enters the battle. The tides turn, and the Greeks chase the Trojans back to the wall. Achilles isolates Hector, who finds himself at a disadvantage, having also been deceived by the gods. Hector begs Achilles to return his body to Troy and treat it with respect, but Achilles refuses, promising instead to desecrate his body. He kills Hector, then drags around his body in violent disrespect of the dead.

The next book — the penultimate book — comes as a surprising change of pace: to honour Patroclus’ death, Achilles throws an athletic competition. It is, at first blush, an odd interlude. We go from life-or-death nailbiting threats, to friendly competition. But I think this chapter is the key to understanding the story The Iliad wants to tell: for each of these athletic challenges, the winner is determined not only as a matter of skill, but also based on negotiation where parties disagree on who wins, or where skill fails to produce a clear winner. As translator Emily Wilson writes in a footnote:

The funeral games as a whole show the Greeks working towards a political model in which several powerful men who share no ties of kinship might be able to share power amicably together, using models of collective decision-making that need not result in violence or incandescent rage—as in nascent oligarchic and democratic Greek city states.

In the final book, with encouragement from his mother, Achilles ends his rage. He meets with Hector’s father, and negotiates to return Hector’s body. Under the cover of a ceasefire, Hector is given a proper funeral and the poem ends.

So the poem starts with a mismanaged quarrel, two men refusing to find a way to cooperate and respect each other’s honour, and ends with two men reasoning out a solution that grants them both honour, without force or violence. This dynamic plays out in the intrigue between the gods too, who also eventually negotiate solutions to which of the Greeks should live or die, and whether Troy should fall or not. In contrast, the devastation of war is never far from mind when reading the battle scenes. With very few exceptions, each man who falls is named, and linked to a family or a place, sketched out as a particular person — even the most minor of characters. 

The Iliad is therefore a political work: an argument for the form of democracy of the elite that Ancient Greece became known for. Had it began with the story of Helen and Paris, it could not have made this argument: the natural climax would be the fall of Troy, which happens via military force, not political negotiation. Had it included the wooden horse, the lesson would be one of cleverness and trickery, not one of levelheaded politics saving the day. And so this ancient text — familiar and unfamiliar — tells just a small section of the story of the Trojan War.

Review: Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the Twenty First Century' by Stephan Kaufmann

This being a review of a book that is itself a review, I'll keep it short lest it fall prey to the Law of Diminishing Fleas. 

Kaufman's extended essay starts by sketching the context in which Piketty wrote his opus — the wake of the ’08 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and other symptoms arising from several decades of neoliberalism — before presenting a sympathetic summary of Piketty’s argument. That is, the return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, as demonstrated by several centuries of carefully curated tax records (these being too historical for prior economists to have parsed, and too economic for prior historians to have parsed), and so inequality inevitably increases.

Subsequent chapters ask why this book garnered the hype it did (the concept of increasing inequality under capitalism is hardly new), and what we should make of Piketty’s argument. The author examines several critiques of Piketty. The financial interests of many of his critics place them squarely at odds with his prescription (a wealth tax). These libertarian or neoliberal critiques miss their mark: Piketty’s data largely hold up to scrutiny, and his argument is ultimately in defense of capitalism and markets.

Piketty’s warning against inequality can be reduced to a single objection: if the belief in a society that justly rewards performance with legitimate differences in income disappears, then people will start to doubt whether everything is as it should be in capitalism and whether differences between poor and rich are ultimately just. Piketty argues like a crafty technician of power who exhibits concern about the subservience  and motivation of the propertyless masses.

That is, we must tax wealth not because poverty is gruelling and lethal and this wealth can be put to better use, but for the continued stability of capitalism and markets.

Review: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte cuts through the headlines and drama to understand how the French Second Republic fell to Bonaparte III in 1852 after just four years of existence. This is Marx applying class analysis to his present day, de-tangling the conflicts between peasantry and landed bourgeoisie, proletariat and industrial bourgeoisie, and between the various factions of the bourgeoisie. The value of the work is in understanding how Marx saw class conflict, and in Marx’s vivid writing; this work contains many of Marx’s best known lines, but many unsung passages are similarly poetic. Marx’s understanding of history is one of individual actors acting according to their interests (his Hegelian roots are evident), without seeing all of history as just the whims and wills of great individuals. He shows how relationships to the means of production shape individual decision-making without deterministically dooming history to unfold a certain way. 

