Book Review: Michel Houellebecq - Serotonin

Serotonin is clearly a step down in ambition from Submission, and in many ways the grimmest of his works. Its theme - the uselessness of trying to revive the past to avoid facing down the present, or worse, the future - is delivered in a more constrained and less engaging manner than his other novels. Houellebecq gets his obligatory unhappy anhedonic author surrogate protagonist free from all his attachments quickly, only to have him stare blankly at fate over the course of the rest of the book. He puts in nods to contemporaneous social movements that just aren't as provocative as his other books, with rare exceptions. It's really bleak, a novel that perhaps could only have been written by an old man, with an overwhelming sense of numbness, exhaustion, and futility. I don't expect novelty from Houellebecq, exactly, but if you step back and look at his whole body of work, maybe it's easier to see how this particular iteration of his idées fixes - the erosion of communal attachment, the moral and spiritual void of Anglosphere capitalism, the dull horror of modernity, the pointlessness of traditionalism and nostalgia, the empty void of the future, the irresistibly obsessing but ultimately unfulfilling trap of sexual desire - is a perfunctory rehash, without the philosophical connections to life's struggles that made his earlier works so memorable and thought-provoking. By the end it's clear why he's written the novel this way, but that doesn't make it more satisfying.

You know the drill: protagonist Florent-Claude Labrouste doesn't like his cushy job, doesn't like his sexually adventurous girlfriend, and just plain doesn't like anything about life. He tries anti-depressants but they aren't really doing it for him, so rather than stay in his life and slowly suffocate, he cashes out his savings, lies to his boss about another job opportunity, and ghosts his girl to run off to a bucolic small-town nowheresville in order to do not much of anything. Flush with cash and freed of all responsibility, he stays in some hotels, reflects on the shabbiness of the much-vaunted but little-respected French countryside (it's always funny to me how unfond Houellebecq is of France), and then lodges with his old college friend Aymeric, a descendant of the Normans who's taken up the family business of farming on his inherited estate. The two have several discussions, informed by Houellecq's background in agronomy, about the seemingly irreversible economic decline of the idealized rural lifestyle due to the impersonal forces of globalization and European Union agricultural policy, which eventually leads Aymeric to participate in a sadly doomed protest against economic reforms that echoes the recent Yellow Vest protests that occurred just after this book was published.

Most importantly, while staying with Aymeric, Labrouste is overcome with regret at the long-ago collapse of his relationships with two women (melancholy Houellebecq is the best Houellebecq, he's able to perfectly capture the subtleties of mourning for things beyond recovery). He blames himself for these failures, but though his youthful romance with Kate has affected him deeply, it's his love affair with Camille that actually meant something profound to him. He becomes obsessed with the idea of reanimating their romance by murdering the child she now has and then "coincidentally" running into her, which would theoretically correct his mistakes and let him start anew by rebuilding what they once had. On the very cusp of going through with his deranged plan, as he has Camille's son in his rifle sight, he realizes, more out of despair than morality, how foolish, cruel, and most importantly futile this action would be. The past is dead, ultimately you have no one but yourself to blame for your failures, sometimes there is no fixing what's been broken, and there's truly no point in trying to either bring back what has ended or to farcically continue what isn't fulfilling. Even if you can't bear the present and have no hope for the future, you won't find any answers in reviving the past.

And that's what the book is about: coming to terms with your own failures, and the absence of second chances at some of the most important things in life. Serotonin is the chemical responsible for producing happiness, we are told, and once the narrator realizes that he's been reduced to artificially obtaining it from little white pills that will inevitably stop working someday, he's left with some grim realizations about what kind of life he can look forward to: "The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea." This is almost certainly indicative of Houellebecq's own life in some way (to a greater degree than as usual in his novels, anyway), especially because there's a lot of discussion towards the end about the relationship between art, particularly literature, and sex. Houellebecq has never had a high regard for his own profession, and in his trademark style of smut + cynicism has the definitive opinion that all of the high-minded ideals of the great novelists are worthless in the face of the logic of sexual desire, which is worth a lengthy quote:

For a long time I had planned to read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; I had a sense that it was a gloomy book, but that suited my situation and it was probably time. So I dived into it, at first with admiration, then with mounting reservations. Even though its range and ambitions were considerably greater, the ultimate meaning of the work was basically the same as Death in Venice. No more than that old imbecile Goethe (the German humanist with a Mediterranean inclination, one of the most sinister dotards in the whole of world literature), no more than his hero Aschenbach (broadly more sympathetic, however), Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann himself – and this was extremely serious – had been incapable of escaping the fascination of youth and beauty, which he had in the end placed above everything, above all intellectual and moral qualities, and in which, at the end of the day, he too, without the slightest restraint, had abjectly wallowed. So the whole of the world's culture was pointless – the whole of the world's culture provided no moral benefit and no advantage – because during those same years, exactly those same years, Marcel Proust, at the end of Time Regained, concluded with remarkable frankness that it was not only social relationships that supplied nothing substantial, friendships didn't either, they were quite simply a waste of time; and that what the writer needed was not intellectual conversations, contrary to popular belief, but 'light affairs with young girls in bloom'. At this stage of the argument, I am keen to replace 'young girls in bloom' with 'young wet pussies'; that would, it seems to me, contribute to the clarity of the debate without detracting from its poetry. (What could be more beautiful, more poetic, than a pussy that is starting to get wet? I ask you to think about that seriously before giving me an answer. A cock beginning its vertical ascent? There are arguments in favour. It all depends, like so many things in this world, on the sexual point of view that one adopts.)
Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, to return to my subject, might have had all the culture in the world, they might (in those impressive early years of the twentieth century, which summarised eight centuries and even a bit of European culture all by themselves) have been at the head of all the knowledge and intelligence in the world, they might respectively have represented the peak of French and German civilisation – that is to say, the most brilliant, the most profound and the most refined cultures of their time – but they were at the mercy of, and ready to prostrate themselves before, any wet young pussy or any valiantly upright cock – according to their personal preferences, Thomas Mann remaining undecided in this respect, and Proust being somewhat vague as well. The end of The Magic Mountain was thus even sadder than a first reading suggested; it didn't just signify, with the two highest civilisations of the day rushing, in 1914, into a war as absurd as it was bloody, the failure of the very idea of European culture; it signified the final victory of animal attraction, the definitive end of all civilisation and of all culture. A Lolita could have made Thomas Mann lose his marbles; Marcel Proust would have crushed on Rihanna; these two authors, the crowns of their respective literary cultures, were not, to put it another way, honourable men, and we would have had to go further back, probably to the start of the nineteenth century, to the days of early Romanticism, to breathe a healthier and a purer air."

The entire armature of theory around the production, consumption, and analysis of literature is wrongheaded, openly meaningless and beside the point. This makes it perhaps a bit easier to understand certain artistic choices that Houellebecq has made here, as it's difficult to actually internalize this profound point and then blithely continue to write afterwards. There is a glancing reference to Gogol's superb novel Dead Souls, which doesn't appear to mean anything, but in my mind the true reference point is Camus, who goes unmentioned, even though the entire novel can be seen as a dramatization of Camus' famous statement in The Myth of Sisyphus that the question of suicide was the only real philosophical problem that existed.

Houellebecq's way of approaching this issue almost couldn't be more different than that of Camus - Camus' idea of a shock to the conscience leaned more to the purposeless murder in The Stranger than to the stupid bestiality and pedophilia references here - but the protagonist's quest for a final answer to himself about what makes life worth continuing is precisely in that vein. Houellebecq has a much more dismal conclusion, however. One of the more interesting aspects of Submission was the main character's fruitless attempts to find answers in Christianity, under the theory that no amount of material comfort can soothe a spiritual ache. Though that novel definitively concluded that there was nothing there, here Houellebecq concludes with a poignant reminder in the language of the New Testament that unhappiness is often chosen; people are entirely capable of pursuing the most self-destructive paths with fervor and aplomb, and that ultimately the true source of our dissatisfaction in a universe overflowing with wonder lies in the mirror:

God takes care of us; he thinks of us every minute, and he gives us instructions that are sometimes very precise. Those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away – those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature, our status as simple primates – are extremely clear signs.
And today I understand Christ's point of view and his repeated horror at the hardening of people's hearts: all of these things are signs, and they don't realize it. Must I really, on top of everything, give my life for these wretches? Do I really have to be explicit on that point?
Apparently so.

