The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub May 26th 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374184032

One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or joys in case we are fearful or disappointed? But Rachel Cusk reminds us why we read other people’s tales: she is observant, and terribly funny. Tales of her trips make ours resonant with laughter, too. How did we first manage when confronted with grocery stores without anything we would consider food in them?

Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.”

One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people

“push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want…I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its spacious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire.”

So few are the antiquities that people from the world over wait in long, snaking lines, “an overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze in to a slender garment from their youth.” It takes one’s breath away, the clarity with which Cusk writes, reminding us of what we may have once observed but could not convey.

The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience?

This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples.

The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too.

Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks.

One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate.

‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019






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War on Peace by Ronan Farrow

Hardcover, 392 pgs, Pub Apr 24th 2018 by W. W. Norton Company, ISBN13: 9780393652109

Who could have known Ronan Farrow would develop into such a remarkable thinker? He credits his mother, of whom he speaks with genuine awe in his voice. Not only has 30-year-old Ronan Farrow been a diplomat, in his early twenties working closely with Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of American’s longest war, but just last year he broke the story published in The New Yorker which set America on a new trajectory for gender relations.

War on Peace is an examination of American foreign policy in the last two decades, though Farrow occasionally wanders further afield to highlight a trend or to stress a break in continuity. Did we have a foreign service in the past two decades that was not consumed by military matters? Believe it or not, we had a robust diplomatic core who was toiling away unsung, trying to wrest decision-making from generals focused on anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Richard Holbrooke was one of these.

Holbrooke wasn’t well-liked in Washington, but was effective in his role in the Bosnia peace talks. He was hard-headed, obsessive, egotistical. He’d wanted to be Secretary of State during President Clinton’s administration but the job went to Madeleine Albright. He was Secretary of State Clinton’s choice for envoy to the Afghanistan war zone. It was a bum job, but Holbrooke was happy to get it. Ronan knew Holbrooke as a family friend and was invited onto Holbrooke’s team. We get a view of Holbrooke from someone who knew his gifts and his faults.

Ronan has a disarmingly frank manner. For this book he interviewed on the record every living Secretary of State, and just about every other Washingtonian who had anything to do with international work. What he charts herein is the militarization of the diplomatic corps, starting way back in Bill Clinton’s presidency through Bush and Obama, neither of whom did anything to slow or halt the trend. Farrow does talk about the current president, but only to highlight how diplomacy has become a dirty word in D.C.

Most interesting for me was the access that Farrow had in talking about American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how we never seemed to actually get anywhere. In Pakistan especially we never seemed able to take advantage of cooperation with the people who could bridge the trust gap. Farrow makes it sound like we were so close to better, more cooperative relations but the ship of state is hard to steer. Our relationships with other countries tended to impact our relations in Pakistan, to say nothing of the assassination of Bhutto, the misuse of aid funds, and bin Laden living in hiding there.

Farrow gives some idea how DJT is playing in Europe at the moment, as if we didn’t know. He quotes Merkel's dry and damning statements about "we really should all be trying harder to work out problems with our allies..." But when this 30-yr-old says we must stay engaged in the leadership of the world because if we don’t, someone else will, we understand and we believe him. When Clinton said this during the campaign, actually answering a question I’d posed about America’s role in the world, I was resistant. I am still working through disappointment that she couldn’t manage to make even her countrymen want her to be that leader.

Our dysfunctional relationship with Colombia is spelled out in painful detail. How stupid and disrespectful has America ever been in South America? America’s war on drugs became a sordid saga of the U.S. training drug runners. Towards the end of Farrow’s book, this story is just so sobering and souring. Perhaps we come off looking like the buffoons we are because of the unending corruption in every single South American country. It is just exhausting and hard to believe an honest person cannot rise to the top anywhere in South America. But we just keep playing out the worst examples of bad behavior, on both sides of the border.

In the end this book is an impassioned call to young people to create the change they want to see. Farrow is trying to gin up some enthusiasm for a diplomatic corps who can think, talk, and make treaties around the world rather than militarize our relationships. It is obviously true that if you start with a gun in your hand you are going to have a very different mindset about solving disagreements. Diplomacy is long, frustrating, and often useless seeming…until it isn’t.