Marx writes for an audience that would have been intimately familiar with the events of the day. His work seeks to make sense of the causes, so that readers might apply these hard-earned lessons to future conflicts. It makes for a challenging read for the 21st century reader. Marx refers to the “June Days” with the familiarity a millennial author might refer to the “George Floyd Protests” in a dissection of the COVID pandemic era. (I, a millennial author, shall leave this comment with little further explanation. Like Marx, I assume my reader already knows the details and infers my meaning.) My annotated version (Leopard Books) provided some useful context but I still found myself needing to look up historical details.

For understanding the phenomenon of Bonapartism and how it relates to the problems of governance of today, I preferred Losurdo’s Democracy or Bonapartism. Losurdo writes with the advantage of over a century of Bonapartist leaders since the one that gave the term its name. Tracing the pattern across countries and historical contexts makes it easier to identify the commonalities and causes. Losurdo’s book is also a great introduction to Marx's: the problem of universal suffrage, the charismatic leader pushing aside inter-party strife to unite the nation, the attacks on the means of theoretical production, the child-like multitude, the externalization of threat — all these characteristics Losurdo draws out are there in Marx, if sometimes under-emphasized.

I’m glad to have read this work cover-to-cover, to have familiarized myself with the shape of its contents. It is a major work, often cited. There are so many interesting threads to pull at. For example, towards the end, Marx discusses the centralization of state power as something that “modern society requires” — how should we interpret this line with respect to Marx’s vision for the role of the state in socialism? In other passages, Marx appears to have a strong appreciation for soft power and democratic norms; he often chides the liberal Party of Order for trampling on liberties, absconding from responsibility, or disrespecting institutions, showing how these actions impeded their ability to maneuver politically and resulted in their own demise. In his analysis of the peasantry, Marx refers to the isolated nature of their work and the lack of scientific thinking in their work as reasons for their combining together like potatoes in a potato sack, rather than in the transformative way the proletariat unites. In our modern age of swathes of isolated workers, do we have classes that resemble the peasantry more than the tools of their trade might suggest? It is a rich text, and I am sure I will return to it often.

Review: Authority by Andrea Long Chu

I picked this book up nearly by accident. I had been looking for Authority, Jeff VanderMeer's sci-fi novel, but the name Andrea Long Chu caught my eye. She was one of those writers to which I attach vaguely positive associations, although without a clear picture of their ideas or style. I decided to fill in these blanks (anthologies are great for getting a sense of a writer’s forest rather than just their trees) and I’m really glad I did. As a reader and writer with a background in the applied sciences rather than the humanities, I had been thinking about the respective roles of the novel and the critic in society. ALC addresses these two topics in the two new essays written for this collection (“Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority”) by historicizing the relationships between critic, art, and the public, giving me a better understanding of the tradition of literary criticism. These topics are also implicit in the 22 republished essays, which serve as examples of the theory she presents in these two newer essays.

Reading this book helped me test some of my own ideas about criticism, art and society. That is, I found a productive mix of inspiration and interesting ideas, as well as places where the author and I diverge, helping me to solidify my understanding. At times, she can be a little floaty, bending away just before landing a broader political point to strike more narrowly on a specific artist. She can also be turned inwards and towards pessimism; I enjoyed re-reading a critique of her On Liking Women that I’d read long ago, with my newfound familiarity in my pocket.

Below, I’ve included some highlights that I found thought-provoking.

• This is the supreme task of the critic: to restore the work of art to its original worldliness. The artist creates by removing something from the world; the critic’s job is to put it back.
• That’s it: as close as Sittenfeld ever comes to laying bare her heroine’s deepest desires. In an airport memoir, this would be mere pablum; in a novel, it amounts to dereliction of duty.
• What I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all.
• It strikes me today as a vicious piece, but not a very cruel one. Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.
• When Arnold had made a virtue of disinterestedness, he had pictured the critic turning away from himself and toward the social whole, whereas Wilde’s critic was so disinterested that he answered to no authority but his own personality.
• But we will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future. Nothing may be more dangerous, in criticism or in politics, than the revanchist desire to restore a form of authority that, if we are being honest, never existed in the first place. The great enemy is not the king of France, whose bloody head has been rolling through the streets for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy, my friends, is Napoleon.
• But the kind of freedom that John Dutton III truly admires, the kind that Beth Dutton embodies, is not the freedom to make decisions—that is, ethical freedom—but rather the freedom to act as if one’s decisions have all been made in advance. 
• Indeed, it is precisely because we feel that characters in novels are real that we can politically object to the way a writer treats them.
• The midcentury literary critic F. R. Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that Austen’s genius was to take “certain problems that life compelled on her as personal ones” and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen had stayed in her lane; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.
• The humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics. Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness. It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine.
• This was the game’s masterstroke. Form erupts into content, the player’s ludic relationship to Joel at last given narrative flesh in the person of Ellie, whose bitter determination to keep Joel alive leads to a horrific loss of innocence from which—as players of The Last of Us Part II already know—she may never recover. Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding on to another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity. Of course, a TV show may treat these themes too, and the adaptation acquits itself admirably; the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach.