Book Review: Don DeLillo - White Noise

I've had a deep ambivalence towards DeLillo's goofy writing style in the past; his silly dialogue, wacky characters, and shaggy-dog plots work well when they work, but they come off as boring and frustrating when they don't (I liked Mao II but gave up partway through The Names). Fortunately White Noise makes all of those elements work fairly well, and even DeLillo's inexplicable addiction to bizarrely precocious Woke Toddler child characters can't ruin what turns out to be a fairly thoughtful exploration of mortality, family, and consumerism in an unstable modern world. White Noise was tagged with the infamous "postmodern" label when it came out in 1985, but from nearly 35 years later, it doesn't feel nearly as weighty/experimental/metafictional/revelatory as what I usually think of as postmodern novels. Instead it feels more like a humble comic novel with some serious bits rather than as a serious novel with jokes, and consequently it stays on the safe side of the implausible/insufferable chasm that it turns out DeLillo was working in before most other writers. His offhand jokes about doing things purely to be seen doing them are some of the best writing I've seen from him, and it was truly an unhappy realization to see how accurately DeLillo's parody America resembles what's now the real thing.

The premise is pretty funny: protagonist Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler Studies in an invented Midwestern college town along the lines of Ames or Champaign-Urbana. He doesn't even speak German at first, instead concealing his utter academic uselessness behind hilarious pyrotechnic pomposity whenever he's forced to do anything that resembles teaching. This sort of light-hearted sendup of professorship was probably done better by Nabokov in Pale Fire but is still funny here, even if the fact that real-life universities have made amusingly specialized liberal arts positions like this essentially extinct renders this premise a parody from another era. Gladney and his family evacuate their town when a chemical accident, the Airborne Toxic Event, temporarily engulfs the town, and upon their return he has to confront his own changed sense of mortality, as well as that of his family, since he discovers that his wife has begun an affair to gain access to a drug that helps her cope with her fear of death. After an extended walk-and-talk with a colleague about whether he's at heart "a killer or dier", Gladney attempts to murder the other man, but changes his mind at the last minute. The novel ends with an examination of the supermarket and its emotional centrality to the population of the town.

My main complaint about Don DeLillo's writing style was that it seemed like he wrote himself out of anything really affecting. Coming into White Noise, I felt that his characters were so artificial, with such relentlessly absurd dialogue and odd worldviews, that whenever he tried to drop in "profound" observations into their speech or as a description of a character action it mostly comes off as annoying. I was concerned at why what's so clearly supposed to be a lighthearted, easygoing style wasn't working for me, until I realized that he was just ahead of his time. He perfectly predicted that awful snappy banter dialogue pattern like in Marvel movies where what's clearly supposed to be a meaningful moment is immediately drained of all gravity by some stupid snarky quip and you're onto the next scene before there's a risk of anything actually mattering to the characters. It's aggravating, but it's supposed to be that way.

That said, I still had to actually read this stuff, and it's inarguable that DeLillo isn't the prose stylist that other comic authors are, and often seems to genuinely be trying too hard to be funny when a more naturalistic approach might have worked out better. Sometimes he will have good lines like "Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level" or that "The twentieth century is all about people going into hiding even when no one is looking for them", but you have to work through a lot of zany chaff to get there. Luckily not all of White Noise is afflicted in this way, and the meandering puffery that Gladney spouts off is funny when he does it, it's just when it's in the mouth of his son Heinrich that it's not so charming. Thomas Pynchon, who DeLillo is often compared to, had a thoughtful take on this exact thing in the Introduction to Slow Learner, his collection of early short stories:

At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the defective way in which my narrator, almost but not quite me, deals with the subject of death. When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death - how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate.

I think this is true, and seen in that light, the adamantine goofiness every character has is not so bad, in fact it's almost endearing, as they infodump, dodge, and avoid real matters when speaking to each other in just the way that every character in most mass-market entertainment does these days. Likewise, one thing I will give DeLillo is that his depictions of celebrity/voyeur/parasocial culture are not just vivid but incredibly prescient. "The most photographed barn in America" that people drive out of their way simply to photograph and never actually see is a brilliant representation of the increasingly engineered tendency to perform activities just for the sake of being seen. It wasn't new even in the 80s to ponder how many people (yourself included) have documented something without ever actually looking at or enjoying the ostensible subject, which is not even the "real" subject anyway, but rarely have I seen it captured so pithily as DeLillo does here.

There's a little riff on California and natural disasters that I swear must be exactly how Donald Trump watched their recent wildfires:

"We're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information."
"It's obvious," Lasher said. A slight man with a taut face and slicked-back hair.
"The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."
Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.
"Japan is pretty good for disaster footage," Alfonse said. "India remains largely untapped. They have tremendous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious strife, train wrecks, boat sinkings, et cetera. But their disasters tend to go unrecorded. Three lines in the newspaper. No film footage, no satellite hookup. This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we're not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They're standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny."

It's really disturbing to recognize the President of the United States in a discussion where one of the characters is a Professor of Hitler Studies, and even more dispiriting to remember that Trump's victory depended on winning the votes of exactly the Midwestern consumerism-addled dimwits that populate this novel, but somehow it seems fitting that reality has only recently caught up to the absurd, too-stupid-to-be-real comedy of the past. Oh boy.

Book Review: Upton Sinclair - Oil!

The Jungle will always be Sinclair's most acclaimed work, and rightly so given its impact, but I believe that Oil! has just as much relevance to contemporary life, if not more so, and deserves to be as well-known as its more venerable sibling even if it did not spur the same reforms of the oil industry that The Jungle did for food preparation and handling. I was spurred to read it after a rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the novel is so different from, and more complex than, the film adaptation that they probably should not be considered strictly related. Anderson's film is a small, close study, with Daniel Day-Lewis' oil tycoon patriarch a cryptic, amoral madman, whereas Sinclair's sprawling epic of ambition and capitalism has the son as its vastly subtler and more complex protagonist, arguing for and against several political philosophies against the backdrop of World War 1, the Teapot Dome scandal, evangelical religious revivalism, the film industry, and the generally explosive growth of Southern California. As always with books vs movie questions, one should decide how much the snappier running time and enhanced aesthetic experience of a film outweighs the greater richness and depth of a novel, but there is so much great stuff in Oil! that isn't the film that it deserves to be experienced as its own masterwork, particularly its exploration of how internal leftist debates interact with public opinion and the forces of big business.

In fairness to Anderson, ones of Sinclair's weaknesses as an author is that it can be difficult to tell his digressions from his details, which is probably why the movie really only uses the plot from about the first 100 pages and then does its own thing. The very first chapter is a lengthy, floridly overwritten dramatization of J. Arnold Ross Sr. and Jr. driving into California to investigate some oil leases, but the story picks up rapidly and Senior, a small-time oilman, begins gradually making it big through smart investments and some cunning. He's a tough negotiator, and not averse to greasing the palms of public officials when necessary, but he's not at all like his movie depiction; he's always fair to his workers and generally supportive though skeptical of his son's ideological meanderings. His son, nicknamed Bunny, is the real main character, and over the course of the book he loyally defends his father's line of work to the various leftists and socialists he encounters as he gets continually more and more involved in the world of radical politics, especially after he meets Paul Watkins, a tough-minded worker, and his brother Eli, a religious charlatan (both played by Paul Dano in the movie). Like any good class traitor, Bunny feels guilty about the increasing wealth and privilege he accumulates as his father's business continues to expand, but that doesn't stop him from dating actresses and "reluctantly" enjoying the F. Scott Fitzgerald high society lifestyle while at the same time attempting to use his wealth for good. Eventually the brutal repression of socialists and anarchists after World War 1 in the Palmer Raids leads to Paul's being beaten to death at the hands of the authorities, and the novel ends with a solemn resignation at the unstoppable power of the impersonal capitalist juggernaut.