Great book. The inside scoop on how the Department of State functions is worth the price of admission. I listened to the audio of this, read by Farrow himself and it was terrific. Produced by Audible.



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Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster & J.M. Coetzee

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub Mar 7th 2013 by Viking (first published 2012), ISBN13: 9780670026661

There was always the chance that the letters between two literary friends wouldn’t be as interesting as their novels. That hasn’t happened, at least to me. On the contrary, I find their thoughts on the current state of Israel, the work of Philip Roth and Franz Kafka, and their own method of imagining their fiction completely absorbing. Thoughtful men on subjects about which we may disagree…

Their letters reflect their novels; that is, Auster is so concrete, sports-minded, explicitly organizing the rooms (cities, countries) in which his characters move, sending articles, being an instigator while Coetzee—sometimes we have difficulty figuring out which place on earth he is speaking of. And yet, his ideas are bigger, deeper, more honed. He appears to be at home on every continent, except perhaps Asia. But as he says, he sleeps better in Europe, in the time zone of his natal South Africa.

The two men are not equally intelligent, nor equal writers, but how would that work, to speak of it among friends? The joy I get at reading what Coetzee is thinking is entirely what this collection of letters is about. Though these ideas and scraps of writing are not curated, his succinctness allows me to see the care with which he marshals his thoughts, and what he worries about as he ages.

There is too much here, in this short book, to point to all that moved me, but within a page, in his first letter addressing the subject of male friendship, Coetzee has reminded us

"...of a remark by the character Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: that one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her. Implication: that turning a women into a mistress is only a first step; the second step, turning her into a friend, is the one that matters, but being friends with a woman you haven’t slept with is in practice impossible because there is too much unspoken in the air."

In a letter about male friendship, this tiny mention addresses a question I have pondered forever, it seems. Coetzee says further than unlike “love or politics, which are never what they seem to be, friendship is what it seems to be. Friendship is transparent.” Yes, this clarifying definition places this relationship where it belongs: in the light, unashamed, unembarrassed, unrehearsed. Further,

"...the most interesting reflections on friendship come from the ancient world…because in ancient times people did not regard the philosophical stance as an inherently skeptical one, therefore did not take it as given that friendship must be other than it seems to be, or conversely concluded that if friendship is what it seems to be, then it cannot be a fit subject for philosophy."

On this subject and in his first letter, Auster doesn’t mesh well with Coetzee’s lead. He writes at much greater length but says less—that men and women can be friends so long as no physical attraction enters the equation. His mind turned instead to “friendship is a component of marriage” and “marriage is above all a conversation, and if husband and wife do not figure out a way to become friends, the marriage has little chance of surviving.” All true, but perhaps not the direction indicated. He does accurately, I think, point out that “the best and most lasting friendships are based on admiration.”

Anyway, Auster proposes a topic—sport—which shows up in a lackadaisical way throughout the series of letters. One gets the sense that it is Coetzee now that will engage but has little real interest in the topic. We learn that Coetzee is an avid bicyclist who travels pretty frequently in Europe by this method, but he worries that he rarely has much to say about his trips afterward, that he is the worst travel writer and reporter ever. Auster points out that Coetzee is not a reporter, after all, but something far more creative.

But I think I understand that worry of Coetzee’s. It is endearing, that he worries. It is why we like him. Towards the end of this book of letters, nearly four years into the experiment of letter-writing, Coetzee came back from his first trip to India with two observations, nothing about color, heat, food, or filth. First, that animals in India, the ones he saw, like pigs, cows, dogs, monkeys, were not treated cruelly but were accepted and tolerated for their habits and characteristics, even for behaviors that intrude upon the sphere of men. He contrasted that to Africa, where animals are treated with contempt and an unthinking cruelty as for a lower form of life.

The second observation he came back with was that some people in India are perilously poor, very close to subsistence living, and yet the reservoir of practical skills, sheer industriousness, and the “intelligent hands” that in any other culture would make them respected artisans, demonstrate the vast potential of only very partially tapped human resources. He says no more about it, but one does get a sense of…is it hope? I may be making his thoughts sound banal, but in their context they are anything but and are more like opening a window to a scene you never expected to see.