Review: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Jacobs is a fascinating writer. She’s passionate about making cities vibrant, and deeply curious. Together with her training as a journalist, these characteristics turn what could be a dry tome or trend-driven screed into something that is both very readable and still relevant to today’s urban planning debates.

Jacobs takes aim at the predominant school of urban planning at the time, which sought to enable isolated aristocratic lifestyles at high density or escape the city altogether. Instead, Jacobs sees the beauty in the diversity, variety and community of cities, evocatively referring to their rhythm and coordination as a “ballet,” where others may see only bustle. What particularly sets her apart from her adversaries in this book, and what has leant the work staying power, is her view of cities as dynamic and interconnected, like living organisms. She directly makes this comparison in Chapter 22, where she philosophizes on “The kind of problem a city is”:

Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

Jacobs sees how issues like mixed-use neighbourhoods, foot traffic, building age, density, and road and park structure are all related questions. Failures for an urban region to thrive arise from these material factors, and often result in feedback loops. One example I found particularly compelling was her analysis of a hot restaurant scene falling victim to its own success. By chance, a mixed-use area became known for its handful of restaurants. Because the area was seen as a good bet for investors, it attracted other restaurant entrepreneurs. The area became busy during the dinner hours of 5-9pm, but there was little foot traffic outside of these times. The empty streets during the day and late night made the area feel dead and unsafe. As a result, the restaurant traffic died off too, as diners moved to livelier locations they discovered during their walks around the city.

Her solutions to the problems she identified are limited. For example, as an alternative to the decaying restaurant scene, she uplifts a wise landlord who carefully selected tenants with varying business models, rather than optimizing for who could pay the highest rents. Hoping thoughtful individual capitalists will forgo profits is a naive and unsustainable model for creating thriving cities. Jacobs believes strongly in the power of the markets to solve problems, disapproving of public housing and strong central governments. She values self-determination and democracy, pointing to various neighborhood councils as models for creating communities that respond to the needs of their members. However, it is unclear how these models of democracy should interface with the “wise landlord” to produce the desired mixed use neighborhoods.

It is this intersection of private property and democracy that challenges social organization at all levels: the cities Jacobs studies, as well as nations and larger structures. Jacobs avoids interrogating this question directly, keeping her writing carefully nonpartisan (beyond its general commitment to western capitalism — she was of course writing at the height of the “Cold War”). Her incisive critiques but vague politics have earned her fans as diverse as socialists and neoliberal Hayekians. Her continued relevance to the urban planning questions of today is part condemnation of her approach: despite inspiring generations of urban planners, we have still not cracked the nut for how to balance private property and social wellbeing, and our cities bear the scars of our continued commitment to individual freedoms over communal good.

Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

It’s been a year of re-reads, and this book I have re-read many times. Journeying through its pages is always part self-discovery: how did these characters and their surreal banter shape my view of the world?

I can try to remove myself from the reading experience, and assess its themes and messaging from a cool distance. I played around with the idea of Through The Looking Glass as a metaphor for the rise of the bourgeoisie. Alice is a commoner — a privileged one, with servants and a nanny, but a commoner — and she starts her journey in the looking glass world serving the aristocracy, lifting the red and white royalty (chess pieces, but a possible nod to the Tudors?) out of the ashes and tidying them up. Alice expresses her desire to be a queen, and the red queen promises her that she, too, can be a queen if she gets to the eighth square (after all, the aristocracy promised/permitted some wealth and power to the bourgeoisie in their ascent). Alice makes her way through a series of odd holdovers from the feudal days: a king, napping against a tree, uselessly, while his kingdom is a flurry of activity; a duel between two brothers, to settle a silly dispute, but fought with blunt swords and a gentleman’s agreement to end by dinner-time; a knight, who can neither stay seated on his horse nor invent useful products. The world is strange: it is filled with old, familiar nursery rhymes but none of the logic makes sense any more (perhaps a revolution is in order?). Alice reaches the eighth square and finds a golden crown on her head, but she is still subordinated to the red and white queen. She starts to assert herself over a battle of wits and of table manners, and eventually leads a revolution:

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

The white queen is shrunk down into a doll, while Alice shakes the red queen into a kitten. The power is all Alice's.