What's interesting is that the novel is for the most part quite nuanced and almost sympathetic in its explorations of industry and power. The Jungle, written 20 years before, was much more stridently anti-capitalist, but Oil! portrays the the struggle between large businesses and small for market share with real enthusiasm, and Sinclair openly admires the mix of guile, dedication, and vision it takes for an entrepreneur to grow from a small operator to a major political player. Ross and his operation in "Beach City" is an only barely fictionalized depiction of the real-life Edward Doheny's development of Huntington Beach in Orange County, and Sinclair's melancholy illustration of all levels of government as corrupt, feckless, and reactionary fits into a long tradition of California-as-American-microcosm, like in Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, etc. At various points Bunny attempts to stand up to Vernon Roscoe, his father's much more ruthless business partner and the bad cop of capitalism to his father's good cop, and Roscoe's powerful defenses of the inexorable logic of capitalism are right in line with the famous monologues in Wall Street, Other People's Money, etc. By the end of the book the triumph of capitalism is taken as practically unavoidable, but at many points the characters are given room to portray this as an actual good thing, which Sinclair did not do in The Jungle. The oil industry has many casualties over the course of the novel, but Sinclair leaves it up to the reader to picture what if anything would change under a socialist system. With the hindsight of a hundred years, we can see that real-life socialist countries don't seem to have discovered a clearly superior method for resource extraction, but that doesn't make the imperial cruelty of the oil barons at the incredibly modest demands of the workers for simple wage increases any easier to swallow.

It's notable that all of the radicals Bunny encounters are well-meaning but ultimately doomed, whether by pointless factionalism, naivete, or government hostility via strike-breaking and state-sanctioned brutality. Sinclair spends a good deal of time on how the cannibalistic disputes between the various flavors of socialists, communists, anarchists, and leftists were unavoidable but ultimately meaningless, as the real powers operated with impunity on a plane far above them, and one does not have to think very hard to see how the equivalent forces of oligarchy ensure that the same system operates today. I was reminded of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, set a decade later, and how how liberal reformers in the FDR administration defused much of this kind of radical pressure with pro-union policy as part of the New Deal, but Sinclair can't bring himself to write anything close to the redemptive ending that Steinbeck was so fond of, and Paul's ultimate death at the hands of an anti-union goon squad is nothing but a fatalistic reminder of the power of unchecked greed. Even worse, Eli is able to cynically use his brother's death to advance his immense evangelist movement, making one long for the violent comeuppance Anderson gave him in the film. And even though Bunny and his new wife Rachel dedicate his inheritance to establishing institutions of reform, Sinclair doesn't have any illusions that they will matter greatly; all of the antagonists (and even Bunny's father) not only escape any consequences for their corruption in the Teapot Dome scandal, they successfully install Coolidge as president in a landslide.

Since this is historical fiction, it's easy to take the gloomy irrelevance of the American socialist movement as inevitable (though it is curious that Eugene Debs' surprisingly successful campaigns for president go unmentioned during the discussions about the viability of electoralism), I think the book raises a lot of excellent questions about how leftists should proceed when history is in motion. It goes without saying that none of the warmongering, nativist, plutocratic, petroleum-obsessed, reactionary impulses on display in the novel have left the American political landscape, yet it remains to be seen whether the current resurgence of socialism in the US is authentic or permanent. Oil! vastly improves on There Will Be Blood in its understand of how systems are far more powerful than individual men and women, and though Sinclair's own experience with electoral politics - he ran for governor of California less than a decade after Oil! was published and was crushed - does not provide a particularly inspiring example of how to challenge entrenched interests, perhaps now that even greater challenges like climate change are no longer quite so ignorable, a politics of kindness will be more successful now than it was back in his era.

Book Review: Yasmine Seale - Aladdin

Aladdin was perhaps one of the very first genuinely international cross-cultural fairytales, a collaboration between the Syrian Hanna Diyab and the Frenchman Antoine Galland, who tucked it as well as the similarly new stories of Ali Baba and Sinbad into his translation of the Thousand and One Nights, which introduced that famous collection of tales to the western world. There's some dispute over exactly how much each contributed to the final product, but it seems reasonable to infer that Diyab provided the basic narrative and Galland polished it up somewhat for his European readers. Until I read this new translation of the original French text, I'd only known Aladdin via the 1992 Disney children's movie, so the differences were eye-opening. I've been as critical as anyone of "Disneyification", a vague yet useful term that I think we all understand generally means a smoothing, sugaring, simplifying approach to the often-grim fairytales of the past, yet I have to say that, much as I hate to admit it, I honestly believe that Disney improved somewhat on the source material, though I immediately saw why it's endured for so long.

The main adventure narrative of the original is still flawless and vivid, but enough of the details are off to make the original fall a bit flat to the modern reader:

• It claims to be set in China although there is absolutely nothing Chinese about the setting, it's clearly an Arabic Middle Eastern milieu
• There's both the familiar magic lamp and a magic ring, which feels narratively redundant, magic item-wise
• The genie can grant unlimited wishes, which lacks the creative tension of the "3 wishes" constraint
• The princess Badroulbadour is generally a more boring and limited character than Jasmine is, as was the fashion at the time, although she does eventually poison the evil magician to death, which is cool
• The main character is kind of an unlikable dolt, whose only redeeming quality is that he gives away a ton of money once he finds the lamp, although there's predictably no exploration of if he considered actually permanently curing poverty, or if unlimited magic money would eventually turn the kingdom into a proto-petrostate via the Dutch disease
• The grand vizier is a much more sympathetic character, as he's understandably upset at how Aladdin has destroyed his son's seemingly perfectly happy betrothal to the princess out of nowhere
• The magician (who is combined in Disney's version with the grand vizier to form the Jafar character) has a brother for some reason, who attempts to take his revenge after the princess' murder via the classic ruse of cross-dressing as an old woman, a plot device I truly hope never vanishes from literature

I also unexpectedly found myself missing the perhaps naive but generally palatable Disney morals, because as written, the story is like an inferior Charles Dickens or Horatio Alger novel: after having spent his youth failing to learn a useful trade or developing any admirable character traits at all, Aladdin uses his newfound magic to frighten off the grand vizier's seemingly normal son, and the narrative assumes that this shortcut is fine and that the princess will be happy with him instead when he simply buys his way into her heart with copious amounts of genie-delivered treasures. How romantic! It's thus a bit harder to empathize with him or the princess than, say, with Odysseus, who at least has some entertaining personal qualities to go along with his roguishness. Aladdin is of course much shorter than the Odyssey and therefore more limited in how sympathetic its characters can become over just a few brief chapters, but as weird as it might seem, it's possible that modern fairytales might actually have improved somewhat on their predecessors, at least in terms of delivering morals more complex than "don't trust mysterious strangers bearing bargains that seem too good to be true" or other Brothers Grimm-type warnings. Disney does generally know what they're doing.

That being said, if we take it for granted that this is before anti-heroes gained real popularity, and that we are therefore supposed to closely relate to an oafish peasant enjoying a windfall he doesn't deserve, Aladdin's lack of a distinct personality might thus make him easier for 18th century European readers to project themselves onto him, and therefore enjoy his rags to riches victory. It's entirely possible that the Disney version would have been received very poorly back then; perhaps contemporary audiences would have revolted at an unrealistically liberated Jasmine, or been baffled by an Aladdin who voluntarily embraced his street rat upbringing rather than transform into a zillionaire prince as quickly as humanly possible (and to be fair, many modern readers might have this attitude as well). Seale's decision to stick closely to a distinctive "fairytale-ish" tone throughout is therefore quite useful in providing some distance to the story, and serves as a good reminder that truly great stories often find themselves adapting in the telling to their time and place, revealing different facets according to the needs of the audience. I still read the whole thing in one sitting.

Book Review: Jin Yong - Legends of the Condor Heroes Vol. 1

This is the first volume of one of the most popular Chinese martial arts novel series ever written, and it reads like an excellent novelization of a kung fu film, although of course it's really the other way around given how influential this series has been on depictions of martial arts in all forms of media ever since it was first published in the 50s. If you've ever seen a kung fu movie, chances are it borrows heavily from Yong's work in tone, setting, or spirit. Naturally wuxia/martial arts novels have had a long tradition dating back centuries before these books were written (in a pleasing fan-fiction-y touch it's revealed that the protagonist Guo Jing is a distant descendant of one of the characters in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Novels), but Yong's work is fully its own despite inhabiting the well-trodden, familiar universe of medieval China. Yong evidently didn't set out to reinvent the wheel in terms of wuxia tropes, but in much the same way that a genre classic like Harry Potter outshone a whole host of similar young wizard adventure novels by being the best version of that genre, Yong's work hits the optimal sweet spot of family drama, political turmoil, patriotism, and of course plenty of incredibly-named kung fu action.

