→ October 14, 2024
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Midaq Alley.

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, making him the first and still the only Arab writer to win that honor, the same year he published his last novel, The Coffeehouse. The Nobel committee’s speech cited several of his works, including his Cairo Trilogy, which the Zimbabwe International Book Fair named as one of the 12 best works of African literature in the 20th century; and Midaq Alley, which my daughter had to read for her IB English class last year.

Midaq Alley is a slice-of-life work set on one street in Cairo in the 1940s, near the close of World War II, and follows a broad array of characters as they live, work, fall in and out of love, and more. The closest we get to a protagonist is Hamida, the young foster daughter of Umm Hamida, who spends most of the novel trying to find a suitable husband – with finances high on her list of criteria, and her story intersects with those of two other residents of the Alley as well as a well-heeled visitor who sets his sights on her as soon as he arrives. The entire novel is a moment, an attempt to capture Egyptian city life as it sits on the precipice of modernity, with western influences creeping in, technology threatening some traditional jobs, and secular sentiments battling with traditional beliefs. The myriad people living on this street and on these pages are likely a stand-in for Egyptian society as a whole during the last years of the monarchy and the final years of British presence on Egyptian soil.

The alley itself is so small and life there so provincial that everyone knows everyone else’s business, which is part of how Mahfouz can pull off the constant changes in narrative and perspective – although it also seems like there are few real connections among the residents. There’s plenty of gossip, but there isn’t much love lost between them; not once does Mahfouz present us with a true friendship between any two characters, even with the large number of people who cross the page. This aspect of the book lies in the background, even when tragedy strikes at the very end of the novel, where one character makes a choice that will upend several lives yet he has nobody willing to stop him or who might have dissuaded him from his actions.

There’s clearly a lot of cultural context I missed when reading Midaq Alley, and I’m sure I would have benefited from reading it as part of a class, since I know very little of both Egyptian culture and its history outside of what we typically learn in school (ancient Egypt) or what has happened in my lifetime. I was better able to pick up some of the satirical elements, like Zaita, the “cripple-maker,” who gives beggars false deformities or disabilities so they may take in more money while panhandling, or Dr. Booshy, who isn’t a real doctor but provides medical-adjacent services at cut-rate prices and no one wants to know how. Those character archetypes are at least somewhat universal, even if the specifics are unique to Mahfouz’s world, and I could get a handle on them and what they might represent. I was also aware from the very first chapter, where a Quran-quoting poet finds himself out of a ‘job’ because the radio has effectively replaced him, that my lack of knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture would probably wall off some aspects of the novel from me. That’s on me, not the author, but the result was that I didn’t get as much out of Midaq Alley as I might have hoped.

Next up: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, another of my daughter’s books from her last year of high school, and I think her favorite.

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→ June 29, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 6/28/24.

I posted my second mock draft for 2024 on June 19th, and on Friday posted a scouting report on Japanese first baseman Rintaro Sasaki, who’s playing in the Draft League this summer and will play for Stanford in the spring. Both are for subscribers to The Athletic. I also held a Klawchat the day of the mock draft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Pixies, a great small-box game for family play, good for kids as young as 7 but solid enough for the adults to enjoy.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams, assuming American Airlines doesn’t wait six hours and then cancel my flight like they did this past week. So much for my idea that flying the night before would help make travel easier.

And now, the links…

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→ April 28, 2020
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The Double.

Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s novel The Double seldom appears on the list of his most notable works, even though it was adapted into a movie by Dennis Villeneuve (retitled Enemy) starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the two title roles – two, because the story revolves around a man who discovers that there’s another man, an obscure actor who has minor roles in various films, who is a carbon copy of himself. The two men are completely indistinguishable, not identical twins, but identical in every way, down to scars and blemishes, leading the first character into an existential crisis, one where he tracks down his double and causes a spiral of problems for both of them and for the people closest to them.