While I think this is a fun lens through which to enjoy the book, I can’t argue that this is the reading Carroll intended. The scenes are not crafted with the through-lines such a grand theme would need to pull it together. The sole commonality between each of her adventures that Alice remarks upon is the unexpected frequency of fish in the poetry of the looking glass world. Instead, the chapters are episodic — like an absurd version of The Odyssey — with each encounter playing on different expectations Alice has of the workings of the world, language and customs. But even if Carroll did not intend to tell the story of the bourgeoisie superseding the feudal system, that was the zeitgeist of the time (see, for example, Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens). It’s unsurprising that the strangeness of the new world order would find its way subconsciously into delightful children’s books.

Review: The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx

Marx’s model of political economy is better laid out in Capital and more briefly laid out in Wage Labour and Capital, but it’s fun to see it in draft and wielded like an axe against Proudhon. Even if you are looking for Marxist economics delivered as a killing blow, this book is tough for the uninitiated. Although Marx quotes Proudhon at length, the reader is presumed to be familiar with the overall shape of his argument. I read this work in parallel with Marx's Inferno, and was glad of the extra context Roberts gives regarding Proudhon’s positions (particularly Chapter 5, but also Chapters 2-3).

Perhaps one of the most important take-home messages is that we should uphold correct pro-capitalist economists (in this work, Ricardo and Smith) and not placate incorrect anti-capitalists (like Proudhon) despite the appearance of shared goals. The work is structured in two parts, which correspond somewhat to parts 1-3 and part 4 of Capital. I particularly enjoyed the second section, in which Marx targets Proudhon’s clumsy and idealistic attempt to apply Hegel’s dialectics. The other works by Marx that I’ve read did not discuss dialectics as a tool and it was fun seeing Marx describe historical materialism in these terms. Unlike Capital, this was not a transformative read, but did help me better understand the development of his thought. Marx’s writing in this work is often quite vivid and fun, and I imagine I’ll return to it again when I’m looking for a colourful quote.

Review: And Quiet Flows The Don (Part 1) by Mikhail Sholokhov

This review is for Part 1 and the first 9 chapters of Part 2 only. Unbeknownst to me, my library had only this portion available on audiobook, and I haven’t been able to track down an audiobook for the rest. I’m reminded of the time I took The Name of the Wind as my cottage book, not realizing it was only book one in an unfinished trilogy. I hunted through every used bookstore in rural Canada until I found its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. Ah well.

As a starting point for this review, let’s begin with its setting, evoked in the title: a small village on the banks of the Don river at the start of the 20th century. The Don flows constantly throughout the novel, the backdrop to emotional conversations or quotidian life. This is an area with a long history, and its people, the Cossacks, view themselves that way too; before the narrator can start with the story of Gregori, he first tells us of the unusual circumstances of his grandparents’ marriage. She was a Turkish war bride, was accused of witchcraft by the locals and was killed by a lynch mob, leaving behind a premature infant. He spent twelve years in a penal colony for avenging her death. Already in just this vignette, we have the unfurling of many themes of the book: match-making and love, nationality, patriarchy, community ties and community violence, the way war changes men’s lives. 

Gorky compared this novel to War and Peace, and the similarity is likely intentional on Sholokov’s part. Like Tolstoy’s work, And Quiet Flows the Don is a dramatic epic spanning times of peace and war. It also introduces us to a varied cast of people trying to navigate the waters of love and social expectations, following them through the heartbreaks of these decisions. But Tolstoy’s characters navigate the world of the aristocracy, while Sholokov's characters plow fields and work in mills.

Though agrarian, the Cossacks are relatively free: they are proud of their history as escaped serfs. The Cossack sense of national identity is explored chiefly through the eyes of Gregori, who is self-consciously aware of being only three-quarters Cossack. The Cossacks are particularly proud of their horsemanship — the lack thereof in outsiders is remarked upon, and the shame of not being able to acquire a suitable horse hangs over Gregori’s head. The emotion of a scene is often conveyed through the characters’ awareness of their horses: exhaustion, urgency, readiness.

