"Directionality of Humankind's Development" by Victor Torvich

 In “Directionality of Humankind’s Development,” Victor Torvich, a physicist and specialist in complex systems, builds a considerable set of data, and applies consistent and rigorous standards to it while tracing the development of the human race. His time frame begins 44,000 years ago, and ends last year, in 2023. His methodology is to define resources humankind invented for itself, and accumulate them over time, and thus measure the creative energy of the race, and try to establish the cumulative direction. He is exacting and somewhat exhaustive in his researches and his methods.

He first assigns levels to the resources he enumerates, and describes the relationship between these levels; however, my discussion will focus (as his does too, mainly) on the resources themselves. Obviously these resources can be categorized, for instance mass transportation can be divided into mass transit by rail, mass transit in a vehicle with a motor, mass transit by water, even mass transit by tank. The author enumerates these separate classes, but I found his level of detail about these data appropriate and useful.

I will say that I am not a scientist, nor a historian, nor am I conversant in complex systems. I have exposed myself just slightly (almost not at all, really) to the new disciplines of Big History and Deep History. Torvich does not align himself with either of these disciplines, which have their own methods, terms, and theorems. I did find it interesting and gratifying that he chose the time period of 44,000 years ago to the present as his sample. (It’s not a sample at all, it’s a population. I do know that much.)

The first resource humankind invented for itself, much further back in history that 44,000 years, is “Novel Mental Images,” and the date given for its inception is 42,000 BCE. This is based on the dating of human-animal hybrid paintings found in caves in Indonesia. He also offers the current finding that Neanderthals and Denisovans were gone from Earth by then. Of course, the main interchange of Novel Mental Images between humans is language. He excepts language from his scheme because of, among other things, of deep uncertainty of when to peg its beginning. He cites the most recent invention of a resource as the First Communication via hologram, which occurred in 2018.

In all, Torvich enumerates 318 resources which humankind invented for itself, and they aren’t all intuitive, but I’m sure that’s my fault. I clearly haven’t devoted the time and energy to the issue as he has. I will say that his choices, aside from some splintering of latter-day digital resources, appear to have merit. And 318 data points is certainly enough to warrant the use of statistical methods and conclusions. His concise conclusion says, “Humankind is moving towards increasing the arsenal of resources and classes of resources that humankind creates for itself”; that the rate at which humankind is creating resources is increasing, and that the process has not occurred at a steady rate over time.

He dives deeply into the data in later chapters, particularly Chapter 3, and for me, much of this information could have been added as appendices. But this is a quibble. This is a thought-provoking, sweeping assessment of humankind’s historical amassing of its “arsenal of resources.” Torvich applies his rigorous standard to it, eschewing any political, emotional, or religious terms. He simply counts up each resource, establishes the year when it first went into service, and goes from there. Again, I’m not an academic in any historical field, but I found the design commendable, and it seems to me a solid, basic text from which further work may well grow.

 

 

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"Parade" by Rachel Cusk

I tried to find a quote that I recalled, about the surprise and shock we receive when fiction reveals the harsh realities that lie beneath the surface. I did find something that veers very close to the narrative mode of this book, and it’s from Tim O’Brien: “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” There’s nothing oblique about the truth in Rachel Cusk’s Parade; she simply doesn’t use conventional scenes, actions or dialogue to exhibit it. The truths in the book do not flow from what John Gardner calls “a continuous dream” for the reader, but in deep, sometimes esoteric philosophical and aesthetic pronouncements.

The opening section (I don’t consider them chapters, because that denotes a continuous narrative sequence, and that does not exist for this novel in a conventional sense), called The Stuntman, an artist identified only as G begins to paint all of his work upside down.