Tertuliano, whose name roughly translates as “chatty” (or something more pejorative), is the first man, a history teacher whose colleague suggests that he rent a particular movie without explaining up front what the significance of the film might be. It turns out that a minor character actor in the film is a dead ringer for Tertuliano, a similarity that affects the teacher far more than you might expect at first. He tries to find the actor’s name, renting any movie he can find from the same production company, and eventually uses a subterfuge to contact the actor. Even their voices are identical – the actor’s wife thinks it’s her husband on the phone, not Tertuliano, playing a prank on her – and when the two men meet, there’s an immediate, mutual disdain as you might see when two cats meet each other for the first time and each decides that it’s his territory and the other is an intruder. As with cats, this leads to a sort of pissing contest where each man tries to demonstrate some sort of dominance over the other, as if to say that he’s the real person and the other the facsimile, with consequences that are both shocking and foreseeable, with a clever little twist in the novel’s very last paragraph.

Saramago expresses the existential crisis that Tertuliano undergoes rather well throughout the book, keeping the character’s anxiety and dread visible but at a slow boil, so his actions and gestures aren’t overly dramatic or forced. Once you accept the premise that he’s undone by this thought that he has a clone in the world, and loses some sense of himself in the process, everything that follows makes sense. It’s his clone who seems harder to buy, especially when he bullies Tertuliano into accepting something extraordinary, an action that ultimately leads to the novel’s climax and resolution – although the payoff does mostly justify the torturous path that got us there.

The bigger question around The Double is how well Saramago communicates the reasons for the existential crisis – that is, why Tertuliano goes off the rails just because he saw his duplicate in a movie. It might be unnerving to see someone who looks just like you in a film, but would you stalk that person and try to meet up with them? Would you let this unravel your entire life? Probably not, unless your life was already a bit threadbare, but Saramago doesn’t give us any real reason to believe that Tertuliano was already in that kind of state – he’s not a happy man or very fulfilled by work or his relationship with his girlfriend, yet he doesn’t come across as a man on the verge before he sets off on his quixotic effort to find his double.

You’re also not going to get any explanation of how the clones came about, either, so don’t go into The Double expecting one: the resolution is about the characters, not the mystery of their existence. I was hoping for some kind of answer, but Saramago never actually implies that he’s going to provide one, and the book heads in a different direction from the start; it’s hard to see a way where he could have given that explanation and still taken the story where it goes. It doesn’t live up to Blindness, one of his best-known and best-regarded novels, which pulls off the trick of a compelling (if often gross) story that conveys a stronger philosophical message, but is at least thought-provoking with a plot that works right up through its resolution.

Next up: I’m a few write-ups behind but am currently reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

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→ January 25, 2019
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The Plague.

Reading Albert Camus’ The Plague, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, was itself a bit intimidating, because it’s the rare novel where I could go into it already knowing there would be layers of meaning beyond the text itself, presenting me with the challenge of reading for plot while also considering how much time to spend deciphering the metaphors and allusions throughout the book. Fortunately, it’s a better read than Camus’ The Stranger, a hallmark of existentialist literature that stands at an imperturbable remove from its protagonist, although I won’t pretend I truly understood everything Camus was trying to express in this text.

Set in Oran, in what is now Algeria but at the time was still a French colony, The Plague follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city through about a half-dozen characters, primarily Dr. Rieux, who becomes the leader of the efforts to treat and slow the progress of the epidemic despite a lack of medicines and unhelpful authorities. Bubonic plague, the best-known disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, had no effective treatment at the time that Camus wrote the novel, so characters who fall ill expect and are expected to die, making the response from Dr. Rieux and the other central characters more about management and quarantine rather than cure.

Camus tracks the actions and emotional responses of those half-dozen characters as the plague appears, waxes, peaks, and wanes, with nearly everyone suffering some sort of loss as the novel progresses. Rieux has sent his wife, ill with some other ailment, out of town to a sanatorium as the novel opens, so she’s away during the plague but he has no contact with her. Rambert, a French journalist who was scheduled to leave Oran but who is trapped by the quarantine, speaks of his desire to return to his wife in Paris, even plotting escapes around the guards, but eventually choosing to stay because he feels some responsibility to help. The plague affects everyone, even those who don’t lose family members to the disease, as it first alters the rhythm of the town’s life – Camus writes of the movie theaters running the same films, then exchanging films with other theaters, just to retain some semblance of normal life – and eventually leads to shortages.

There are some strange omissions in the novel, as the major characters are all French men – the women who appear are all minor characters, and I’m not sure there’s even a single named Arab character in the book. Whether Camus intended this, it is a book of othering – his characters set themselves apart from the Algerians in Oran, but are themselves the others, the minority ruling class in a country that would begin a violent revolution for independence seven years after The Plague‘s publication.