Coetzee is older than Auster by seven years, and both men are happily married to long-time spouses. The four seem to get along with one another and every year they would run into one another at a conference or plan to meet up when in the same country. This correspondence covers things they think about while apart.

One final remark of Coetzee’s about the writing of Philip Roth which so closely parallels something I have written about Updike and Irving that I laugh to include it here:

"I don’t find Exit Ghost a particularly notable addition to the Roth canon. I know that Roth relishes the challenge of wringing something fresh out of stock situations, but there is only so much mileage one can get out of the aging male struggle against decay to prove his virility one last time."

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Late Essays 2006-2017 by J.M. Coetzee

Hardcover, Pub Jan 2nd 2018 by Viking (first published 2017), ISBN13: 9780735223912

Coetzee is among my favorite Nobel Prize winners. There is a deep vein of humor in his work—so deep we may never break into overt laughter—but a vein that is fast and cold and refreshing. These essays are criticism for the work of others, and choosing the order from among the selections is a rare delight.

In Nemesis, one of a series of novels written by Philip Roth, Roth confronts the idea of a plague visited upon a city, in his case “the polio summer of Newark in 1944.” The reader is unsure for most of the novel who is writing. A voice belonging to Arnie is describing the life and inner thoughts of another person, a man called Bucky Cantor. "The novel is an artfully constructed and suspenseful novel with a cunning twist towards the end." Reading Coetzee read Roth is revelatory.

Another essay highlights my second encounter with the work of Heinrich von Kleist, whom another author I admire has called greater than Shakespeare. Heinrich von Kleist wrote in the early part of the 19th Century, and died by his own hand at age thirty-four. Von Kleist was a playwright foremost and wrote prose fiction for money, thinking it a very inferior art form. His “Michael Kohlhaas” story has lasted two centuries, lately resurrected every couple of years with new film treatments, i.e., The Jack Bull (1999), and Age of Uprising (2013). I understand that story is now considered a novella rather than a short story; I was able to discover it reprinted in Twelve German Novellas, translated and edited by Harry Steinhauer. Hopefully that's up next.

On the subject of Samuel Beckett, Coetzee breaks his musings into four separate essays, one concerned with the young Beckett, one on Watt, and one on Molloy. His final essay “Eight Ways of looking at Beckett” completes his examination. So thorough and intriguing are these essays, they could be used as the basis of a university course, with students reading Beckett (in the original French if possible) and Coetzee’s observations. Why did Beckett begin to write in French?

"Part of the answer must be that by 1946 it had become clear to him that France was and would in future be his home. Another part of the answer was that the French language was hospitable to a savage directness of tone that he wanted to cultivate."

What I find so intriguing about his analysis of Molloy is that Coetzee finds the soliloquy assigned to Molloy

"…is not the voice of an individual, a ‘character’ (in this case Molloy), but the communal voice of much of Beckett’s fiction from Molloy onwards. It is a voice that seems to echo, or take dictation from, another remoter and more mysterious voice… "

Coetzee moves on, sharing facts about fellow citizen Patrick White, who on most counts is considered

"…the greatest writer Australia has produced, though the sense in which Australia produced him needs at once to be qualified: he had his schooling in England, studied at Cambridge University, spent his twenties as a young man about town in London, and during the Second World War served with the British armed forces.”

Patrick White’s fiction was too difficult for me to grasp when I first encountered him, and I see in Coetzee’s discussion so many reasons why White escaped me. This delicious substantive critical analysis mixed with well-chosen highlights from the author’s biography is perfectly intelligible to someone not steeped in the tradition of criticism. White wrote of an adult world outside of my experience. I was more at the understanding level of his Kathy Volkov, a thirteen-year-old girl in The Vivisector, “for whom White draws—a little too closely at times—on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.”

Coetzee does not discuss the work of David Malouf (born 1934) or Thomas Keneally (born 1935) in this work, but does discuss the work of their contemporary of whom I have never heard, the so-called fiction writer, Gerald Murnane (born 1939). Murnane was of Irish Catholic descent and suffered for it. His work was apparently awash in self-criticism, uncertainty, fear, and lacked the standard features of novels. In his later years he admitted,

“I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces as essays.”