People first thought the works were being hung wrong, but no. G’s wife immediately concludes he has “inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition.” While I wouldn’t call this thought a “leap” in everyday thought, it occurs halfway through the very first paragraph of the novel, without foundation, or even a hint that it might be coming. And here is a passage that pops up on the second page, after a bit of history about how the artist G cannot forgive the critics who “brutally criticised” his early work:

“His was the type of strength not to withstand attempts to poison and destroy him, but rather to absorb them, to swallow the poison and be altered by it, so that his survival was not a story of mere resilience, but was instead a slow kind of crucifixion that eventually compelled the world to chastise itself for what it had done to him.”

This is the sort of no-holds-barred statement that fills Parade.  Cusk presents the action obliquely, while placing the psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic issues in the foreground—usually, but not always, putting them in characters’ thoughts or words. There are bare plots to the four roughly equal sections into which the book is divided, but at times the action reads like a bare synopsis, or even a police report.

Reading Parade forces us non-athletes onto skis and down a steep slalom course with gates at unequal intervals and on unpredictable sides. Its chronological order is very difficult to parse out, and perhaps not all that important anyway. While there are several plots, it’s not usually clear whether they’re related. I will attempt to give you the timbre and substance of the book:

This is a novel about art, sexual politics, modern society and multi-generational family dynamics. The action, what of it there is, lurches forward through a thicket of erudite, sometimes startling, pronouncements, in which apparently the human action and interplay play only a secondary role, almost as if they’re included to provide examples. Highly literate and learned characters make these observations in erudite and well-framed statements, the author first and foremost among them. At times it felt like a book-length philosophical treatise. This book has definite attractions, especially if you like abstruse discussions of recondite psychology and aesthetics, and care, as we all should, about sexual oppression and bigotry. In this challenging piece of fiction, Cusk has wrestled the novel form, and pinned it absolutely to the mat.

It’s obvious from my review that I want to give this book more study. But this review is not the place for that, so I think I’ll end here.

 

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"The Way It Is" by Shirani Rajapakse

 

Readers of Shirani Rajapakse’s poetry will be familiar with her anger and impatience in the face of the violent, bloodthirsty politics practiced in so many areas of the world. Children displaced or murdered, families ripped apart, men disappearing without a trace, beautiful, verdant valleys laid waste, legitimate democracies overthrown. Her righteous and justified anger, her outrage, burns the pages of this collection.

Readers of her poetry will also be familiar with her startling observations where she anthropomorphizes natural occurrences, like leaves dancing with each other in a breeze, or a tree waving to a neighbor. This collection doesn’t have quite the range of these charming offerings, thrust as it is in the service of the poet’s magisterial anger.

These accusing verses veer from anger to despair to resignation to hope; Rajapakse dwells on all these at some length and from a variety of vantages. She touches on class conflict in a way that I don’t recall her doing before. A woman’s homeland is invaded by privileged young people who tell her she’s not doing enough to decry the dictator. They tell her she must reduce consumption for the health of the planet. Reduce consumption?:

“…but of what? She wonders as she
looks around meagre belongings, someone’s
hand-me-downs old slippers with holes that can’t
keep the dirt out,
a pot in the middle of the only room
she shares with her sisters and parents
to collect the water dripping from the roof…” (from “Whose World Is It Really?”)

Rajapakse’s imagination ranges on: she waits for rain to bring water that a T-Rex may once have drunk. She remembers the age-old natural remedies, prepared from plants now plowed under in deference to Big Pharma profits. She suffers through dark nights of the soul, without sleep, without contact, and temporarily without hope.

At length, however, Rajapakse does see fit to finish on a hopeful note. In a poem called “I Will Rise,” she reviews more than a thousand years of being cut down and yet getting to her feet again; she cites monks with stakes driven through them; she recalls Nazis locking her “inside cauldrons of hate”; her tongue cut out so she could not accuse those who didn’t like what she says. After her house is set aflame by an incendiary device:

“…My words
crumpled and turned to cinders and they think
they have won. Yet I will rise.
I will rise. For I am truth
and I will rise.”

As we review this poet’s oeuvre, it becomes blatantly clear that she has the clarity, magisterial judgment, and comprehensive outlook to earn the title “Conscience for our Age.” Would that many many more would read her words, and be chastised into less destructive, and less murderous, lives.