Most critical analyses I’ve seen of The Plague describe it as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France and the intermittent, nearly futile resistance offered by some French civilians against their occupiers and the collaborators in the Vichy puppet government. Camus’ protagonists know they are likely doomed to fail, and even success will be defined by forces outside of their control. I thought the disease worked better as a metaphor for life itself, especially as defined by Camus’ atheist/existentialist worldview: If life and death are largely random, both in the sense of unpredictable as well as without philosophical meaning, then how should we react? What moral codes dictate our actions? Is there value in finding external meanings, as the priest Paneloux – who argues that the death of a child due to plague must be right, because if it occurred, then it means God willed it, in a sort of ne plus ultra form of the unitary executive theory – does right up to his own death? If not, how do we give meaning to our lives when they are finite and may be cut short without warning?

If that was Camus’ intention, he gives us several possible answers, but none is as powerful as Rieux, who seems to sacrifice the most in the novel, but whose only gain is intangible and fleeting, the boost we get from helping others. In a time today when so many people still celebrate materialism or aspire to its excesses, and where we live as if the probability of a catastrophe like The Plague is almost nil, that message feels as relevant as it might have seventy-two years ago in the Holocaust’s wake.

Next up: Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, recommended by a close friend of mine who used to work in a restaurant mentioned in the book.

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→ October 16, 2018
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Missing Person.

French author Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, and his best-known work, at least outside of France, is his novel Missing Person (originally Rue des Boutiques Obscure, a real street in Rome on which Modiano once lived), which won the 1978 Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. Modiano’s works tend to be short and tersely written, with sparing prose not too dissimilar to Hemingway’s, and a constant distance maintained between the reader and the text. (This post is primarily about Missing Person, but this summer I also read Suspended Sentences, a collection of three novellas by Modiano, which informs my opinion of his style.)

The protagonist of Missing Person is an amnesiac detective whose boss of ten years is retiring, leaving him to try to solve the case of his own lost identity and history, based on scant clues and the need to talk to people who may not remember him, or want to talk, or even still be among the living. The short novel follows the character around Paris and France, and eventually to the South Pacific island of Bora Bora, as he tries to unroll the years he lost prior to whatever caused his amnesia. He uncovers a possible answer to his identity, although it’s far from certain, and the person he may once have been was himself a frequent changer of identities as he tried to flee from the occupying forces during World War II, eventually slipping across the Pyrennées into Spain.

Even that story, however, is of dubious veracity, and there’s a sense throughout the novel that the protagonist, who also narrates the work, is grasping at any straws he can find, overly eager to get an answer to his search without worrying enough whether it’s accurate. He has a photograph of someone who might have been him, but whenever he shows it to someone who might recognize him in that context, he’s quick to ask, “Don’t you think it looks like me?” — a leading question that elicits half-hearted agreement more than actual answers. Once the narrator has a story on to which he can latch on, he also seems to drop alternate theories, which seems contrary to his new identity as a private detective and apparently a successful one at that.

It’s impossible to read a story like this without also seeing it as a meditation on identity – on our need for a back story, for example, or how on the stories we tell ourselves to provide meaning to our lives, especially when there might be things in our own pasts we’d rather gloss over or forget entirely. It’s unclear whether the protagonist did things during the war of which he might not be proud now, and there’s a trap in his easy adoption of this particular identity: what if he finds he was a collaborator, not a resister, during World War II? Or simply betrayed people who were close to him? The farther he goes down this rabbit hole, trying to convince people to give him the answers he wanted, the greater the risk he exposes himself to a story he might have preferred to forget.

And if the narrator can’t solve the mystery of his identity and past, then what remains for him? Can he be satisfied living a life without a history, or knowing his real name (or, as it seems, one of his real names)? When the foundation of our self-identification is denied to us, how does that affect our ability to function in a society that is obsessed not just with who we are or where we came from, but with where our parents came from, or whether we come from certain stock or a high enough class? What does the lack of a personal history do to someone’s self-image? Is it better to have a satisfying myth than to have the unvarnished truth – especially if the latter is unflattering or even includes something shameful?