Sometimes it occurs to me to describe novels as "comic-book-ish". Even the most resolutely naturalistic novels involve a certain amount of exaggeration and poetic license, but there's a particular way of simplifying the messiness of reality while simultaneously presenting complicated narratives with exaggerated human nature and (especially) physical traits that some authors use in their works which reminds me of comic books. Stories of noble, innocent heroes with mysterious dramatic backgrounds fighting sinister, irredeemable villains for life and death stakes while continuously threatened with various forms of supernatural peril will always be popular no matter the delivery format, and this fits that archetype to a T. Guo Jing is pure of heart but a little dim, naturally clumsy but willing to train hard, and as such practically the ideal protagonist, especially once the Seven Freaks begin to train him in the martial arts, each move more hilariously named than the last. The novel's setting during the Song Dynasty's struggles with the Jurchens on one hand and the Mongols on the other (a young, up-and-coming Genghis Khan is a major and sympathetic main character) also lends itself well to action, as the horrors unleashed by the collapse of central authority and the evils of foreign domination have been staples in Chinese fiction since forever. There's also plenty of humor, as the plot is full of farcical contrivances (everyone is related to someone else, there's tons of convenient coincidences, many scenes are done with a perfect comic sensibility). This volume ends on a cliffhanger, after Guo Jing has just discovered important details about his heritage, and even though I've seen some complaints about the translation, I found this a whole lot of fun.

Book Review: David Heymann - My Beautiful City Austin

A loosely-connected collection of short stories that perfectly conveys the fun, relaxed, not-overly-driven spirit of the idealized Austin that seems lodged permanently in our memories of our twenties. Though Heymann swears that the characters in the novel are not drawn directly from his own life, it's obvious that the rich detail here, down to specific species of trees in clients' yards, comes from having spent a good amount of time marinating in the town (like the protagonist, he's been a "practicing" architect in Austin since the mid-80s). My favorite story was "Keeping Austin Weird", where the main character solves an oak-poisoning incident on the site of one of his clients' properties with the help of an arborist whose personal life is straight out of a letter to Penthouse; it mixed thoughtful architectural discussion with barbecue ("There are a series of barbecue joints positioned like Stations of the Cross in a ring of towns around Austin"), serendipitous encounters, and a satisfyingly salacious yarn. But each of the other six stories are also a pleasure to read, and properly appreciative of the way that people balance their inner and outer lives. There's not a higher moral here, just thoughtful appreciations of how pleasant it is to while away the hours in a city with seemingly limitless opportunities to let time float peaceably downstream.

Book Review: Anton Chekhov - Five Plays

Chekhov is perhaps the most dedicated chronicler of unhappy, dissolute minor aristocrats there's ever been. The five major four-act plays selected here examine in grim detail the joyless lives of cash-strapped gentry with their best days behind them, forced to pawn off what's most dear to them merely to preserve a life that, on reflection, hasn't been worth much to anyone anyway. Chekhov's work is "funny" in that same melancholy way that Kafka's oeuvre strikes a certain bleak-minded kind of person as funny, so in striking contrast to Gogol's weirdly cheerful absurdity, the "comedy" involves characters being required to continually revise their expectations of life downwards, the previously fixed emotional scaffolding supporting their cherished conceptions of life getting knocked out bit by bit, until their lives collapse into lovesickness or destitution or terminal misery or all of the above. Midway through Uncle Vanya, an odd comparison struck me: Chekhov's plays are like a gloomier, more realistic Seinfeld, bone-dry modernist studies of small people in ill-fitting clothing too big for them, going through the motions of their meaningless lives with only themselves to blame. Unlike the harmless slapstick of a a sitcom though, Chekhov thoughtfully includes murder or suicide at the end to punctuate the unavoidable futility of everyone's existences, so there's that.

The perennial downside of reading plays instead of seeing them is that you lose the different emotional valences that performers bring out of the text; you might as well read an opera's sheet music instead of hear it, or judge a movie by its script alone. Chekhov worked very closely with Konstantin Stanislavski, the inventor of "method acting", on these plays, so I can only imagine the contrast between the somber action and the intense performances in a contemporary production. Reading all these plays back to back is a bit bleak, although it must be said that there's a sparse perfection to the construction of the scenes and flow to the dialogue that's impressive even if you feel the need to detox with some lighthearted farces afterwards. Chekhov keeps his characters on a tight leash for the most part, only occasionally letting their frustrations loose in volcanic monologues. One can't help but sympathize with Ivanov, Triplev, Astrov, Vershinin, or Trofimov's agonizing, and yet their passionate declamations are typically dismissed instantly by their loved ones. It's a great example of theater as tempo and cumulative effect, and although he does occasionally dip into the dangerous waters of metafiction, like the play-within-a-play in The Seagull, he always returns from his abstractions to the hard facts of his characters' lives. Perhaps all our most cherished possessions, experiences, and even thoughts themselves are like cherry orchards, fated to be consigned to oblivion in the end; or perhaps I just need a refreshing dose of Molière.

Book Review: Sally Rooney - Normal People

What a thoughtful, infuriating, nuanced little novel. Even though I'm not predisposed to read a lot of stories about on-again, off-again teenage romances, the spectacle of these sympathetic, all-too-relatable characters making important life decisions based on poorly-understood or half-admitted emotional impulses really hit home. In a plain, unadorned language Rooney portrays many indelible moments of two young people struggling desperately to communicate something important to each other, failing because of the wrong phrasing, or an ill-timed silence, leading to them making seemingly irrevocable choices for reasons as unnecessary as they were inevitable. I couldn't count the number of times I wanted to shake some sense into both of them, yet Rooney so skillfully conveys how their presence in each other's lives is simultaneously irreplacable and unsustainable that each stage in their relationship had its own irrefutable logic. The way that crucial events were often conveyed through gaps and absences as much as by visible action made the open ending fully appropriate if not completely satisfying. Even if you thought these characters should have broken up with each other by the end of the first chapter, you're still pulling for them, in a way, all through to the end.

I started off thinking it was something like a "YA novel for adults", if that makes sense, but by the end I had almost forgotten even having that opinion. In fairness to myself, its characters and initial setting are practically archetypal for the YA genre: Marianne is a rich kid from an unpleasant and abusive family, and her high school classmate Connell is a poor kid whose mother Lorraine works as a housekeeper in Marianne's family's house in the tiny fictional town of Carricklea, out west in the Irish sticks near Sligo. They're drawn together by their shared feelings of being outsiders, but because Marianne's a social pariah, her relationship with Connell, a standoffish but generally well-liked football star, has to be kept under wraps. They mutually decide that they shouldn't be seen in public together, and the effects of this essential status ambiguity, and resulting tension between their public and private relationships, drives each scene in the book as they then go on to attend the same university in Dublin, intermittently get "back together" and break up to see other people, and gradually wander down their respective life paths. The novel ends four years later with the two discussing whether Connell should pursue a job opportunity in America, while they obliquely discuss if their meaning to each other - whatever that is or has been, exactly - would still endure after a year's separation.

This doesn't sound like a particularly unique premise, and Rooney's fairly straightforward prose style means that there aren't too many arresting sentences or novel imagery. But what made this such a good novel to me was in how Rooney showed off Marianne and Connell's characters through their actions, both within the scenes and between them. That they have a place in each other's heart isn't in question, but it's difficult to say if their periodically recurring contact with each other is healthy or not, whatever that means, or if all their angst was a waste of time. In reading other reviews of the book I kept seeing Rooney referred to as a "Millennial author". I find that label debatable, in part because I don't think there's too much in here that couldn't be fairly transposed to a different time or place: yes, the characters text and use Skype, but even the "orbiting" concept that you sometimes read thinkpieces about, a continuous half-presence theoretically enabled by that same technology, has also been fairly common via one method or another since forever. Even if there are minor details peculiar to the 21st century, all that they really mean is that Rooney using contemporary materials for her exploration of ambiguity, which is perhaps more common than in the past but is hardly unique to us. When have people ever NOT struggled with the disease of wanting to know the "real" basis for their emotions, or chased endless tests of fidelity which themselves might end up causing that thing to evaporate permanently?