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"There are Rivers in the Sky" by Elif Shafak

In “There are Rivers in the Sky” you will find three narrative strands plaited together, and even though they span many years — from the 1850s to the 2010s — the themes they treat at length are all 21st Century concerns. Elif Shafak’s agenda clearly focuses on current issues, current challenges that sometimes feel intractable. On the whole it is a grand attempt, but I finished it unmoved, disappointed by its cobbled-together feel, and at a distance from the final protagonist. 

We meet Arthur Smyth at the moment of his birth in a squalid Thames-side slum in 1840 London. Arthur can remember the moment of his birth and each and every moment of his life since. His abilities are acute, and wasted on the lessons of small-minded teachers in a charity school for boys. In a pivotal moment of his life he witnesses a massive Assyrian sculpture — a lamassu, a hybrid god with the head of a human, the body of a bull, and the wings of a bird. His confined horizons suddenly disappear, as he gazes in wonder. Jumping forward to 2014, we encounter Narin, a young Yazidi girl in southeastern Turkey who is slowly going deaf. Her link to the world is her beloved grandmother, whose lessons and wisdom are indeed rich and worthy. The third of our protagonists is hydrologist Dr. Zaleekhah Greene, working in London for a non-profit in 2018. Zaleekhah is finding it hard to find her path, and battles with her adoptive father over her impending divorce.

 

 Shafak sets up her challenge of yoking these three characters into serving her themes. Her plotting is clever and her concerns comprehensive, but make no mistake: the author’s focus is on current 21st Century themes: intractable Mideast conflict, oppression, genocide, global climate change, the plight of immigrants, both in the physical migration and in the cultural assimilation that must follow. She engages us with the history of a single drop of water which falls on ancient Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s head, and winds up as part of the River Thames in the 19th Century, obviously having traveled any number of other places. The 21st Century scientist, worried about pollution and dwindling fresh water, also wrestles her own clinical depression and a family which she thinks is unsupportive (she’s wrong). 

 

The yoking-together felt forced at times, in spite of Shafak’s unstinting effort to fit them together. Zaleekhah’s character in particular I found unsuccessful, either as a human with feelings, or as an exemplar of modern women, trying to make her way in the world. She’s quite insular for most of the book, in terms of interacting with other characters, including (and especially) her family. 

 

The author is inventive, for sure. See “10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World” if you have any doubts. There are Rivers in the Sky doesn’t necessarily tend to the ponderous, but in all the multifarious stories contained within it, I found the final, principal protagonist, Zaleekhah, a wanting, unsympathetic character. As I look back on it, the conception is brilliant, but the execution doesn’t quite measure up.

 

 

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"1Q84" by Haruki Murakami

 If someone were to say, “Haruki Murakami is up to his old tricks,” it would be catnip to millions of readers, and deservedly so. 1Q84 features some of the more celebrated Murakami touches: an alternate universe, many mysteries, some very memorable oddball characters, and multifarious threats, real and supernatural both, which keep both readers and characters on edge. Fortunately, Murakami’s clever presentation, his plain language, and mainly, his conception of this outré story all contribute to a memorably rewarding whole.

Tengo Kawana and Masami Aomame were classmates in elementary school almost 25 years ago. Each must fight the effects of a toxic home life featuring strict, overbearing parents and the cult-like demands that are imposed in each household. As children they find each other alone in a classroom while everyone else is out playing in the schoolyard. Aomame, which is the name the little girl eventually goes by, grabs and holds Tengo’s  — the little boy’s — hand briefly, tightly, and as it turns out, unforgettably. For the remainder of the book’s 1,000 pages, we try to learn whether they can find each other again after all these years and strange events.

This book covers themes of sexual abuse (not directly depicted); mainstream but debilitating religious cults; poor parenting, which manages to be both abusive and neglectful at the same time; love, done in a quirky and unique way; and how people are judged by their appearance. He sets these challenges before his characters, and one can  tease out the author’s position on these issues by how the characters fare.