The extraordinary range of Coetzee's essays, covering writers from every continent over five centuries, is the least of its astonishments and delights. What we appreciate most is Coetzee’s deep reading and enlightened presentation, his enjoyment of untangling the mysteries of great and not-so-great writing, and the fact that not for a moment is he dismissive or forgetful of the ordinary human failures we all share.

All of the essays, edited from the originals, have been previously published, many in The New York Review of Books. Others are mostly excerpts of Introductions written for reprints of his subject’s work. In one of his essays on Patrick White, Coetzee discusses White’s insistence, before he died in 1990, that his unpublished papers be destroyed. They were not. Coetzee suggests authors who know their executors will not comply with their wishes do the deed themselves before they are too infirm. He has thought about his own legacy, I suppose. I wonder what he will choose to do.



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So Much Blue by Percival Everett

Paperback, 236 pgs, Pub June 13th 2017 by Graywolf Press, ISBN13: 9781555977825

Percival Everett blows the doors off with this beautifully constructed novel that holds secrets and mysteries in each of its three stories centered about Kevin, an oil painter living in Rhode Island with his wife and two children. I do wonder about Everett, who so gradually has become one of America’s most reliably exciting and unique novelists that his anonymity lasted long enough for him to enjoy some walking-around time without celebrity recognition. That’s probably well over now, if this enormously assured work of fiction garners the attention it deserves.

The work is studded with recognizable truths in the way of great literature but the writing is plain enough that we spot these easily, following his trail eagerly. Describing the way his children looked at him when he was drinking regularly and too much:

“No, I never flew into rages or stumbled late and noisily into dance recitals or yelled a little too loud and made inappropriate comments at soccer games, but I became acutely aware that I wore a sickly-sweet late evening cologne and I noticed how my children looked at my eyes, holding them for too long and looking away too quickly.”

There is a paragraph less than fifty pages in which describes what happens in Paris when Kevin is visiting a museum on a day his wife is traveling. He happens upon a young woman, a watercolorist, who recognizes him and invites him somewhere they can talk comfortably.

“Very close of course was Victoire’s flat. She was, after all, a watercolorist and her apartment was full of them. Thankfully they were not portraits of cows, but there was a preponderance of empty parks and stark river scenes. There was a large window that overlooked a garden. In the middle of the garden was a broken birdbath and I felt a little guilty when I realized I was paying more attention to it than to the many works of art. I turned my attention to her work and found them well done, but ordinary.”

This paragraph with all its conflicted feelings describes a true thing; I know this because it happened to me. I can’t remember now if I was the young woman or the older man. Perhaps I was the younger woman with the eyes of an older man.

Everett does this to us regularly: holds up our experience, or maybe his own, for us to acknowledge. He is always surprising and exact yet comfortable and intimate with us. Sometimes his sentences remind me of the clipped noir of Raymond Chandler or the deeply funny seriocomic social commentary of Joe Lansdale. But Everett is unique. Not only that; each novel is unique.

Almost every novel by Everett is different than the one preceding it, making it seem as though he were reveling in the breadth of the form, trying out methods, working a style. One has the sense of an oeuvre not unlike a fiction chapbook which showcases many forms of popular fiction but which is infused with a self-conscious humor, even parody, always within the realm of literature. It is American literature at core, worthy of study for the pieces Everett chooses to highlight. That standing outside the form is almost missing in this novel, but Everett is sly.

The novel's three strands, each thread in a different country, are widely spaced in time yet carefully braided into one narrative so that no one strand seems dominant nor gets lost as the other stories unfold. The interleaving is so well done it is a model for writers. The only overlap in all the stories is the main character, Kevin Pace; married, living in New England, two children, a painter.

Blue, the color blue, cerulean, cobalt, “the color of trust, loyalty,” ultramarine, blue leaning to green, Guillet green, emerald green. Kevin saw one painting done by the young French watercolorist which was outside her usual style, all done in blues and green running into blue, with a splash of blood red in one corner. It made him cry. It should have been done in oils. Blue was a color he could not control, and it reminded him of something, a secret.

This novel is about secrets, and upheaval, and finding a safe place, and the how paint can reveal truths we cannot speak. Everett is a painter besides being an author, and in 2010 he collaborated with the novelist Chris Abani to produce a journal of Abani’s poetry and Everett’s paintings.

