"The Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald

 

Translated from the German by Michael Hulse.

W.G. Sebald eschews character and plot and barely has a unifying framework for his 1998 novel The Rings of Saturn. Instead of these orthodox fictional features, he spends his ten chapters describing his endless walks around Suffolk near the east coast of England. During his peregrinations he considers a range of intriguing topics in the most engaging and evocative language I have read in a very long time. The Rings of Saturn is inspired, wide-ranging, deep, surprising, and unpredictable. Not to mention superb.

Sebald leads off saying he traveled to the east of England to do a study of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a unique and forward-looking scientist and philosopher. Sebald mentions Browne a few more times in the book, but we learn as we go that this will not be his principal focus. He traipses across the Suffolk heath in an exhausting walking tour: he tries to find Somerleyton, a great estate of the region, and recaps its many wondrous and excessive features. He gets lost in his wanderings, seemingly more than once, but manages to find a writer he was going to visit—Michael Hamburger, who, as a boy, fled Nazi Germany with his parents in 1933. He considers what it must have been like to experience that, and begins, oddly, to assume the man’s experiences and consciousness as his own.

And just as he rambles across Suffolk, the author’s mind takes trips far and wide. There is no subject beyond his scholar’s ambit: whole towns that once held important places in the regional and national economy have only one tower left before it too will surrender before the advancing sea; the tale of the Ashbury family estate, of some repute in the area, but which at the time of writing, Sebald finds the home is dilapidated, with only the ground floor habitable, and the family distracted and engaged in useless activities, like the building of a boat which the builder acknowledges will never sail, and the sewing together of bridal veils which will never be worn; and finally, the story of Reverend Ives who is visited in around 1800 by an exiled young French nobleman. This vicomte falls in love with the Reverend’s daughter during his stay, but returns to France, heartbroken, having confessed that he is already married. We learn at length that the young man is the world-renowned writer and memoirist, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand.

 

The somber palette of loss and decay pervades Rings of Saturn. But that does not make for an unpleasant book. On the contrary, Sebald’s treatment of his theme of the universality of change brings the reader constant surprise and wonder at his erudition. The author travels by foot as if in a dream—indeed, lengthy passages regale of remembered dreams, often going on for pages, in astonishing, impossible detail. This book will treat readers to the author’s erudition, his courtly prose, and his inventive format. Not to be missed!

 

 

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"Contrary" by Laury A. Egan

 

In Contrary Laury A. Egan trains her unforgiving eye on some of the 21st Century’s worst features. She takes up toxic childrearing practices; the dicey work of maintaining relationships in the Queer spectrum; the haughty, insular views of the wealthy class; and, among others, the isolation and confusion of older citizens beginning to lose their mental acuity. Through it all she yolks her comprehensive understanding of people’s emotional journeys, and treats her characters and her readers with a therapist’s support and generosity. It’s a collection full of lovely, memorable pieces.

As in all good fiction, characters’ lives change: they move from one phase of their lives to the next, for better or for worse. There’s the teenager born to privilege who, after walking to a welcoming home in a very different neighborhood for his Thanksgiving dinner, returns home to grudgingly fulfill his holiday duties. He remains in his room long enough to rein in his disgust toward his father and his old-money pals so he can perform dutifully.

We also meet a widow late in her life who is not very comfortable attending a Christmas dinner under the threat of Covid. When she finds no one else is in a mask, she surreptitiously removes hers, but is horrified when everyone else at the party, who are all her age or thereabouts, interrupts their own conversation to take video hello’s from family in other states. Her isolation is complete when she decides to get her coat and leave early, to the angry glances and whispered recriminations of her fellow guests.

And, quite memorably, a young psychotherapist marches along a beach, fuming about a cowardly breakup being perpetrated by her mooching lover. Because of a note written in the sand, of all things, she meets an enigmatic character holed up on the beach who calls himself “Captain Roy.” This old gent draws her out about why she’s so angry, and says some miraculously on-point things, plumbing her emotional depths so quickly and  with such exactitude that she is quite gobsmacked. The kinetic therapy he treats her with, and who he used to be before retirement, are simply wondrous, exciting, ineffable.