I didn’t object as much as some critics to the book’s length. Some felt too much of the book contained no events worth considering, but I thought the tame language, the plodding, matter-of-fact nuts and bolts of a detective’s investigation, were interesting, and made me comfortable, and appreciate the author’s point of view as I hadn’t before. The tension during this exposition comes from an ill-defined set of supernatural beings called the Little People, who threaten an ill-defined cataclysm should Aomame and Tengo escape back to the real world.

Overall, 1Q84 proves Murakami’s inventiveness, as though any further proof could ever be needed. He lulls his readers into a sense ease at times, even though he has established that virtually his entire novel depicts supernatural and impossible features. The “story within a story within a story” effect wilts a little as the long dry passages parch it and make it pale, but this is still a rewarding book. I don’t, however, recommend it as highly as Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or Kafka on the Shore.

I have not read an opinion on whether 1Q84  makes any kind of statement or reference to George Orwell’s classic 1984. Orwell takes modern cult politics and shoves it through a prism to point out its cruelty and absurdity. This does not strike me as something that Murakami was trying to emulate, repeat, or interpret here. Someone with more time to treat it might be more able to address it fully. 

 

 

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"How to Read a Book" by Monica Wood

The lives of three people—a young woman named Violet and two more mature people named Frank and Harriet—swirl together in How to Read a Book and each has a life-altering effect on the other two in Monica Wood’s brilliantly plotted and rewarding novel.

The author of the awe-inspiring One in a Million Boy and the soulful My Only Story has published yet another captivating, funny, beautiful character-driven novel. Twenty-two year-old Violet begins the story in prison in Maine, having served more than two years for manslaughter, stemming from an auto accident. Frank and Harriet, two very endearing and perfectly drawn characters, know her in the context of the criminal justice system—more than that I will not say—and each will conclusively end up in her corner as events evolve.

The charm here, and it is a thoroughly affecting charm, is Wood’s endlessly deep and eloquent understanding of, and description of, the emotional lives of her principals. Frank has been widowed not only from his wife, but also from a job from which he retired, but misses badly. Harriet is retired as well; she deals with the difficult love of a niece who will abandon her for the opposite coast, and with losing the most important activity she engages in in this chapter of her life. Violet ties the two together with her tragic mistake three years earlier; all three have a long way to go, and all three help the other two to get there. It’s a balancing act that Wood brings off without strain, mishap, drop, or wobble. It’s just superb.

There are other attractions, other well-drawn characters and effects, but these three characters carry the work, and Wood deserves congratulations and honors for the touching good fortune these three deliver for each other. Rewarding and worthy of the same kind of praise as her past work, How to Read a Book is balanced, true and generous. Recommended!
 

 

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"In the Throes" by Mathias B. Freese

In In the Throes, author Mathias Freese imagines a prehistoric creature called a Gruff, who by dint of sheer intelligence and will breaks through the constraints of pure instinct and finds the fraught gift of awareness. And by ‘awareness’ we mean the full array of reflection and consciousness that we humans function with day to day. It’s an amazing trick for the animal, and after the initial thrill of discovery, the Gruff finds other new thoughts, which you only get when you have the gift of consciousness, like  shock, regret, introspection, and the surprise of guilt.

Freese has carved out for himself a unique challenge. He must establish in a large but nebulously described animal (who shares the landscape with humans) the ability not only to achieve a reflective consciousness, but to understand it and describe it. For that, it needs language. The author finesses the issue somewhat; the protagonist creature can communicate with others of his kind through sophisticated telepathy. So he gives Gruff words to work with, but it is Gruff alone who transcends the base instincts of the others of his species.

And Gruff’s language and depth of thinking rapidly increase and deepen: very soon he is cogitating on such issues as the nature of reality, the self, and the unity of oneself with the landscape and the magenta sky. He even finds enough logic and insight to rebut the existence of the “Image Giver,” which is the term used in this epoch for the purported almighty creator.