This novel, coming after thirty or more earlier works, seems to bring all that earlier experimentation to glorious fruition. It’s a beautiful novel, full of energy, movement, truth, and color. So much blue.



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A Hope More Powerful Than The Sea by Melissa Fleming

Hardcover, 288 pages Pub January 24th 2017 by Flatiron Books Orig Title A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival ISBN13: 9781250105998

Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with horror and disbelief. Of a boat holding 500 people, eleven survived.

Even before the cruelty of rival smugglers (I only assume that’s who they were), Doaa’s life was filled with harsh treatment and a constant threat of kidnapping or physical abuse at the hands of strangers. Forced to leave Syria as a seventeen-year-old when government forces started targeting rebellious youth in her hometown of Daraa and outright killing townspeople and dumping their bodies, Doaa was sympathetic to the rebellion. The rebellion, however, was diffuse and never allowed to develop widely before government forces came down hard.

The Al Zamel family fled through Jordan to Egypt, where they were welcomed at first by the the local populace and by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were distributing food and blankets under the protection of the Morsi government. This Egypt piece of Doaa’s journey I didn’t want to skim over: I had so many questions about why young men were constantly asking for the girls hands in marriage, unless this was meant as a jibe, a joke, or a kind of harassment. Did Egyptians perceive Syrians as wealthier, more educated, or more sophisticated? If so, why? Why did I get the impression that Doaa looked down on the Egyptian locals? Was it just a cultural distance?

When a another young Syrian expatriate, Bessem, decided upon seeing Doaa that he wanted to marry her, I started feeling that distance one does when viewing another country’s cultural norms. This is so far from acceptable in the United States, despite Bessem’s friendliness and gift-giving to the family, that I was uncomfortable with the inevitability of it all. I understand the family was under duress. That is really the only condition under which such a decision to marry that man could be acceptable. Sure enough, shortly after agitating constantly and finally getting his way, Bessem, then insisted the two of them depart Egypt for either Syria or Europe.

Doaa was emotionally coerced into accepting the decision to move, and I resent this, even from my distance of several years and many miles. That she later recalled this man as the great love of her life shows us how circumstances change perceptions. I resent that change in her emotional landscape, and can’t help but see it as a kind of dishonesty. However, placed next to all the other things in her experience, a kind of fake love is surely least awful. She had a horrific experience getting to Europe, and deserves all the support she can get. Or handle, really. When many countries combine their attention, it can be another kind of overwhelming horror.

Doaa’s story reminds us how fragile is our careful calm construction of a life, and how easily it can be disrupted through no fault of our own. I recognize Doaa’s insistence that her destination be Sweden, despite Greece offering her a stipend and citizenship. Sweden was the original goal, and the confusion she, all alone, must have felt when all her constraints suddenly fell away must have been monumental. Now that she has many choices, instead of one uncertain one, which should she choose? Fleming’s retelling of Doaa’s options allows us to feel those uncertainties along with her.

During all Doaa went through, she must have asked herself repeatedly if in fact she and Bessem really had “no choice” but to attempt a migrant illegal crossing. As sorry as I am for what their situation was in Egypt, I would have to conclude that in fact, it was their hope for a better, more prosperous existence with more opportunity that led them to attempt the crossing, not once but three times.

They had a choice. After all, their parents and family stayed in Egypt. I understand conditions were bad in Egypt. I understand they had limited understanding of what went on outside their circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. But I am not sure they have the right to attempt to move to another country just because they want what that country offers its citizens.

What reasonable people must ask themselves is how they can help communities torn apart by war or natural disaster. This kind of migration is humanity’s problem. It doesn’t have to be as deadly as it is at the moment. There may be solutions that address the root issues and do not require the kind of dangerous, deadly journey that Doaa passed through. In some ways her story tells of a kind of grim lottery. If one makes it through the gantlet of death, all kinds of benefits are bestowed upon one.

That viewpoint, however, doesn’t take into account Doaa’s personal bravery to engage the world in this critical conversation about the best way to pursue one’s dreams. I’m quite sure she would rather have not gone through that horror, but sometimes we have…no choice.

Doaa's story was translated twice, from Arabic to Greek and from Greek to English, before it became this book. This fact lends a little distance to the narrative that one must overcome to get at the real experience of this woman and millions like her. The really difficult task of organizing the material fell to Melissa Fleming, and of asking questions that readers like us wanted to know.