Egan concludes her collection with a two-act play, “Duet.” This is a new form for her, but she handles it with aplomb. The subject matter and theme are right in her wheelhouse: generous, caring therapists who extend a hand to a troubled client. The drama is very professionally drawn—set and staging are modern and creative—and moves forward with clever devices. For me some of the monologues run a little long, but the climax avoids any tidy wrap-up, but packs a wallop nonetheless.

This is a very rewarding collection. Modern themes hold center stage, and draw the author’s vituperation, which is always pointed and appropriate. Take this collection up, and be reminded of the emotional punch good shorter fiction can provide.

 

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"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner

 

In her latest novel, Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner treats us to a cynical, shifty first-person protagonist who must pursue her work using a series of assumed names. One thing on this job that diverts her: a series of email missives from a onetime Paris radical (now retired from trying to overthrow governments) who tries to guide a group of younger, sort-of like-minded activists in rural southwest France. The emails are long and full of philosophical and scientific reflections; as part of her undercover job our narrator intercepts them, and finds the the man who writes them, a fellow-traveler-emiritus named Bruno, somewhat inspiring. In fact, these detailed emails carry much of the thematic weight and depth of the book.

Our protagonist infiltrates a hippyish commune in the Guyenne region; she’s fluent in French, but retains the accent of her native U.S., which probably puts the natives a little more at ease, because the poor accent would make sense. The commune plans a protest and a blockade at an agricultural fair—they’re opposed to the overreaching state plan for hijacking the area’s groundwater: to siphon it into vast catchment basins for eventual state-supported agribusiness use.

So, this caper novel includes a number of email lectures from the eminence grise agitator, enjoyed by our covert agent but abjured by their intended audience, the young cadre of activists. She also uses them to glean clues for what these youthful disciples/agitators are planning and when they’re planning it. One understands the potential tie-in of these epistles to the plot, but it’s tenuous at best, principally because the email lectures devolve into lunatic ravings at a couple of points. The author may have intended an independent critique of the anti-establishment group of young people, but the older influential patron loses credibility, and any tension between the two sets of aims fails. If she wanted to illustrate the hopelessness over the decades of overthrowing capitalism, she succeeds much better.

With a protagonist who is unsympathetic until the very end, an out-of-touch mentor who disqualifies himself from mainstream thought and behavior, and a listless band of protestors living an agrarian bad dream, there is little to engage the reader. The plot is balanced and mildly suspenseful, and I appreciated a few of the more caustic observations made by the first-person narrator. A disappointment.

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"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Johan Huizinga

 

Translated from the Dutch by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch

Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a professor of history at the University of Leiden from 1915 until the Nazis closed the university in 1942 and held him hostage until shortly before his death. He first published The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1919; this book represents a translation of 1921’s second edition. The current translators, both from the University of Western Washington, cite problems with the first translation into English, such as adaptations and misstatements that change Huizinga’s original meaning, as justification for their own version. This current version was not published until 1996, after the death of Ulrich Mammitzsch.

Huizinga set himself the task of pinpointing the changes in philosophy, art, and literature which mark the end of the Medieval period, and the beginning of the Renaissance. He tackled it with unstinting effort and monumental erudition. He sets his stage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Burgundy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Following a rigorous and concise logic, Huizinga establishes the culture of the time: in secular politics it was a time of insecurity, marked by separation of families, regions, and nations into feuding parties. This insecurity led nobility and the merchant class to agitate with their overlords to subject their neighbors to a reign of terror. In religion, the Church’s faithful followed a primitive (Huizinga’s word) and impersonal form of adoration based on visual icons (which made it easier to worship) and an absurd legalistic weighing and balancing of sins and indulgences as they tried to finagle their way into heaven. Literature, even of the more serious, higher kind, followed set formulae of verse length, rhyming patterns, and even theme.