Freese sets himself the task of using language to describe a consciousness brand new to this deep and circumspect way of thinking. After a slightly jarring effect at the outset of the book, I found he does a creditable job of it: as the narrative progresses, the question of where this ability comes from ceases to matter. That’s because the author sets out in this book to expound on human consciousness, and uses Gruff to illustrate it. In the Throes is a parable of human thought and endeavor, of the problems which come under consideration when humans start to philosophize.

An interesting exercise in writing and reading, this is. The last quarter of the book is replete with observations on human psychology, and considered statements of philosophy. The novelty of the “graduation” of a prehistoric animal—who befriends a band of humans and protects them and learns enough to teach them—fades and the disguise falls away to reveal a set of aphoristic philosophical tenets, which for me vary in the amount of persuasiveness they carry.

The plot (straightforward) and the level of diction (surprisingly high) both serve the author’s purpose of observing and elucidating human psychology. It’s a highly inventive route for such a discussion, and no less effective for being so. It’s a specialty piece, and those with an interest in this area and an appreciation of human philosophical problems will find cogent argument gracefully presented.

 

 

 

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"Held" by Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels’s Held contains a series of oblique glimpses into the lives of World War I survivors, early British photographers, and present-day globe-trotting doctors to illuminate the devotion, heartache, and abiding love between mortals. Held is a book- length elegy, written in refined but robust language, which achieves striking effects while showing an elegance almost never seen in a piece of this length. It’s superb.

Different sections of this novel portray fraught moments in for people as they yearn for the touch of a loved one, or dream nostalgically, or shed tears of joy with the love of their lives. Characters shine in their moment, whether brightening, illuminating, or vexing. There are cogent, convincing passages here, that show these episodes in high relief. One example: when married, loving doctors Mara and Alan contemplate the newly pregnant Mara’s impending sojourn to a war zone:

We no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we  live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other—the apartment block, the school, the nursing home—citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash.”

Then, momentary character Lia, one of the intelligent, seeking women in these pages, meets an artist in a wood in winter in France in 1910. The artist, a photographer, tells her if you leave the shutter open long enough, anything that moves will disappear.  

She thought several things then. That a photographer’s entire life’s work would add up to only a few minutes of time. And that one could make a long exposure—say, thirty years of married life, or family life in a kitchen, infants growing into adults—and all that the photographic plate would show was an empty room. But it would not be empty, instead it would be full of life, invisible and real."

Such reflections feature prominently in the female characters of this book. An ultimate female character of deep reflection and renowned ability, Marie Curie, appears at a fraught moment toward the end of the book, when she has fled Paris for southern Britain, to escape a storm of controversy, unjustly fomented against her.

But this is not a polemic, or it is polemical only in the fairest and most even-handed of ways. The men who love the women in this book are emotional, fanatically loyal, deferent, and devoted.

It’s a hard book to characterize, except in the depths of the emotion displayed. Its diction is of the highest level—and this aspect never flags. Poetry abounds through the sentences; the very ordering of words draws us along so that, even if we never encounter the character again, we’re delighted with the vivid detail and the cogent  emotional content with which they are highlighted. We feel the ache of yearning, and understand through Michaels’s mastery, that it is a constant in human relations; she achieves this through her exacting use of language, her poetry.

This is memorable, heartbreaking, and hopeful. A small gem of a novel that will hold your attention with the author’s challenging concept and her unerring execution.

 

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"The Year 1000" by Valerie Hansen

 

Subtitled: When Explorers Connected the World—And Globalization Began

 

Valerie Hansen, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, came upon the idea for The Year 1000 when she reflected on the fact that Norse people landed at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland within a scant few years of when major Central Asian (the Karakhanids taking of Kashgar) and Chinese (Song and Liao dynasties) territorial expansions took place. Each of these important events were deeply influenced by, and in turn, exerted influence on, international trade. Given that the Norse peoples connected Eurasia and the Americas, albeit temporarily, the fact is that this was the first moment when the world had a truly global economy.