I was especially grateful for her including things someone speaking of their own experience may not have included, e.g., what was the composition of the migrants on the boat, their ages and country of origin, who were the ones who rammed the boat (we never learned who they were, but their manner and words were included), the manner the ship went down, and all her time in Egypt, information which was supplemented by interviews with Doaa's mother and sisters. Doaa probably couldn't have done that on her own so soon after her ordeal.



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On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Paperback, 128 pgs Pub March 28th 2017 by Tim Duggan Books Orig TitleOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century ISBN13: 9780804190114

Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, has written a pamphlet reminiscent of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense written in 1776, at America’s beginning. Snyder’s pamphlet contains twenty admonitions for us to consider as we pay attention to the political environment we see right now in the United States. The first sentence of Snyder’s Prologue brings us right back to our founding fathers, the Constitution, and the democratic republic they envisioned.

It’s a small book, the quarter-page size running slightly more than one hundred pages. A word about the publisher, Tim Duggan Books of Crown Publishing: Duggan's list is fascinating and diverse, and heavily international. This is the kind of work I crave, and gravitate towards. In any case, the relative brevity of this particular book may leave a few notions unclear that Snyder fully intended to illuminate for us. We need to be careful in reading, combing it over until our questions are clarified, calling them out and talking with others about them if not.

There is no reason for me to deny I agree with Snyder’s take on the present administration and the henchmen that carry out the damaging policies dreamed up by our thoughtless, fearful leader. For that reason I was all set to clap through a review, stamping it with my approval. Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself slowing down and viewing what Snyder has decided to spotlight with a critical eye.

The very first point Snyder makes caused me to back up, circle around, scratch my head until it finally dawned on me that we probably agree. What Snyder says is 1. Do Not Obey in Advance which in my parlance would be, “Do not anticipate your leader’s orders.” The example he gives is

“In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought.”

Snyder goes on to say that “anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflection.” Yes, I agree that the eagerness to be agreeable can make fools of us. Even if we are in the uniformed services, Snyder argues, we have the responsibility to 7. Be Reflective if You Must Be Armed. “Be ready to say no” and stand up for our values.

19. Be a Patriot. The word patriot has been so bandied about we are no longer sure what it means any more. Snyder tries to help us think critically about this concept. In addition, he exhorts us to remain skeptical and 11. Investigate and still 10. Believe in Truth. The world is changing rapidly and dangers are all around us. We must 17. Listen for Dangerous Words and do not allow words to be hijacked and used against us. We can reclaim our vocabulary and the language of reason, but it requires speech, action, dissent.

To give us feel a measure of stability and solidarity in a political world in which we no longer have faith, Snyder suggests we 2. Defend Institutions: we created institutions to protect citizens from changes in attitudes and government. We must defend them now, when they come under attack, so that they continue to be able to protect us when needed.

And when Snyder exhorts us to 3. Beware the One-Party State, he means

“We believe we have checks and balances [in government], but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.”

We must be strong, 18. Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives, and 20. Be As Courageous As You Can. "If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny." When I read these words I thought of the bravery of the man during the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 who was wearing a white shirt and holding grocery bags in each hand as he stood in front of rolling tanks. It wasn’t just that man who showed extraordinary bravery, but the soldier in the tank whose orders were to reach the square. He stopped, disobeying orders, and for all he knew, would bear the wrath of his superiors. That’s when we know the values hold.

This book is also available on audio, produced by Random House Audio and read by the author. A sample is given below. #Resist





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Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline by Gideon Rachman

Hardcover, 320 pages (Orig pub Bodley Head, London August 2016) Pub April 4th 2017 by Other Press (NY) ISBN13: 9781590518519; due out in paperback by Vintage Sept 2017 Literary Awards: Orwell Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)

Easternization turns out to be one very interesting book. I doubt Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for London’s Financial Times, expected Donald Trump to win the American presidential election in November 2016, but he doesn’t miss a beat. This book, published at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017 adds a Preface which addresses the expected focus and personality of a Trump presidency and addresses Trump’s impact on American influence in the world. Rachman looks at the world through a reducing glass and illustrates how much of what has happened and will happen over the near term in world relations has been “baked in.”