One of the most crucial episodes of ambiguity that stood out to me was in the September 2012 chapter, about halfway through the novel, after they've both begun going to college. Connell's working-class background has been a constant source of worry for him, as it is for most non-wealthy people, and the fact that Marianne comes from wealth is a fact he can't get out of his mind, even though he "of course" knows she would never draw on it except to help him. He discovers that his hours at his job will be cut at the end of the school year, which means the place he's been living at while in school won't be affordable anymore, which means he would have to move home for the summer. The obvious solution is simply to move into Marianne's fully paid-for apartment, which would save him from paying rent at all, and also be an expression of permanence in a relationship that has sorely lacked it. Even if this would be an acknowledgement of his dependence on her, well... isn't he? Emotionally, if not financially, of course he already is, and from the reader's perspective we know that the last thing in the world she would want is to hold their class difference over his head. But this emotionally fraught conversation doesn't go so well:

Eventually he said: Hey, listen. By the way. It looks like I won't be able to pay rent up here this summer. Marianne looked up from her coffee and said flatly: What?
Yeah, he said. I'm going to have to move out of Niall's place.
When? said Marianne.
Pretty soon. Next week maybe.
Her face hardened, without displaying any particular emotion. Oh, she said. You'll be going home, then.
He rubbed at his breastbone then, feeling short of breath. Looks like it, yeah, he said.
She nodded, raised her eyebrows briefly and then lowered them again, and stared down into her cup of coffee. Well, she said. You'll be back in September, I assume.
His eyes were hurting and he closed them. He couldn't understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately. He contemplated putting his face down on the table and just crying like a child.

This total mess of an important moment, where a Rubicon is crossed almost accidentally and unwillingly, is told via flashback; each of them has moved on (though not really), and to be honest it seemed like the best move for them was to stop spending time together entirely, despite their obvious affection for each other. Our time on this earth is limited, and a relationship doesn't have to be a complete failure for it to not pass a completely sensible cost-benefit test. Imaginary problems can become real problems, via action or inaction, and once they're manifest they will have to be dealt with one way or another. But though the reader might be tempted to conclude that that was that, they keep managing to learn the wrong lessons, if you can call them that, from their never-quite-permanent flings, and despite their inability to truly commit to each other, their relationships with other people somehow never quite pan out.

Speaking of which, while some of their other partners seem fine, some of them do not. Sexual compatibility in particular is important, as in real life, and Marianne's interest in submission leads her to some uncomfortable places, even with Connell, who's reluctant to play dominant with her in the way she seems to want. One of the most discomfiting scenes in the novel takes place in January 2013 with Jamie, a similarly rich kid she's been seeing for a few weeks. Shortly before what's essentially a domestic violence scene, Marianne reflects on herself:

Early in their relationship, without any apparent forethought, she told him she was 'a submissive'. She was surprised even hearing herself say it: maybe she did it to shock him. What do you mean? he asked. Feeling worldly, she replied: You know, I like guys to hurt me. After that he started to tie her up and beat her with various objects. When she thinks about how little she respects him, she feels disgusting and begins to hate herself, and these feelings trigger in her an overwhelming desire to be subjugated and in a way broken. When it happens her brain simply goes empty, like a room with the light turned off, and she shudders into orgasm without any perceptible joy. Then it begins again.

I don't have any comment on how Rooney seems to tie Marianne's tendencies to her unhappy family life, but it should prompt some reflection on how we all relate to our own needs and desires. Something similar happens again in December 2013, where Lukas, the guy she's been seeing, wants to tie her up, but he does it in a way that she violently rejects: "Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he's acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake." It's hard to know how to express ourselves, but just before that, Marianne has made an interesting observation on how, despite the fact that we should know better, we associate a good sense of taste in someone with their potential goodness overall, and how often the two can be jarringly unrelated in reality:

There's a mattress in the corner of the studio, where Lukas sleeps. The windows are very tall and run almost to the floor, with blinds and thin trailing curtains. Various unrelated items are dotted around the room: several large potted plants, stacks of atlases, a bicycle wheel. This array impressed Marianne initially, but Lukas later explained he had gathered the items intentionally for a shoot, which made them seem artificial to her. Everything is an effect with you, Marianne told him once. He took this as a compliment about his art. He does have immaculate taste. He's sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.

It's an often hard-won insight that good taste doesn't make a good person (and perhaps the inverse, that bad taste isn't so dispositive), but, as always, the questions remains of what then really does make for something lasting. And so when it comes to the ending, where Marianne encourages Connell to go to the United States for a year, it was a real question for me of whether or not I found this romantic or not:

You know I love you, says Connell. I'm never going to feel the same way for someone else.
She nods, okay. He's telling the truth.
To be honest, I don't know what to do, he says. Say you want me to stay and I will.
She closes her eyes. He probably won't come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They've done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I'll always be here. You know that.

Does that promise represent a failure to really learn from the past, a successful preservation of something vital, or something else? The lessons that we learn from our relationships aren't always the right ones, or even the ones we think we learn at the time. Both characters have grown and changed over the course of the novel, and yet their feelings for one another have, improbably, managed to remain equal in intensity if not identical in form to what they felt four years ago. At one point Marianne reflects that "Dwelling on the sight of Connell's face always gives Marianne a certain pleasure, which can be inflected with any number of other feelings depending on the minute interplay of conversation and mood. His appearance is like a favourite piece of music to her, sounding a little different each time she hears it." While all truly deep relationships represent a polyphony of sentiments, repeated chords of joyful touch, and enough syncopated interactions to retain our fascination, it's really the coda that truly determines our ultimate satisfaction. In that light, perhaps a successful relationship is just one that you don't want to end, and even if repetition of the last movement isn't quite as satisfying as a progression into new territory, as long as each spin uncovers new resonances the composer will have done their job, no matter if you've paused to listen to something else in between. A cherished album never truly relinquishes its hold, and perhaps it isn't always a bad thing to stick with one, filler tracks and all.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 2

This second volume of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, covering chapters 33 to 63, was just as awesome as the first. The breathlless pace of the action seems to move faster than the story, as each chapter is still crammed with detail, and so it's often hard to judge how much time is passing within or between scenes, but the expansion of the storyline to include the real beginnings of the infamous division into three kingdoms unfolds in a logical and seemingly inevitable way, one stratagem, double-cross, and blood oath at a time. Despite the inclusion of the most epic battles yet, it's a study in decision and indecision as well, as more powerful warlords like Liu Biao and Sun Quan risk repeating the fate of Yuan Shao in the face of Cao Cao's relentless ambition. It starts off with Cao Cao consolidating the north, his son Cao Pi marrying Yuan Shao's widow Lady Zhen, and ends with Liu Bei riding off west into the Riverlands to found his own kingdom, but there's seemingly entire books in between.

This volume made me think more about the problem of leadership, specifically of how the characters attempt to enforce or encourage loyalty. This has been one of the underlying themes of the book from the very beginning, of course, but it's in this stretch of the story that the Emperor fades into the background and the three kingdoms begin to solidify, and loyalty is no less important in the destruction of one regime than in the creation of another. In an environment like the collapse of the Han dynasty, where there's a nominally all-powerful Emperor but in practice a nearly unlimited amount of autonomy for essentially independent petty warlords, individuals are confronted by an extra layer of moral choice that informs their actions. How should one balance allegiance to the sovereign with filial duties, and obedience to liege lords against an oath sworn to brothers? Watching the many characters grapple with their moral compasses in the face of all the momentous decisions they make in life-or-death situations each chapter is a real pleasure, even if they're unsure of the right course themselves, and even through Luo's determined editorializing between the Big Two. Liu Bei, the hero who, we're continually told, draws men to him through his virtuous nature and noble deeds, has the same problem of winning his own place in the world as his duplicitous antagonist Cao Cao, who's universally derided as a crafty yet corrosive force, yet it's often difficult to see a principled difference between them.

For example, towards the end of the volume, at a crucial moment in the balance of power between the north and the south, Zhang Song travels to Cao Cao near the end to offer him the vitally strategic area of the Riverlands, but he gives up because they're each too stubborn and prideful, and he simply offers the territory to Liu Bei instead. This momentous decision is presented as right and proper, a result of the magnetic attraction of Liu Bei and repulsion of Cao Cao, yet it's not so different than Pang Tong's disagreement and reconciliation with Zhang Fei, and in fact it's also quite similar to the many minor instances where a governor will surrender a town, or a general will defect at the end of a battle, and the decision to reward or execute them for their shift in fealty seems arbitrary rather than appropriate. There's probably literature out there on how Confucianist or Legalist ethics, or prestige and dominance leadership styles, could be formulated in game-theoretic terms, and how each individual conundrum of whether to keep an oath or do the most expedient thing fits into a coherent framework of morality; ultimately I decided to just sit back and enjoy my suspense and outrage cycles as the two decided whether the latest hapless provincial commander would be rewarded for switching sides or beheaded for his treachery as the circumstances above and beyond him shifted.