Hansen reviews the vast array of data describing international trade of the time. Archeology has shown that trade had flourished in Afro-Eurasia since ancient times. I won’t go into any depth of description here, other than to repeat (because I was not aware of it) that African monarchs initiated trade on their own, across the Sahara into the Middle East, and across the Indian Ocean with Southeast Asia and China. In addition to that, in the Americas, a high volume of commercial trade traveled from the Incan empire, through the Aztec territories, and into Mississippi River sites in the present-day United States.

I have always been interested in trade between nations as a way for merchants to do business, and for ideas to travel and find new adherents, or at least become known if not accepted. Hansen makes the persuasive argument that the practice of monarchs converting to and supporting what she calls “universal religions” in the lands they control resulted directly in the religious blocs in the world today. Europe operated under the sway of the Catholic Church, either Roman or Byzantine, Islam ruled through Northern Africa through to Central Asia, and a patchwork of Hinduism and Buddhism held sway in Southern and Far Eastern Asia. All these choices occurred in the period between roughly 950 to 1100.

Dr. Hansen’s effort succeeds in enumerating the goods which have continually changed hands since the dawn of human history. Her task was to winnow this ancient litany down to a manageable length, and in this I think she succeeds. She has written a book for the general public, easily understood by the modern reader. If you are interested in the history of economic globalization, this well-rounded and disciplined survey would be an excellent place to start. 

 

 

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"One Hour of Fervor" by Muriel Barbery

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Author Muriel Barbery combines a light touch with deep, enigmatic insights to propel a profound and moving story in One Hour of Fervor. It’s superb, another bravura performance from the novelist who enriched all our lives with The Elegance of the Hedgehog. She sets Fervor in Kyoto, a calm and beautiful city (in which Barbery has a residence), and the culture of this setting affects everything. It strips conversation and action to their essences, with the result that much philosophy and mysticism shine through.

Deep in his core, protagonist Haru is a merchant. But his poet friend passes judgment: he says that for a dumbass from the mountains, Haru has superior taste and a sensitive soul, and because of these virtues, he will be a success. And succeed he does. He nurtures young artists and helps them to material success, and his talent for grace, or its material form, beauty, thrusts him to the top of Kyoto’s art world, and his fame spreads to Tokyo, and national recognition.

But at the center of Haru’s life and success lies a paradox. He will always fail at romantic love, but be a master of friendship. Indeed his friends are steadfast throughout the novel, just as his love life is a series of uncommitted relationships. One of these dalliances, with a French woman, is a pivotal moment, with repercussions that will last all his life.

The spare plot revolves around life-and-death moments, but is rendered cheerfully, and is leavened by frequent citations of Shinto and Buddhist principles, complete with their practical application to the lives of the characters. The entire book comes to us through Alison Anderson’s excellent translation, as low-key, oblique, and tinged with kindness and politesse.

Kindness and politesse graces the emotions and statements — or silences — of the players, and it never stints. It works for the reader, and it works for the characters. One Hour of Fervor stands, and will stand, as a genteel exemplar of right feeling, right thought, and right action. And Barbery’s benign diction shares with the diegesis this refined, almost rarified level of discourse.

This is a gem, a diverting piece of sophisticated storytelling, with memorable characters facing the best and worst that life can dish out. Its even keel feels like a miracle, and it keeps the characters, all of them, safely on board and at least pushing their lives in the right direction.

Again, I need to honor translator Alison Anderson, whose partnership with this author goes back some years. She also translated my only prior experience with Barbery: 2008’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and I will confess that my enthrallment with that novel led to my concern that Fervor would suffer by comparison. But no. This novel confirms for me Berbery’s mastery of plot, character, theme, image, mood, and structure. Not to mention tone, pacing, and wisdom. I’m urging you to take it up!
 

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