Modiano’s stories seem to lack firm conclusions; that is certainly true of Missing Person, where the Bora Bora lead doesn’t pan out, leaving the narrator with one last clue to try to unravel his personal history, with the novel ending with a brief thought from the narrator on his quixotic mission but no resolution. He might know who he was, but he’s not sure and it appears he might never receive that closure. Modiano asks if half an answer, of uncertain accuracy, would be better than having none at all, and leaves it to the reader to judge.

Next up: I’m halfway through Vernor Vinge’s mammoth Hugo-winning novel A Deepness in the Sky.

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→ July 21, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

For Insiders this week, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors and posted analyses of the Manny Machado trade and the Brad Hand/Francisco Mejia trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My next game review for Paste will go up next week; this week I reviewed the app version of Istanbul, a great strategic game of pathfinding and set collection, here on the dish.

I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm to talk Smart Baseball and sign copies.

And now, the links…

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→ March 20, 2018
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Nudge.

Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics – or whatever the longer title is, it’s the one Nobel Prize people don’t seem to take all that seriously – for his work in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, especially on what is now called “choice architecture.” Thaler’s work focuses on how the way we make decisions is affected by the way in which we are presented with choices. I mentioned one of Thaler’s findings in my most recent stick to baseball roundup – the candidate listed first on a ballot receives an average boost of 3.5% in the voting, with the benefit higher in races where all candidates are equally unknown (e.g., there’s no incumbent). You would probably like to think that voters are more rational than that, or at least just not really that irrational, but the data are clear that the order in which names are listed on ballots affects the outcomes. (It came up in that post because Iowa Republicans are trying to rig election outcomes in that state, with one possible move to list Republican candidates first on nearly every ballot in the state.)

Thaler’s first big book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, co-authored with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein came out in 2008, and explains the effects of choice architecture while offering numerous policy prescriptions for various real-world problems where giving consumers or voters different choices, or giving them choices in a different order, or even just flipping the wording of certain questions could dramatically alter outcomes. Thaler describes this approach as “libertarian paternalism,” saying that the goal here is not to mandate or restrict choices, but to use subtle ‘nudges’ to push consumers toward decisions that are better for them and for society as a whole. The audiobook is just $4.49 as I write this.

This approach probably mirrors my own beliefs on how governments should craft economic policies, although it doesn’t appear to be in favor with either major party right now. For example, trans fats are pretty clearly bad for your health, and if Americans consume too many trans fats, national expenditures on health care will likely rise as more Americans succumb to heart disease and possibly cancer as well. However, banning trans fats, as New York City has done, is paternalism without liberty – these jurisdictions have decided for consumers that they can’t be trusted to consume only small, safer amounts of trans fats. You can certainly have tiny amounts of trans fats without significantly altering your risk of heart disease, and you may decide for yourself that the small increase in health risk is justified by the improved flavor or texture of products containing trans fats. (For example, pie crusts made with traditional shortening have a better texture than those made with new, trans fat-free shortening. And don’t get me started on Oreos.) That’s your choice to make, even if it potentially harms your health in the long run.

Choice architecture theory says that you can deter people from consuming trans fats or reduce such consumption by how you present information to consumers at the point of purchase. Merely putting trans fat content on nutrition labels is one step – if consumers see that broken out as a separate line item, they may be less likely to purchase the product. Warning labels that trans fats are bad for your heart might also help. Some consumers will consume trans fats anyway, but that is their choice as free citizens. The policy goal is to reduce the public expenditure on health care expenses related to such consumption without infringing on individual choice. There are many such debates in the food policy world, especially when it comes to importing food products from outside the U.S. – the USDA has been trying for years to ban or curtail imports of certain cheeses made from raw milk, because of the low risk that they’ll carry dangerous pathogens, even though the fermentation process discourages the growth of such bugs. (I’m not talking about raw milk itself, which has a different risk profile, and has made a lot of people sick as it’s come back into vogue.) I’ve also run into trouble trying to get products imported from Italy like bottarga and neonata, which are completely safe, but for whatever reason run afoul of U.S. laws on bringing animal products into the country.

Thaler and Sunstein fry bigger fish than neonata in Nudge, examining how choice architecture might improve employee participation in and choices within their retirement accounts, increase participation in organ donation programs, or increase energy conservation. (The last one is almost funny: If you tell people their neighbors are better at conserving energy, then it makes those people reduce their own energy use. South Africa has been using this and similar techniques to try to reduce water consumption in drought-stricken Cape Town. Unfortunately, publicizing “Day Zero” has also hurt the city’s tourism industry.) Thaler distinguishes between Econs, the theoretical, entirely rational actors of traditional economic theory; and Humans, the very real, often irrational people who live in this universe and make inefficient or even dumb choices all the time.