There are various measures used to illustrate China’s rising strength, but Rachman believes the balance has already shifted east. American and European military influence is definitely contracting as China increases its spending and the centrality of the needs of its billion people in Asia is drawing other economies into its orbit, creating spheres of influence. However, the population in China, as a result of the one-child policy, is aging. China will be dealing with this legacy well into the next thirty years when it is expected India will become the world’s largest economy. India’s population in 2015 was 65 percent under the age of thirty.

For the most part, countries in Southeast Asia have been unable to resist the temptation of China’s development aid and trade. One exception has been Vietnam. Encroachments from the sea by China testing coastal boundaries has so alarmed Vietnam that they apparently asked the United States if they wanted to establish a base at their old wartime location in Cam Ranh Bay.

"For the Vietnamese…the offer made perfect sense. In its thousands of years of history, Vietnam has found only one war against the United States—but seventeen against the Chinese."

China decided in the 1990s that it would pivot to Africa, and since has become Africa’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade exceeding $200 billion in 2010. Apparently India, watching China make great gains in Africa, stepped up its own investment there, where it is historically positioned to be at home. Africa, like India, has a large proportion of its population under the age of thirty, and some development specialists suggest that the Indian Ocean will become the next growth center of trade and development, when the Pacific Rim economies and growth has slowed.

China recently began purchasing Russia’s gas reserves in a win-win for both countries, though Rachman believes the Russians suffered a very difficult negotiation. Many Chinese have been moving northward, legally and illegally, to set up business distribution networks in the less populated regions of eastern Russia. China watchers wonder if China will eventually move to take the east back from a too-large-to-govern Russia. There are also signs of cooperation, if not alliance: On July 4, 2017 Russia and China together signed an agreement to sanction North Korea after their successful ballistic missile launch, and to warn the U.S. and South Korea of the provocativeness of joint exercises. The closeness of any relationship between these two goliaths is a new feature American and the Europeans have not had to consider for many years.

Latin and South America, both in America’s backyard, in the new millennium suddenly discovered it had options, and in 2011 Brazil’s largest trading partner was…China…who imported twice as much soy, sugar, meat, iron, and copper as did the United States. Japan, watching China, stepped up its aid and investment as well, creating life-giving competition in Mexico and Colombia. The formerly ignored BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) may become a economic fulcrum to edge any power discrepancies into the Asian sphere.

One aspect of Obama’s pivot to Asia was intended to engage and contain China’s influence in Southeast Asia, though the pivot started to come undone almost as soon as it began. Events in the Middle East and his own intransigent government effectively kept Obama from erecting anything on the pillars of doctrine he might want to call his own. What we noticed instead was a gradual drawing away from involvement or intervention in the Middle East except in where others are willing to come in with us or in cases and places where surgical strikes might achieve an outcome without loss of life or treasure.

The West is still struggling to adapt to low growth and unemployment as a result of China’s low cost production, but Europe and America are still the desired destination of the world’s migrant peoples, make no mistake. China is able to make great investment of human resources into Africa’s infrastructure development because their own level of development is not so distant from what they find in Africa. The technologies used in both align.

Rachman makes clear that the West still holds the institutional advantage: many of the key institutions that allow smooth communication, banking, and trade were created by and situated in the West. Sanctions are suffocatingly effective on excluded countries, cutting them off from many life-giving international exchanges. Until changes are made to the centrality of these internationally-recognized bodies, and challenges are on the horizon, the West is still central to the aspirations of the world.

There is a huge amount of fascinating discussion and no-fat detail in this worthwhile read and Rachman has gotten a good deal of attention: check out the WSJ review, those of you with subscriptions, as well as the following links NPR interviewed Rachman, The Atlantic’s Uri Freidman interviewed Rachman, and the NYT published in April an article by Rachman about his premise. This is a marvelously readable ‘catch-up’ volume for those of us who took our eyes off the ball occasionally in the past ten years, but those who have been watching with undivided attention will be grateful for his overview and his discussion of where it is leading us. Highly recommended.