The patriarchal and parochial Cossack society is romantically and sexually restrictive, and the tension of the novel comes from the characters rearing at these reins. Economic considerations and social shame weigh differently on men and women. Aksinia, a victim of sexual abuse at home, flees a violent husband to be with her lover, Gregori. Gregori is unsatisfied in his marriage with Natalia — a marriage negotiated as a business deal under the gaze of a portrait of the Tsar. Feeling no love for his young and devoted bride he leaves his family, like his grandfather, to be with Aksinia. But Gregori is a cold partner to her too, doubting the true paternity of his daughter with Aksinia. His military summons come as a form of relief, a promise of honour. Later, grieving the loss of her baby alone while Gregori is at war, Aksinia is coerced into sex by a wealthy lord. Gregori is aware of the powerlessness of women to economic and violent coercion: he fights off a squad of his fellow soldiers to save the woman they were raping. But Gregori cannot accept Aksinia’s lack of faithfulness nor the shame of being unable to compete with a wealthier man, and he returns to his wife. Although the reader spends the most time with Gregori, Aksinia and Natalia, we see glimpses of how all the other villagers manage their own quiet gender struggles: they are jilted lovers, bear unwanted pregnancies, or despair at the loneliness of an absent partner. 

Abuse, unhappy marriages, infant mortality. These tragedies are shaped by social structure and economic hardship. Although devastating for the people involved, these dramas remain domestic: their ripples aren’t felt past the banks of the Don. In the meantime, Europe comes to a boil. Rumours of a possible war with Austria start trickling into the village and are met with incredulity — how could they go to war with us? We supply all their grain! As another augur, an educated stranger moves to the village, and takes up playing cards with the mill workers in the evenings. He is arrested for possessing banned books, and is discovered to be a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (a precursor to the Bolsheviks). For the villagers, he is the first person they have seen “[dare] to act against the Tsar himself.”

The military summons finally arrive, and families are torn apart. War throws men into a deadly meat grinder — and into the company of others from distant parts of the country. Discontent and political education spread through the camps.

“You think you’re fighting for the Tsar, but what is the Tsar? The Tsar’s a nobody, and the Tsarina’s a chicken; but they’re both a weight on our backs. Don’t you see? The factory-owner drinks vodka, while the soldier kills the lice. The capitalist takes the profit, the worker goes bare. That’s the system we’ve got. Serve on, cossack, serve on!”

Russia is a tinderbox ready to explode, but the novel stops here.

Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

This is a book for readers. Italo Calvino slips into your mind and examines every part of your relationship with books, showing you that you are connected with countless other readers through our mirrored experience in reading. 

Your never-ending reading list and the comfort of your reading routine. Word frequencies, and the way word choice characterizes a work. Reading a book alone, versus reading a book with another reader, versus being read to. Reading as a metaphor for social connection. Reading as a communication with the writer. Reading as a political activity. Reading a work only in translation and wondering what is lost. Reading as a spiraling activity:

If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.

One of the most unique of these, that I have felt but had never seen expressed so evocatively, is the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer or editor: 

Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to “the other side” and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed.

I choose “the other side”, that privilege of the editor or the writer. The ability to see the seams of a work, to see what could be tightened, that makes reading more enjoyable to me, not less. But I am not immune to a little sentimental reflection on those days gone by when every book was a wonder, every scientific paper a flawless addition to the literature.

These meditations on reading, all told in second-person, are interspersed with segments of lost novels, all told in first person. The overall plot that ties together this ode to books is that due to publishing house mishaps, political strife and various other interruptions, you, the reader, can never finish any one of these books despite desperately wanting to. The lost fragments range from the creative and thought-provoking to the cliche and boring. Portrayal of women left much to be desired. Portrayal of political topics was also disappointing; when writing on this vein, Calvino reads like any other disillusioned twentieth century socialist. I mostly found myself awaiting the next frame story, for when you, the reader, or I, the reader, could next discover what aspect of our relationship with books would be probed next.

Review: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Philosophical beats repeat throughout history. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment traces anti-foundationalism from the Ancient Greeks through the modern era, and acts as a vaccine against such thought. Having read this work, I recognize it easily, and I can send out my metaphorical T cells to fight it.

J.S. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man plays a similar role against race science, tracing the bad philosophy and bad science to uphold the imperialist and racist status quo through a few hundred years. Indeed, his first edition (1981) anticipates the 1994 version of mismeasuring man, The Bell Curve. Gould highlights the factors that make this train of thought return to prominence: the need to justify cutbacks in social resources or explain increasing inequality by means of anything but social policy (“they deserve their fate, they’re just not smart enough to compete”). I think we will have many more years of such worsening social outcomes, so it’s a good vaccine to take.