The author treats each of these features at considerable length, and cites a wide range of contemporary sources and examples. I found the whole to be entirely convincing, even though the later chapters suffer from an overabundance of citation and a growing mix of sources, themes, and points he felt he had to make. The book is set up somewhat awkwardly as well: I read the epub version and found jumping between the many passages in the original Middle French, and the appendices containing translations, a bit burdensome. I’m not sure how I would have solved this issue; I may have put the originals in appendices and let the main narrative flow with translations.

Huizinga takes pains to point out areas where 14th or 15th Century Burgundian or French thought anticipated the Renaissance humanism which would follow, but his conclusions about such things always carries magisterial weight. I am no one to question it. He’s always reasonable, specific, and balanced.

This is a useful volume; it puts the curious reader directly in touch with a famous scholar who has studied his subject closely and communicates his conclusions persuasively. If this period in history interests you, this late-coming treatise is an excellent place to start.

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"Cancelled" by Danny King

 

I am going to preface this review with the thought that most of my readers know what “cancel culture” is. If you’re fortunate enough to be fuzzy on the concept, it involves the willful defamation and ostracization of a person who may or may not have made a statement offensive to self-righteous observers who lurk on the internet. These observer/judgers bloviate from their self-assigned “high ground.” By and large, these cowards operate in the toxic space of a fully public forum, while maintaining full anonymity. [End of preface.]

Danny King lambasts today’s cancel culture by envisioning its evolution into a strong-arm authoritarian regime in a future dystopian Britain — called “New Britannia.” Told from the viewpoint of Sienna, a 30-ish apparatchik of the New Britannic repressive regime, Cancelled contains such details as these: “A6” sexual consent applications, which must be reviewed by three “womyn” (plural of “womxn” (women)) before the applicant may pursue the object of his desires; all adult non-incarcerated people wear Smart Glasses, giving them access to the Network, which they can access and manipulate by blinking their eyes, and which ground them in the grid. The devices also allow the user to adjust their Vulnerability Condition, or VunCon, which limits what others can say to her or how they behave around her. These represent a bare sampling of the absurdities King includes in his compendium.

In fact, Sienna, or “Sinny,” works under cover as an Auditor, an investigator who brings cases for cancellation before the Auditing Oversight Congress. The author’s range of cancellable infractions is hilarious: a sea-going pirate DJ under investigation for broadcasting songs like "Born a Womxn" by Sandy Posey, for citing gender identity theory; Bruce Springsteen’s "Born to Run" for its disability discrimination; "King Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas for racism; and, among others, "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" by Dean Martin for its suggestion of rape. And I have to add one other example because it’s just so outlandish: since consuming animal flesh of any kind is strictly forbidden, a former butcher is investigated because a private communique between the (supposedly unrepentant) onetime meat cutter and his son concerned “bringing home the bacon”; at a private family barbecue held four years ago, he’d shaped various tofu, soya, and mycoprotein patties into shapes of outlawed meat cuts; etc, etc.

King devotes the early part of his novel establishing this too-fucked-up-to-be-amusing world, and paradoxically, the effect is hysterically funny. The satire is razor-sharp, damning, and aimed way too well to be anything less than devastating. However, dystopias being what they are, Sienna runs afoul of the highers-up, and the novel veers off into a brand new vivid and chilling direction, with Sienna at the receiving end of state persecution. I won’t deal very closely with this section, except to exhort the reader to pick this novel up, and experience the derring-do of its nail-biting plot. It’s as though King has yanked the blinkers off and we witness the logical end of his chosen theme: the real-life grinding of the state’s terrible machinery as it deals with its cancelled—and defenseless—undesirables.

King wields his observations of the cancel culture with devastating effect. He truly has mastered its absurdity while also warning of its Stalin-era tactics of state control. He demonstrates mastery of at least two types of story-telling in the one novel, and one comes away impressed that he could handle both as superbly as he did.

Take it up!