Nudge is enlightening, but unlike most books in this niche, like Thinking, Fast and Slow or The Invisible Gorilla, it probably won’t help you make better choices in your own life. You can become more aware of choice architecture, and maybe you’ll overrule your status quo bias, or will look at the top or bottom shelves in the supermarket instead of what’s at eye level (hint: the retailer charges producers more to place their products at eye level), but the people Nudge is most likely to help seem like the ones least likely to read it: Elected and appointed officials. I’ve mentioned many times how disgusted I was with Arizona’s lack of any kind of energy or water conservation policies. They have more sun than almost any place in the country, but have done little to nothing to encourage solar uptake, although the state’s utility commission may have finally forced some change on the renewable energy front this week. Las Vegas actually pays residents to remove grass lawns and replace them with low-water landscaping; Arizona does nothing of the sort, and charges far too little for water given its scarcity and dwindling supply. Improving choice architecture in that state could improve its environmental policies quickly without infringing on Arizonans’ rights to leave the lights on all night.

Speaking of Thinking, Fast and Slow, its author, Daniel Kahneman, was a guest last week on NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, and it was both entertaining and illuminating.

Next up: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. No reason.

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→ March 7, 2018
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Blindness.

Sometimes I get hung up on a specific review, and end up going a few days between posts here because that one book or film is clogging the mental road and nothing else can come out until I figure out what I want to say. The most recent title to do this is Nobel Prize for Literature winner Jose Saramago’s book Blindness, a strange, hypnotic, disturbing-on-many-levels parable about an epidemic of “white blindness” that is unexplained and contagious, leading to the total breakdown of civilization in a matter of weeks.

Characters in Blindness don’t even get names, and throughout the book Saramago refers to them as the first blind man, the girl with dark glasses, the old man, and so on. The first man to go blind has it hit him while he’s driving in traffic, and he turns out to be Patient Zero, as the sight loss is highly contagious. The authorities move quickly to quarantine patients, and in their initial sweep they take in the wife of one of the first patients when she claims she’s gone blind as well – but she hasn’t, and lies just to be able to stay with her husband. The patients are thrown in a disused mental asylum (there’s some symbolism right there) and are told they’ll be shot if they try to leave. They’re given food, irregularly, and little else. The people in the asylum try to organize themselves, not realizing one of them can see, but the facilities are quickly overrun, and later waves of patients arrive, including a group that takes over the food supply, extorting first valuables and later women before they’ll release any food to the remainder of the prisoners. The one sighted woman eventually leads a rebellion, after which a few surviving patients leave the asylum to find the city in ruins, haunted by itinerant groups of blind people trying to find food and shelter any way they can. Through unfathomable hardships and privations, their little group – which includes a young boy who arrived at the hospital alone in the first wave, and a “dog of tears” who has followed them since their escape – becomes more than a means of survival, but a familial unit of people who continually sacrifice to help others, and who can thus persevere until the crisis ends.

Saramago was born in Portugal but lived the last portion of his life in exile in the Canary Islands, as his philosophies – he was a militant atheist, communist, anti-fascist, and humanist – ran afoul of the fascist Estado Novo regime in Portugal and later the country’s still-powerful Catholic Church, which objected strongly to his 1991 novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Blindness was published in 1995, after he’d left Portugal, and became his best-known work, one of the novels cited in his Nobel commendation, emblematic of his fabulist style and with his trademark meandering prose that eschews standard sentence structure for something that mimics the nonlinear, stop-and-start path of human thought.

Saramago despised religion and thought that human love and compassion were the solutions to many ills of modern society; Blindness, at its most literal level, takes this to an ungodly extreme. He puts his characters into a post-apocalyptic situation where they’re not dying, but could die from starvation, poor sanitation, or the cruelty of others. Some of the secondary characters are merely truculent or selfish; others are more sanguinary or malevolent. They’re all recognizably human, however, even in their stripped-down state. The one woman who can see – “the doctor’s wife,” in Saramago’s prose – turns out to be, or simply remains, the most compassionate of everyone, even though her sight means she can see the worst that’s happening around her. With her as an anchor, though, her band of vagrants coalesces around each other beyond just the need for survival, with real affection growing among them, and their empathy returning even as they encounter other blind people struggling to stay alive outside the asylum.