The real breakout star of this volume isn't Liu Bei or Cao Cao, however, but Kongming. The legends of his sagacity are so great that Liu Bei travels three times to convince him to come work for him, to the consternation of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, whose jealousy at Kongming seeming to supplant them in Liu Bei's heart is a nice bit of character development. And the legends are true! If ever there was a character calculated to delight and entertain audiences, it would be the Sleeping Dragon, an impossibly clever advisor who can concoct ruses subtle enough to fool even Cao Cao and has a handy ability to summon up powerful winds to aid in battle. My favorite example of his ridiculous skill was the scene where Sun Quan's henchman Zhou Yu wants to offer Liu Bei a sham marriage to Lady Sun in order to take him hostage and force him to surrender the strategic province of Jingzhou, which Liu Bei was dragging his heels on relinquishing after the death of his kinsman Liu Biao. This is a dangerous trip for Liu Bei, but no worry: Kongming not only arranges matters so that Liu Bei keeps Jingzhou, but that he successfully marries Lady Sun for real, via the hilarious mechanism of literally giving general Zhao Zilong three sacks with instructions to open each one at the right time to get Liu Bei out of each of Zhou Yu's traps. The buddy comedy friendship between Kongming and fellow wizard Pang Tong is also a real highlight, as each occasionally drops in to make fun of the other before revealing their latest scheme.

Of course, Kongming is far more famous for his deceptive prowess at the Battle of Red Cliffs, which takes up a substantial portion of this volume. Once again I was left marveling at the skillful pacing and ingenious plotting: almost more space is devoted to the feints, deceptions, and betrayals leading up to the battle than to the action itself, and yet as Cao Cao's ill-fated expedition to conquer the south is left routed and shattered, thanks to Kongming's wheels-within-wheels ploys and last-minute conjuration of an east wind, you are never lacking for excitement. You're almost spoiled, too, since right before that is an equally-exciting chapters-long running fight as Liu Bei's retreating army and mass of villagers try to cross the Yangtze for safety in the south, and Cao Cao's forces are only barely held off in the Battle of Changban, where the (in my opinion underrated) Zhang Zilong makes one of his many clutch saves by rescuing Liu Bei's son against great odds (and not for the last time). The heroism and dramatic tension don't let up for a bit, and while there are many points where the ratio of clearly fictional "how could he have known?" strokes of impossible genius against more plausible Nth dimensional chess moves that real people might make gets a bit much, it's all so much fun you don't mind for a minute.

Now's no time to stop reading.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 1

I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of.

My edition of the Moss Roberts translation is split into 4 volumes for ease of reading. This volume begins with the immortal incipit "Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." and the oath in the peach orchard between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, and ends with Cao Cao's defeat of Yuan Shao at the battle of Jizhou (chapter 32 out of 120). You could spend a long, long time exegizing every aspect of the novel - its elastic grounding in the historical record and subsequent authorial "improvements"; its biases of heroism and colorations of personality that turn these real people into Homeric archetypes; the slight supernatural touches like the summoning of convenient storms, fatal hauntings of vengeful ghosts, or complex portents and astrological divinations; the way the actions of individuals recapitulate the recurrent patterns of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in Chinese history - but a few specific observations came most readily to mind as I finished the first quarter of the tale.

First, imperial power is a fascinating contradiction here. As the saying goes, "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and the slow disintegration of the Han dynasty amid the famines and religious fervor of the Yellow Scarves movement (interestingly, this colored clothing rebellion will be echoed several times more at similarly turbulent junctures in Chinese history) is reminiscent of a hollow, gradually rotting tree. While the Emperor's authority is nominally unlimited and he commands (nearly) universal respect, in practice the various warlords, rogue generals, and aristocrats seem to rule with complete independence, and the actual personage of the Emperor is treated somewhat like the puppet Roman Emperors after the Crisis of the Third Century (which by historical happenstance took place only a few decades after the events here), meaning that control of the military is paramount, and to be a successful general is almost synonymous with being a potential imperial claimant yourself. Many years later during the Yuan dynasty, in fact just as Luo was writing the collection of plays that this novel was compiled out of, someone coined the saying that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" as a way of highlighting how notional autocracy and practical independence can coexist simultaneously in the vastness of the Chinese landscape when a failing dynasty surrenders power to the court bureaucracy and a succession of generals.

Military strategy is also pretty thought-provoking, both for its realism and for its more whimsical moments. Many novels, even ones that make real efforts at military realism, often skimp on mundane details, like the importance of supply line logistics, the need to post sentries at night, how important the disposition of your troops are in pitched battles, or the finer points of besieging cities. Often lazy authors will describe their heroes as strategic geniuses, but leave the actual demonstrations of their acuity up to the reader's imagination. Not here! All the ingredients of military prowess are on full display, with Cao Cao in particular shown as a true mastermind of deception and consistently able to turn seemingly any setback into an opportunity thanks to his cleverness and willingness to listen to sound advice. The sheer quantity of his cunning feints and countermoves would be truly impressive even if they weren't (mostly) based on real history; both his wit and his opponents' foolishness are very convincingly rendered, as Luo also faithfully depicts the many ways that superior forces can be defeated by a leader's ill-timed vacillation, inconvenient bouts of drunkenness, stubbornness and inflexibility, or by just plain better tactics and superior hustle.

The flip side is that all of the major characters are all invincible superheroes with plot armor that would make the most hack fanfiction writers blush. Take a drink every time one of the protagonists kills an opponent with a single mighty blow, or fights through a crowd of enemies miraculously unscathed, or gets out of a jam by the impossibly convenient arrival of reinforcements just in the nick of time, and in just a few chapters you will be drunker than Zhang Fei himself! It's one of the fictional scenes, but when Guan Yu slays a series of six generals on a single journey to reunite with Liu Bei, it feels like you're reading a novelization of the Dynasty Warriors video games, which are based on this material, and not the other way around. Even when a main character finally dies, it's invariably in a protracted, grandiose boss battle. And yet somehow the comic book-like action sequences, or the occasional appearances of magic, never feel out of place or untrue to the broader story, as malefactors like Dong Zhou appear and then are vanquished according to the inscrutable dictates of the heavens as well as the familiar laws of villainous peril and heroic resolution.

And thanks to Luo's consistent editorializing to let you know who's good and who's bad, the main characters are all memorable and sympathetic to the point where you can't help but get emotionally invested in their fates like the worst kind of nerd fanboy. Luo's obvious cheerleading for Liu Bei and his oath-brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei comes off as almost charming, even though I can't be the only person who got a bit sick over how exaggeratedly noble and virtuous Luo makes him appear at every opportunity. And by the same token, Cao Cao really doesn't seem like as bad a guy as Luo tries to paint him; not only is he the smartest guy around and sincerely reluctant to seize the throne illegitimately, he consistently tries to persuade his enemies over to his side and forgive their past enmities whenever possible. His occasional ruthlessness is of the "it's all in the game" variety, and his "big transgression" of honestly taking credit for killing the deer on the royal hunt when the Emperor missed it is so laughably petty that, when the rest of the imperial court flipped out, I wanted him to just take power right then and there. We're reminded that the Han dynasty is rotten and corrupt every single chapter; might as well let someone with some talent take the reins. I'm firmly on Team Cao Cao, for now at least.

I can't imagine anyone reading this far and not continuing to the next volume as quickly as humanly possible.

Book Review: Nick Harkaway - Gnomon

Man, this is a lot of book. It starts off as a straightforward dystopian sci-fi story, with an agent of the standard Sinister Comprehensive Societal Monitoring System attempting to determine why a person of interest died during an investigation, before the characters multiply and the timelines expand and the novel transforms into a cosmic detective story that includes a priapic Greek banker during the 2008 financial crisis, an Ethiopian artist during the Selassie period, and the mistress-turned-alchemist-haruspex of St. Augustine, working in musings on art, religion, high finance, and freedom, before it neatly folds back into itself several hundred pages later. Astute readers will note and enjoy the many literary references; Harkaway is able to allude to and draw upon works like 1984, Cloud Atlas, Foucault's Pendulum, Illuminatus!, Greek mythology, Borges' short stories like "Death and the Compass", and so on without ever being excessively derivative. Indeed, he has so much fun creating this world of nested realities and universe-eating sharks that you never think you're reading something else.