Gould’s examination of some of the key figures and concepts of scientific racism (Broca, Goddard, Spearman's g, etc.) reveals a number of patterns. For example, data confirming a hypothesis is easily accepted and poorly scrutinized (Gould re-analyzes the raw data for several flawed but influential studies). In contrast, data showing the role of environment over genetics are tortured or waved away with absurd explanations like “intelligent Blacks move to where living conditions are better.” Politically or socially convenient findings are accepted and applied, despite pushback from contemporary critical scientists. Experimental protocols are poorly designed and often not followed.

Gould writes like a scientist (he was a professor at Harvard), for better or for worse. He is precise, cautious, meticulous, thorough. But he writes like a scientist with political convictions, who knows his work matters, who recognizes a personal stake in communicating the message. His presence throughout the book emphasizes this, such as his experience with a son with learning disabilities and how testing in education played a positive role in this case. Anticipating criticisms of bias, he cautions the reader not to conflate neutrality and objectivity: 

It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and argument can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one’s own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools. 

It’s a work that bridges science, philosophy, history and politics in a way I found very satisfying, and still very important to the questions of today.

Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

This is an ambitious, vivid debut novel. The retelling of the story of Buddha’s son was clever and fresh, and meaningful even if you are not acquainted with the mythology. The prose was elegant and evocative and flowing. The world felt packed with mysteries, swirling with people and politics. The fantasy version of Sri Lanka felt so fun to explore, and the author deftly wove in the scars of colonialism, and its relationship to fascist popular uprisings and religious fundamentalism, and the way political violence is given cover by a liberal tolerance more concerned with bureaucracy and comfortable vacations in the mountains than halting pandemics and pogroms. The pandemic setting also felt eerily familiar: the narrative is very aware of who is masked, which strangers intrude within breathing distance.

But I felt like overall it came together not quite right. Some scenes had awkward transitions and some events were unclear; I had to reread a passage to confirm that a key character had actually died, and it didn’t always feel natural why a chapter started where it did. The mysteries didn’t unravel at the right rate; given the prominence of the Bright Doors, their connection to other worlds felt insufficiently dwelled upon, and was overshadowed by a somewhat out-of-nowhere appearance of a long-lost lover. I expected more coherence between the various mysteries of time shifting, doors, devils and prophecies. Perhaps their seeming disjointedness is given cohesion by familiarity with South Asian folklore. 

The ending also came a little suddenly. From the very first pages of the book, we learn Fetter’s shadow has been torn from him. At the emotional climax of the book, we suddenly learn the narrator has been Fetter’s shadow all along, and we cease seeing the world through Fetter’s eyes as the shadow sets out to complete its own goals. This reveal was well done, and I enjoyed revisiting parts of the story with this knowledge. It was also a clever way to resolve the contradiction between Fetter swearing to never kill again with the prophecy that Fetter would end his father’s life: Fetter’s shadow played the role of assassin (via an ignominious mode of death) while Fetter played the role of non-violent dissenter. Fetter is lighter than air, the shadow operates by causing pain, disgust, indigestion, shame. They form a yin/yang. 

However with this thesis/antithesis established, I felt the lack of synthesis at the end rather unfulfilling: Fetter remains blocked off from his shadow, and more distant and difficult to read than ever. Perhaps it is the author’s intent for Fetter to fully reject forever the use of violence as “the only way to change the world” — his mother’s mantra. A permanent separation of shadow and body achieves that. On the other hand, a synthesis of shadow and brightness would indicate an acceptance of both violence and non-violence. However, in the final page Fetter indicates that he has achieved nearly this latter transformation — he continues to reject violence by his hands while supporting a movement that is willing to use force when necessary to overthrow their government. So then why did his shadow leave him, separate from him?

The crux of the issue is, I think, how the author tried to approach the problem of political revolution in fiction. An author has, broadly, two choices: (1) the main character(s) can play the central role, acting as world-changing heroes (Babel), or (2) the main character can play a small role, some side battle in a bigger war (For Whom The Bell Tolls, Wheel of Time). The Saint of Bright Doors tries to have it both ways: (1) the main character is prophesied to kill his father, and (2) the main character is but a small part of a dynamic, growing movement. While the objective of (1) is completed, the day is not yet saved, and the movement built by Fetter’s friends (2) is poised to contest power. However, Fetter is strangely absent in both aspects: (1) it is his shadow that takes agency in the first arc, and (2) Fetter’s friends who take agency in the second arc. As a result, Fetter’s arc is mainly to drift through the story, and come to terms with his relationships with his parents, while others get the political work done.