The metaphor of blindness lends itself to too many interpretations for me to ever focus on a single one while reading it. The idea of us not ‘seeing’ what’s happening to or around us is the most obvious one that came to me. After finishing, I also latched on to the idea of the blindness contagion as the popular reaction to autocracy, especially fascism, where people choose not to see the suffering of others as long as they are unaffected themselves – the ‘first they came for the Jews, and I said nothing’ idea, written from the perspective of the first group to be rounded up, who then serve as witnesses and victims to atrocities that come afterwards. This interpretation, which I think is consistent with Saramago’s personal beliefs, recasts the story as a parable of the power of caring for others, and how that is what defines us as civilized beings, more than our ephemeral institutions or customs could.

The one truly unbearable part of Blindness isn’t the violence or the deprivations, but Saramago’s excessive and almost puerile attention to bodily excretions. There is so much discussion of shit in this book that just isn’t necessary – yes, I get it, the toilets are going to back up, especially once the municipal water system goes offline due to the plague – but Saramago can’t stop discussing it, and urine, and semen, and menstrual blood, to the point of … what, exactly? Reminding us that we are still biological creatures, and thus subject to the same demands and needs of the flesh that other mammals have? If he were trying to point out how our reliance on the people and technology behind our sanitation systems are the only thing keeping us First Worlders from dying of cholera, then I’d understand his point. Instead, we just get imagery that detracts from any larger points Saramago was trying to make.

Before you ask, no, I haven’t seen the 2008 film version, and don’t plan to, given how poor the reviews were and how graphic the content of the novel could be. At least the images in my own head aren’t as indelible as those I see on a screen.

Next up: Somehow I’m in the midst of three books – Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Nudge by Richard Thaler (on the Kindle), and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (audiobook). They are, in order, the reigning National Book Award for Fiction winner, the most popular book by the reigning Nobel Prize for Economics winner, and a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction winner.

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→ November 3, 2017
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Waiting for the Barbarians.

I’d sort of avoided J.M. Coetzee for a while, given his reputation for dark, depressing themes; one of his two Booker Prize-winning novels, Disgrace, involves rape as a significant plot point more than once in the book. I was in a used book store in Manhattan in June, however, and saw Waiting for the Barbarians, which made the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written, on the shelf for a few bucks, and figured at 156 pages it would at least be over quickly if I hated it – and maybe it would surprise me. I can’t see it as a top 100 all-time novel, but I got more out of the book than I expected, as it’s a fable that seems to combine some of the best of Italo Calvino and Kazuo Ishiguro (the latter of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as did Coetzee), in a work that I’d call the better Darkness at Noon.

The story is set in an unnamed frontier town at the edge of the Empire, where the main character, the Magistrate, has served his country for some years when a Colonel arrives and “interrogates” some prisoners, including a father and son, about the activities of nearby barbarians who might threaten the town or the Empire itself. The Magistrate is dubious about the actual level of the threat, and is disgusted by the Colonel’s use of torture, which kills one of the prisoners and leads to questionable answers – likely the ones that the Colonel wanted anyway to justify a military effort against the barbarians. When the first effort yields a new set of prisoners, who are further tortured, the Magistrate takes pity on one woman among them who’s been blinded by the Colonel’s men. This decision and a journey to eventually return her to her people pits the Magistrate against the Colonel, who declares him a traitor and makes him a political prisoner and pariah in his own town.

Waiting for the Barbarians was first published in October of 1980, winning the James Tait Memorial Prize for that year, but it certainly seems to presage the United States’ two invasions of Iraq (1991 and 2003), especially the latter which, as we now know, was predicated on questionable intelligence about the Iraqi regime’s possession of or attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Coetzee’s use of nameless towns and characters only emphasizes its fabulist, universal nature; he’s discussing core features of leaders who operate without viable opposition and exposing how functionaries may work to provide the answers desired by their superiors rather than the correct or just ones. Coetzee exposes the worst of humanity here, but it’s all well-grounded in actual events that preceded the book’s writing, in dictatorships and democracies.