I was a bit unfulfilled when it ended, however. My main complaint is that while the pace is engrossing, and there's always plenty of stuff going on, you the reader aren't asked to do much but sit and watch Harkaway display his erudition, so while he has clearly intended for this to be more than the standard thriller (most thrillers wouldn't throw in high-concept literary thematic allusions like apocatastasis or catabasis), there's not much for you to chew on afterwards and it ends up feeling closer to a "this author spent a lot of time on this" novel like House of Leaves than "this author packed a lot of life lessons in" novel like Cryptonomicon. I did have fun looking up his British references to things like Lubetkin's postwar architecture, Hawksmoor's churches, Jackie Morris' paintings, and so on, and also exploring neat historical connections like that the repeated phrase "Quaerendo invenietis" is Latin for "Seek and ye shall find" from the Sermon On the Mount in Matthew 7:7, which also references Bach's Musical Offering (BWV 1079). Does it mean anything? Maybe not, besides familiar warnings that universal surveillance systems are bad news, but it was still a blast to read.

Book Review: Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies

This short story collection was Lahiri's very first publication and she won an armful of awards for it, which is logical because if you were to try and imagine the Platonic archetype of a "New Yorker short story" any one of these would do just fine, and indeed several of them were first published there. They're flawlessly written, with complex characterization, engrossing narratives, and emotional nuances in that literary fiction way where at the end of each one you're satisfied but thoughtful, not exactly happy but spiritually enriched somehow - "stories that make you go hmm". Most of them are set in the US, with the remainder taking place in India, and they all deal with some aspect of "the Bengali Indian/Indian-American experience", which generally seems to mean either dealing with culture shock or relationship issues or both. Not a perfect set of stories, since there is a total absence of joy here, but I came away respecting Lahiri's decision to concentrate on the melancholy aspects of the seam between cultures and the gap between expectations and reality, even if some more humor would have improved several of them. Often when I didn't enjoy some aspects of the stories I revised my understanding on rereading, because for the most part they're deeply written, and the restraint and economy of her style is key to the concepts she's trying to convey even if they come off as strange or unpleasurable at first.

• "A Temporary Matter". A couple has been failing to properly deal with the emotional fallout of the stillbirth of their child, until utility work on their house forces them to confront each other. There's an infamous adage that dealing with death is what separates a true "serious writer" from the amateur; by that criterion this story is as serious as it gets, but it's so sad in both its subject and its ending that you understand why most people treat reading as an escape and not a serious matter. I get that both staying in and leaving from a dead relationship are depressing, but man.
• "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine". A young Bengali Indian-American girl's family takes a Bangladeshi man under their wing while his family back home is threatened by the Bangladeshi war of independence. This is a solid commentary on how how remote and irrelevant affairs in the home country can seem to second-generation immigrants, neatly illustrated in reverse as well via the Bangladeshi man's puzzlement over Americanisms like Halloween customs.
• "Interpreter of Maladies". An Indian tour guide fields the questions and life experiences of a particularly ill-matched Indian-American couple and their children. Having just returned from a trip to Bangladesh myself I really sympathize with the poor tour guide's discomfort at the haplessness of tourists, but the unredeemed and unleavened contemptibility of the family in this story doesn't leave you with a good feeling about humanity. There's a whiff of commentary on how debauched Indian-Americans can be when they've lost touch with their heritage, but on further reflection I don't think Lahiri was trying to make a statement in that way, it seems more likely that these are just individually miserable people and not culturally miserable people. To interpret is also to translate, and so the tour guide's unease with these people is in the end perfectly relatable, as is his refusal to absolve the wife of her willful sins.
• "A Real Durwan". An old woman who was possibly once rich acts as a janitor/guardian for a Calcutta housing estate, as new wealth threatens to change the relationship between her and the rest of the building's residents. This is one of those "writing as formal justification for itself" stories that I find hard to criticize but also hard to respond to emotionally. The protagonist's plot arc is unhappy but not really sad, since the fact that the other residents don't believe her stories is the only bit of characterization she's given, so when she's used as the scapegoat for the building's misfortune it comes off as more of as writerly effort - the cycle of her personal falls from grace recapitulated in the community - than a genuinely moving narrative.
• "Sexy". A woman becomes a mistress to a rich banker, which is fun until it isn't, as the real ambivalence of being a side chick sinks in. Despite this story using some heavy-handed tricks - the parallels in the romantic travails of the protagonist's coworker's cousin are a bit too unsubtle, the whole scene with the cousin's overly precocious son she's babysitting is just bizarre - I liked how well it illustrated the paradoxically irresistible appeal of unsustainable affairs, how liberating making mistakes can be, and even though the arcs of passion inevitably return back down to earth, that descent doesn't have to be wrenching or awful but part of life.
• "Mrs. Sen's". A homesick elderly Indian woman who is having major issues adjusting to certain aspects of American life babysits a young white American boy whose single mother is trying to get her life in order. I guess you could say the theme of this story is "maturity", as all the main characters have some adjustment to do, but for some reason I found the title character's frustration with staples of the American experience like driving a car poignant, even if it's objectively pretty childish to refuse to learn how to drive. Assimilation has costs as well as benefits, and at a certain age I think you have the right to take a pass on certain ways of fitting in. I did mourn somewhat that the slapstick potential of some scenes were unrealized, but perhaps that would have undermined the characters.
• "This Blessed House". An uptight traditionalist man newly married to a free-spirited Americanized woman is really not happy with her delighted irony about the Christian religious paraphernalia they keep finding left over from the previous owners in the house they've just bought. Odd couples are a classic sitcom premise, and the New World vs Old World elements give this story the promise of a pilot episode, even if Lahiri scrupulously avoids any hint of comedy in the husband's attempts to cope with the wacky Manic Pixie Dream Girl aspects of the woman he's married after only 4 months of knowing her. Of course in real life this sort of marriage is almost instantly doomed, so as the story ends with the husband staring into the future thinking "oh boy, this is my life now", you're not exactly pulling for them to stay together.
• "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar". An epileptic Indian peasant girl deals with the bafflement and scorn of her community as she attempts to find love despite her condition. Yet another one of these stories that is formally flawless but emotionally unengaging because there's not a lot of dramatic action around the central problem. It actually feels like an over-literal interpretation or bad translation of a fairy tale with all of the magic and wonder stripped out, so instead of wicked stepsisters and helpful talking animal friends you just have this poor girl living in a shack desperately trying to get laid, waiting for a prince and having seizures once in a while. Disney is unlikely to option this one though.
• "The Third and Final Continent". An Indian immigrant to the US via London boards in the room of an incredibly old woman's house and deals with her being incredibly old until he can move out and bring his wife, who he barely knows, to America to begin their life together. That sounds really boring, but this was my favorite story. It's written as a first-person journal, so the stiff diction matches the stiffness of the main character's personality and therefore the lack of emotion in his life complements Lahiri's disengaged style rather than reveals it. Plus this story focuses on beginnings instead the sadness that permeates most of the other ones, so you're really pulling for the main character as he calmly deals with the loneliness of being isolated in a strange country without much money.

Book Review: Madeline Miller - Circe

I really enjoy the various spinoffs, tributes, and fanfictions based on Greek mythology, and though I'm sure it's theoretically possible to tire of yet another derivative of these stories, I'm still impressed with how creative people are still able to be with this millennia-old material. To my knowledge, Circe is the first novel to concentrate solely on its protagonist's life story as a tale unto itself, and Miller takes Circe's appearances in the Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony (or what's known of it) to portray her youth, exile, motherhood, and exit from Aiaia as a full narrative. It's not high-concept short stories, like Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, or an overwhelming modernist juggernaut, like James Joyce's Ulysses, or even a mock-drama, like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, but a humble traditional novel about the relationships of parents to their children: Circe and Helios, Telegonus and Circe, Telemachus and Odysseus. I actually had not heard of the Telegony before reading this, so the full story of her and Odysseus' son Telegonus, and Circe's eventual romance with Odysseus' other son Telemachus, were new to me, and whereas in the Odyssey Circe is merely a pleasant stop for Odysseus on his way home, here Odysseus, with a well-captured dark side, is the key to her release from her long exile but far from the only part of her life with meaning. I don't think people will stop being fascinated by the caprices of the gods for many years yet, but Miller makes their human side not just understandable but even relatable.