Review: Heidegger and the Ideology of War by Domenico Losurdo

When we say we are anti-fascist, it doesn’t mean we are only against the specific forms of fascism that developed in Italy and Germany in the mid-twentieth century, but that we are against all forms of fascism—an ideology of war and violence to benefit the community of the privileged off the subjugation and genocide of the out-groups. Fascism adapts to the specific conditions of a time, and it is happy to put on disguises to best appeal to the needs of a nation. That means we cannot be so reductive as to divide philosophers into camps of “Nazi” or “not Nazi” (or “fascist” or “not fascist”), but must understand and recognize those schools of thought that give birth to fascism, or otherwise nurture it and give it cover. 

To do so, we must correctly understand the political currents of these proto-fascist philosophies at the time they were written. Philosophy fails particularly spectacularly at this task with Heidegger, a philosopher still widely upheld and read today, as Losurdo lays out:

The debate regarding Heidegger and his relationship with Nazism is still unsettled, and it encompasses several unique aspects. Usually, the historian of philosophy tries to single out the interlocutors and the concrete targets of a certain position, and then tries to reconstruct the real historical framework, even for propositions that have the ambition of being valid sub specie acternitatis. He does this not for the sake of historicist reductionism; on the contrary, his starting point is the awareness that even the excess of one theory with respect to its time cannot be grasped and evaluated without a preliminary attempt at historical clarification. In the case of this debate, however, many interpreters of Heidegger seem dominated by the opposite preoccupation: that of relegating all of his texts, even those in which the political dimension is explicit and declared, to a rarefied, politically aseptic sphere. In this way Heidegger, who not only in his letters and occasional speeches, but also in his theoretical writings, tirelessly comments upon the events of his time, is subjected to a purifying process that is supposed to cleanse him of any worldly contamination.

Losurdo places Heidegger in his historical context again, connecting his philosophical work with his political commentary, and comparing him with both his colleagues that clearly denounced the Nazis (Jaspers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Husserl, etc) and those whose philosophy is much more broadly accepted as aligned with Nazi ideology than Heidegger’s (Schmitt, Spengler, Junger). Losurdo traces themes of community and belonging, historicity, epistemology, identity, modernity and war through the philosophical developments between the start of the war in 1914 through the end of the war in 1945.

One of the difficulties with understanding fascism is that within their political movements, at any given time and over the course of time, different strands of philosophies become expressed. For example, the Nazis upheld a bucolic ideal, but then facing the pressures of war, had to elevate mechanization and production, its antithesis. Heidegger’s relationship with fascism is sometimes excused by pointing to these different currents. His denunciation of the Nazis for giving into mechanization and modernity is hardly a damning blow against fascist ideology. It is not particularly exonerating to criticize certain Nazi ideologues for being too liberal: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) — have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’,” (1935) nor is his rejection of specifically biological racism much consolation given his strong antisemitism. His philosophy elevated the transformational aspects of war and volkische community throughout the war, and he shows little self-criticism for his relationship with the Nazi movement after the war.

Losurdo’s argument here hits similar beats as his masterpiece on Nietzsche, however where that work demolishes Nietzsche as a possible pillar from which to build progressive politics, this blow to Heidegger landed as less fatal. This might be partly due to the length; at only one fifth the page count, Losurdo doesn’t have the space to prevent a full intellectual development of Heidegger. Are there parts of Heidegger that can be salvaged, developed towards some other end? It seems unlikely, but Heideggerians might follow their lodestar in doing a poor job of self-critique.

Review: Friend by Nam-nyong Paek

There are two approaches to reviewing Friend. I’ll start with the road less-traveled, which is to comment on the themes, the characterizations, the aesthetics, the author’s apparent intent, and so-on, i.e., the typical book review structure.

Part 1: On The Book

The novel investigates the fracturing of a marriage. Chae Sun-Hee seeks a divorce from her husband, Lee Seok-Chun, and by luck the judge overseeing her suit is Jeong Jin-Wu, a man who experiences difficulty navigating his own marriage, and who steps in to be the friend the divorcing couple didn’t know they needed — someone who listens to them empathetically and helps them see their marital problems and individual needs from another angle.