I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, considered one of the peak novels of anti-communist literature, back in 2008, but couldn’t connect with any of the characters and found the narrative to be distant and cold. Coetzee infuses the Magistrate with more complexity; he’s flawed, a little bigoted, or at least mistrustful, but also highly empathetic, and less disdainful of women than the government officials or soldiers who come to the village and do as they please. The submissive response of the residents of the town, who seemed to respect the Magistrate until the Empire turned on him and labeled him a traitor, mirrors the inaction of many residents of past aggressors, including the Axis powers of World War II, who stood by while their neighbors were arrested, tortured, or murdered. The Magistrate seems to hope that if he stands up for what he believes to be just, others will support him; instead, people he thought were his friends act as if he’s not even there, until later in the novel when the tides shift the other way again and it’s safer to come out on his side.

This is a very grim worldview, but it’s an accurate one, and the 37 years since the book’s publication haven’t dulled its (deckled) edges one iota. Leaders continue to provoke conflicts and pursue wars on spurious grounds to distract their citizens or stage some patriotism theater. Had Coetzee made the Magistrate more of a one-dimensional martyr, it would have come at a great cost to the story’s staying power, but because his protagonist is so thoroughly human, it seems like a story that, while depressingly real, will have staying power for decades to come.

Next up: Angela Carter’s Wise Children, also on that Guardian list.

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→ July 28, 2017
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After the Divorce.

Italian author Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, the second woman to win that honor, the second Italian to do so, and the first Italian prose writer to win it. (There have been 113 winners, six of them from Italy, but four of the winners won for poetry or drama.) Her work focused largely on portraits of regional, peasant life in her native Sardinia, a Mediterranean island that is an autonomous region within Italy, with its own indigenous language and unique history, and a relatively strong economy today that, prior to World War II, was poorer and more driven by agriculture and mining. Deledda’s works, including her 1902 novel After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle), tend to put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances so Deledda can display or criticize social mores, such as the economic disadvantage of being a woman in Italy at the center of this book.

Giovanna and Constantino are a young, happily married couple with an infant son whose unremarkable lives are shattered when Constantino is arrested for and convicted of the murder of his cruel, abusive uncle. A new law passed in Italy shortly after the trial allows a woman to divorce a husband who has been convicted of a crime and jailed, so Giovanna does so, under duress, and marries the neighboring landowner who has been lusting for her for years but whom she rejected prior to marrying Constantino. The marriage is a disaster, of course, and eventually the truth of the murder comes to light and Constantino is released to return to his village, where he and Giovanna begin an affair that leads, almost inevitably, to tragedy.

Although the end of After the Divorce doesn’t quite match the common ending of early novels on the same theme – Madame Bovary, The Awakening, and Anna Karenina all mine somewhat similar material – the novel is still at heart about how women of that era lacked economic power. When Constantino was jailed with no real hope of parole or acquittal, Giovanna has no way to feed herself or her child, and becomes a burden on her own money-obsessed mother.

Deledda never blames her protagonist, instead creating the framework of Shakespearean tragedies to put her core characters on a collision course with each other that you know will end badly for at least one of them. There’s no real way out of the mess short of someone dying; under the law, Giovanna is married to the vile neighbor, Brontu, who, along with his mother, treats her as a servant, and can’t divorce him to return to her first husband now that he’s free. Yet the culture of the time presented no avenue for her to earn any living, and the trial wiped out her family’s only source of income. It’s a feminist novel that predates most feminist literature; even The Awakening, which I think is one of the earliest examples of that genre, has a protagonist driven to infidelity by boredom (inflicted on her by a society that won’t let her do anything with her mind) rather than economic need. Deledda here seems to be describing an injustice of the time, one that might feel a little quaint today but was a real issue in much of Christendom before the post-World War II liberalization of laws around marriage and civil rights.

I’ve seen a few references to this book or Deledda in general as antecedents of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, but I didn’t see the similarity; Ferrante, who writes under a pseudonym and has avoided nearly all media, hasn’t mentioned that this was an influence, and other than the setting there doesn’t seem to be a common thread here. If you liked Ferrante’s novels, you could certainly give Deledda a spin, but I wouldn’t say liking one indicates that you’ll like the other.

Next up: I’ve finished Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, a Puliter winner, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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