Book Review: Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

Novels that deliberately pitch themselves as "for smart people" often draw much more attention to the author than to the story itself (the works of James Joyce being the most extreme example), so I was delighted to read this really entertaining novel that integrated a tremendous amount of advanced linguistics, music, film, physics, and other "just go look it up" subjects into the plot in a way that both showed off DeWitt's intelligence yet still had those qualities that make for a satisfying novel instead of a particularly long Wikipedia session. It begins from the point of view of of Sybilla, a smart but unambitious single mother who gets knocked up after a one-night stand, and her attempts to raise her child prodigy son Ludo. Ludo comes off as mildly Aspergery, and he's absolutely determined to learn out who his father is over his mother's objections that she can raise him by herself. As he becomes the primary character and finally discovers and is then disappointed by his true father's thoroughgoing mediocrity, he decides to visit several candidates to be a surrogate father to him, inspired by the assembly of the characters in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which his mother rewatches endlessly. The pleasure of the novel is not just in watching Ludo grow up over time, but in how his life exemplifies so many things: the joy of learning, the challenges of fitting in, the power of chance, the struggles of making sense of life, the enrichment we get from art, the difficulties of fatherhood, how potential is achieved (or not), and the question of what separates knowing a bunch of facts from an actual education. Among many many other things, DeWitt explicitly references John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I had just read, and Mill's quest for wisdom is well-echoed here.

When you play bridge with beginners - when you try to help them out - you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.... People who generalise about people are dismissed as superficial. It’s only when you’ve known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones - when you look at each one as if you'd never seen one before, they all look alike.

Book Review: Paul Cooper - River of Ink

Here's a great little piece of historical fiction about a time period I didn't know anything about - the invasion and attempted conquest of Sri Lanka by Kalinga Magha in 1215 AD - that manages to be densely researched, well-written, and satisfying on a storytelling level all at once. Cooper fits an impressive amount of research into the details of the Sinhalese-Tamil struggle, the kingdom, the palace, the food, the clothing, etc, in here, and while he drops in maybe a few too many untranslated terms for the prose to be completely smooth reading for a non-Sri Lankan, if you just relax and go with the atmosphere eventually you're so fully immersed you hardly notice it, especially because he's so descriptive and detailed. It's a novel about translation, bother personal and literary, which means it must also necessarily convey something about the difficulty of communication, and the melancholy love story that accompanies the war for control of the kingdom makes the personal political, adding a welcome human element to the mix of literary commentary and political struggle.

The protagonist is Asanka, a nebbishy court poet to King Parakrama and Queen Dayani of Sri Lanka in the Sinhalese royal capital of Polonnaruwa. After the crown prince Kalinga Magha arrives from the mainland and executes the royal family, Asanka is given the task of translating the epic poem Shishupala Vadha from the more academic Sanskrit into vernacular Tamil in order to promote the culture of the invaders as well as to raise the new king's status for posterity as a bringer of literature, since he has a chip on his shoulder about being the bastard youngest son of his royal family. Unfortunately, the Shishupala Vadha is incredibly difficult to translate well, being both dense in complex poetic imagery and heavily reliant on ingenious structural tricks (anagrams, palindromes, double meanings, visual puns, etc), and Asanka's burden of an impossible deadline is additionally complicated by the new king's desire to take Asanka's mistress Sarasi as the new queen. But if Asanka can keep his wits he can keep his head, as he plans an escape with Sarasi and embeds secret messages of defiance into his translation for the commoners to rally around. This subversion of Magha's desire for fame with unflattering comparisons to infamous tyrants is a sort of inverse of Virgil's flattering of Augustus in the Aeneid by linking the imperial dynasty to glorious Homeric myth.

At first I had some complaints about the novel's characters and themes. Even though it's written as a first-person diary/letter to Sarasi, Asanka generally comes off like a rich but uncharismatic dilettante, so it's hard to figure out why the two other main characters put up with him so much. Sarasi is much tougher and self-reliant than he is, to his chagrin, and her affection for him doesn't really seem warranted by his actions, which mostly range from uncaring and distant to cowardly and embarrassing. It seems like she would have dumped him a long time ago, even despite his influence with the new king, and the enduring sincerity of her feelings is out of proportion to anything he does on the page. Magha's continual trust in Asanka until almost the very end of the novel is even odder: a brutal conqueror without a lot of compunctions against killing those who displease him overlooks a long series of incredibly suspicious acts by this holdover poet from the old regime, and Asanka does not seem to have such a high Value Over Replacement Poet that Magha wouldn't have had him executed and replaced several times over. I realize that keeping Asanka alive was necessary to accomplish a few threads of dramatic irony - pay attention to the repeated lament that "poetry makes nothing happen", reader! - yet the sudden appearance of drought-breaking rain at the climax of the novel where the subversive power of literature is exhibited is just too perfect. Even Asanka's fear of elephants gets a callback right before he's reassured that, actually, poets are the real heroes, and the ending revelation of who had been writing Asanka helpful secret messages related to his work is groan-inducing.

But on further reflection these criticisms miss why Cooper set those things up that way. The novel is a deliberate echo of the great poetic epic that Asanka is translating, and just as the deliberately florid similes that various characters deploy attempt to connect the frequently-insufficient power of language to the real qualities of the thing they're trying to describe, the often-stylized actions of the characters connect the messiness of reality to the larger-than-life archetypes that populate the Shishupala Vadha. Asanka doesn't seem good enough for Sarasi to the reader; well, he doesn't seem good enough to himself either! Especially not when all he does is scribble words on the page, what a waste of time... until his works turns out to be actually meaningful to people. It's easy to lose count of how often the characters, Asanka included, denigrate literature ("poetry makes nothing happen"), but we're fooling ourselves if we think it doesn't matter, and even if words aren't real, they have real effects through our beliefs. Cooper did a marvelous job bringing this world of smoke, ink, and rain to life. A fantastic debut novel.

Book Review: George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman

Superb historical fiction, all the more notable for having one of the all-time antiheroes as its protagonist. Fast-paced, well-plotted, bitterly cynical, funny, and full of well-researched historical detail, you almost couldn't ask for a better pulp experience. It was written as the memoirs of Harry Flashman, a spoiled rich kid bully with a great talent for getting out of jams and having his character flaws interpreted as virtues, who's reluctantly forced into the army and spends the rest of the book shirking every responsibility he can en route to completely undeserved glory and fame thanks to the public's need for a hero. He's a total scumbag on basically every page (lazy, cowardly, misogynistic, greedy, lecherous, racist, untrustworthy, etc), and half of the time you're actually pulling for the Plot Armor protecting him to let up and give him what he deserves (in addition to his constant good luck at small things, there's more than one "this is the end, there's no possible way Flashman will get out of this one!" cliffhangers resolved neatly by a timely deus ex machina or fade to black), yet he seems to be the only one capable of understanding the sheer folly of the British experience in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and of imperialism/colonialism more generally.

It's a really neat trick: Flashman's interior monologue is unfailingly unpleasant, but his universal cynicism doesn't spare himself or his fellow British as they arrogantly bumble themselves into a hostile occupation of an unwilling country, pointlessly disrupting its politics and eventually getting over 15,000 soldiers and civilians massacred in the the unmitigated disaster of the 1842 retreat from Kabul. Along the way, Flashman's only principle is to look out for #1, as he advises the reader to do as well, and by the end of this sarcastic demolition of the hero myth, where he's given a visit with the Queen and celebration as a hero, universally lauded by a public ignorant of the real truth, you're forced to admit that he has a point: everyone else in this book is awful too. Don't let the vintage jingoism distract you from a surprisingly fun, insightful, and historically rich adventure story. Better yet, it's the first of a dozen.

Book Review: Lauren Groff - Florida

There were lots of aspects of these stories that I liked as I read them, but the collection as a whole didn't cohere into something I enjoyed until almost the very end when I was able to put them all together and get what she was trying to do. At first, each story ran together for me - if Florida Man is perpetually eating bath salts and driving four-wheelers into a swamp, then apparently Florida Woman is continually mired in unhappy relationships and snakes - but even though a notable percentage of these stories hit similar downbeats, each one conveys some bit of weird Florida-ness in a slightly different way. It might feel like the protagonists are mostly interchangeable, and they are, but as vessels for the emotions of disorientation, disillusion, and dislocation they're just fine. "Yport", the last, longest, and best story, doesn't even take place in Florida, but its narrative of a mother in a strange place trying to cope with several different flavors of disenchantment in her life and her work is a perfect example of how Groff is able to explore several things at once when she gives her ideas enough room to develop.