 

 

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"The Sumerians" by Samuel Noah Kramer

In The Sumerians (1963) Samuel Noah Kramer cites the “unusually creative intellect and a venturesome, resolute spirit” of the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. These attributes allowed them to be the first people ever to build a complex society as we would recognize it today, to dwell in cities, to turn arid land into lush, productive farmland, and as a result successfully to store excess grain. And most sweeping and transformational of all, they developed writing. At roughly the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Sumerians first stepped across the threshold between prehistory and history, and the entire human race followed.

No other known culture of the time, or prior to it, left a record, including the Egyptians. Much of what archeologists have dug up are administrative and account-keeping minutiae, which is very logical, given the surplus grain and agricultural produce which was held in trust by the authorities in the world’s first cities. But Kramer also covers the heroic epics, the lyric poetry, the disputations (for the Sumerians were a pushy, adversarial lot, and individuals strived to be the first among their peers), the proverbs, and the votive verses which they produced.

They developed the practice over time of codifying their laws in written compendia, a practice copied by the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, and all societies to this day. The Sumerians also very apparently influenced the Hebrews, who a thousand years after the height of the Sumerian civilization, busied themselves compiling the early books of the Bible. Consider:
— Both cultures envision strikingly similar processes of creation, with land being separated from the sea by divine agency;
— Both traditions viewed the creation of the human race as clay being given the “breath of life”;
— Both foundation myths include paradise motifs, the Hebrews citing it explicitly as the original home of Adam and Eve. Many Sumerian characteristics and descriptions find their echoes in Genesis;
— Both legends contain a devastating Flood, and they contain numerous striking parallels;
— The Cain and Abel motif in the Bible is a much-abridged version of a frequently repeated favorite theme of many Sumerian writers and poets.

There are other echoes and apparent influences as well: the personal god, ethical and moral standards, the divine retribution theme, where an angry god annihilates the nation of his people, usually by an outside conquering force, and the Job motif of  suffering and submission. The two sources even begin with the same introductory plot.

Not all comprehensive surveys engage the reader as effectively as this one, nor do they paint so vivid a picture of their subject. For an academic treatise, this is as enjoyable as it is comprehensive.

 

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"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows an unorthodox structure to explore at a personal level two social/political paroxysms suffered by China in the 20th Century: the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard scourge of the mid 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. These two iron-fisted crackdowns battered and splintered a family of musicians and poets, members of which had to flee to the desert of Kyrgyzstan, were driven to suicide, or were murdered by the People’s Liberation Army at Tiananmen. At its core, then, the novel exposes mob rule and official paranoia for the horrors that they are, and shines a spotlight on Chinese character, with its youthful impatience for change and its view of justice, and the blind, intolerant authoritarian reactions to such impulses.

The novel gains its power by unfolding this intractable and unfortunate conflict from the inside out: Ba (daddy) Lute and Big Mother Knife head a tight-knit family of musicians and itinerant storytellers which becomes ground into the dirt — hounded as fugitives, driven to suicide, or simply murdered by troops. The blind, impersonal machinery of the authoritarian gods functions in strokes broad and minuscule, and crushes creativity that would never harm a rational regime.

Thien introduces each chapter with a few pages portraying events in the immediate past — the novel was published in 2016 in Canada — and from the viewpoint of Mali, a young woman of Chinese birth who immigrated to Vancouver with her mother in the 1990s. This device grounds the narrative in the present and gives it weight. The framing of the main story this way gives it an exalted, poetic feel, and the characters a heroic tenor. These are the strengths of this very accomplished piece.

This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and this reminded me of the type of fiction honored by the Nobel Committee: its politics clearly reflected those of the Committee, while the writing, though effective, doesn’t always soar to the artistic — character, plot, image, structure, diction — heights of other deserving novels. It’s a powerful, plaintive, memorable novel, make no mistake. As a first-hand narrative of paranoid, cynical, out-of-ideas leadership fomenting groupthink, theft and murder on the part of mindless, lawless mobs, I’ve never read its equal. And probably never will again.

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"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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