We see deeply into the hearts of these three people, we learn who they were when they first fell in love, and how their priorities in life shifted as they aged, discovered new interests, and dedicated themselves to their professions. These challenges are common ones — the difficulty in balancing the professional development of two individuals, the difficulty in finding common ground with a spouse with a different level of ambition or worldliness or who is motivated by different causes. The author skillfully portrays believable characters, with each character being “right” in their own way even as they disagree with each other, and with each character presenting both human flaws (withdrawness, selfishness, snobbery) and human aspirational qualities (dedication, empathy, ambitiousness).

These are questions of mid-life, amplified by the characters undergoing not only changes brought about by their advancing maturity but also by changes in society. In days gone by, women stayed home and prepared meals and cared for children. The challenge of balancing these social expectations with the pressures of a career becomes a point of contention between a career woman and her husband. In earlier days, society lauded factory work, where in the time of the novel’s setting (1980s) there is growing need (and social reward) for more specialized roles requiring further education. The lathe operator without further training gets left behind.

The narrative of individuals discovering love, discovering heartbreak, and rediscovering love is reflected in the ever-changing wonder of nature. The snow can be both a thing of beauty and delight or of devastation. A mountain range is stunning, but the weary may nap through a scenic journey instead of appreciating it. And the wind? The wind represents the loneliness of a being who moves forward thinking only of their own excitement, not sometimes bowing to the needs of another.

From whence, from whom, for what reason was the wind running, like a fugitive, like someone who has abandoned his family? Who will ever know its point of departure, who will ever know its lonesome fate? It wanders the earth aimlessly, seeking refuge among the trees in the depths of a forest or by a river in an open meadow. It dashes by without looking back or it lurks around a single spot. At times, it affectionately embraces life, sharing warmth and love with everything near and far. At other times, it bellows with rage and devours everything in sight with a destructive force that makes the earth shudder. It gets soaked in the cold rain and freezes in the icy blizzard. It moans in agony and howls into the lonely night. But then, on a quiet day, it wakes from the warmth of the sun and embarks on its journey yet again, looking forward to the promise of a new day, a new adventure. This is why it can never find a mate and, therefore, lives a most miserable life. 

(...)

“When were you planning to leave for Yeonsudeok again?”

“If it’s all right with you, I was thinking of leaving on Monday.”

“Monday? Ah that is why you arranged our date on Sunday.” Jeong Jin Wu nodded as though he had solved a mystery case. Then he sighed. “It’s fine, Go on Monday. And next time you don’t have to leave notes. I already know what to do. I’m your research assistant.” Jeong Jin Wu chuckled again.

From outside the window, the wind noticed Jeong Jin Wu and Eun Ok enjoying each other’s company by the single lamp on the desk, and respectfully left them in peace.

Though the characterizations, plot, and structure are well done, the prose reads a little repetitive in its rhythm. My hunch is that the issue lies in the translation, but I haven’t read enough Korean to know for sure. I started to feel the lack of participle clauses and I wonder if the translation could have been more idiomatic to vary the rhythm of the prose more.

Part 2: On The Discourse Around The Book 

In short, this is a novel with compelling characters tackling familiar problems, written with emotional nuance and interesting metaphors. But you wouldn’t think it to read the other reviews, which bemoan its heavy-handed propaganda. Part of me wonders how these impressions might vary if the reader was blind to the novel's origin — it was written by an author from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the author is in good standing with the state. A blind read is of course impossible — the characters are Korean, the world changing around them is clearly a maturing post-socialist revolution society, and the chapter in which Jeong Jin Wu delivers his historical materialist thesis on the institution of marriage is a dead giveaway as to the author’s Marxist education. (I found him falling in love with his wife as she devastatingly critiques his thesis to be quite endearing.)

Yes, there is a moral to the story, and yes, it aligns with what their country views to be a social good. We see how the family is the basic unit of society and must be mutually supportive. We see how corruption hurts its victims. We see how people should study and improve themselves, advance science and technology and the arts, not only for their own self-fulfillment but because it leads to a more thriving society. Are these principles the other reviewers disagree with? Are these values scary, cruel, oppressive?

What’s more, I found myself wondering how these other reviewers fare with works like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. That book certainly hits you over the head with morals: the family is the basic unit of society and must be mutually supportive (so don’t just marry the first pretty thing you fall in love with); corruption hurts its victims; improve yourself and spend within your means. These are good morals to impart for a stable society, and the state and other institutions of the anglosphere have rewarded Dickens handsomely for it. Though I’ll give Friend the edge for its optimism that through hard work, a better — more creative, more technologically advanced — society is possible.