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Catch the Jew! by Tuvia Tenenbom

Paperback, 467 pages Pub February 1st 2015 by Gefen Publishing House (first pub August 1st 2014) ISBN13: 9789652297983

Tenenbom is Jewish, Israeli in fact, and though to this time he had “carried no flag for any country,” at the end of this book he finds himself holding a Palestinian flag in a group of stone-throwing demonstrators in Bil’in, being filmed by European television and documentary crews. It hadn’t been Tenenbom’s idea to be a part of the show, but since traveling around Israel for some months claiming he was Abu Ali the German or Tobi the German journalist, he’d been invited to this celebration of Palestinian Independence Day, all staged for the benefit of the cameras and their international audience. In Tenenbom’s view, finding himself in this position was the height of absurdity.

Tenenbom went to Israel in 2013 at the request of his publisher. His earlier book, I Sleep in Hitler's Room: An American Jew Visits Germany, about a six-month walking tour of Germany, appears to be a critique of European attitudes towards Jewishness, and became an international bestseller. Tenenbom had been born ultra-Orthodox in Israel from a long line of European rabbis. He was groomed himself to follow that path until as a young man, he moved to the United States and to pursue higher degrees in mathematics and literature. For thirty-three years he pursued a career as journalist and columnist for media outlets in the U.S. and Germany, and as playwright in the Jewish Theatre of New York, which he founded and manages with his wife Isi. His role as journalist, playwright, and failed rabbi gave him the perfect platform to ask probing questions about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, and Tenenbom took advantage.

His playful yet incisive questioning and manner allowed him to re-state and re-frame arguments in which sides have been drawn for some time, giving us another angle from which to view the action. This book about a several-month stay in Israel in 2013-24 begins light-heartedly enough, laughing along with the little deceptions of both sides in the Israel/Palestinian debate, feeling a sense of camaraderie, appetite, and deep joy at spending time again in the Middle East.

The longer he stays, however, the more Tenenbom sees traps for the Jewish state in the language Israelis and Palestinians use when describing the actions and positions of each side. There is a huge under-informed army of NGOs and Christian religious organizations that have developed very effective propaganda tools to support the Palestinian cause at the expense of the Jewish state. Tenenbom can see it is big business and grows more distressed when Jewish newspapermen like Gideon Levy writing for Haaretz does not ask better, more thorough questions and instead seems to accept the self-flagellating viewpoint that Israelis are racist.

By the end of the volume Tenenbom is losing his sense of humor about Jews he calls “self-hating” who are not pressing hard enough in their self-examination about what is expected of them, or keeping their minds nimble and open to the realities of the situation. The Palestinians may be milking the “conflict” for all it’s worth, but some of the truly needy are being overlooked in the rush to help the more polished actors. Pay attention we can hear him say in subtext. Stay skeptical.

Tenenbom is very persuasive, and very likable: he has an earthy, warm, and intimate way of pointing to our similarities rather than our differences. It is when he meets a uncompromising right-wing settler who insists on his right to burn the Palestinian olive trees because he is “at war” that Tenenbom’s attitude receives its most damning blow. Tenenbom says the man sounds like a Goy, like any other non-Jewish farmer he’d known, not like a normal Jew.

"Personally, I hardly get to meet conviction-driven Jews, say-what-I-think Jews, farming Jews, if-you-slap-me-on-one-cheek-I’ll-slap-you-on-both-cheeks Jews. The Jews I know are neurotic Jews, weak Jews, self-hating Jews, hate-filled-narcissist Jews, accept-every-blame Jews, bowing to all non-Jews Jews, ever guilt-ridden Jews, ugly-looking Jews, big-nosed and hunch-backed Jews, cold Jews, brainy Jews, yapping Jews, and here-are-both-my-cheeks-and-you-can-slap-them-both Jews.

To me, the biggest proof that Jesus was Jewish is this: Who else, but a Jew, could come up with this statement: ‘If someone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other one as well’?"

If your convictions haven’t been shaken up in awhile, Tenenbom stands ready to help out. He is funny, and those who appreciate self-deprecation will have an easier time of it. His extra layer of thoughtfulness rearranges the Middle East so that we must go back through our understanding and look again, do more work on examining how the ground game has changed since the last time we looked. At the end we may not agree that Europeans, Americans and Palestinians can exhibit anti-Semitism commonly and regularly, but he will have us looking closely, to make sure. What he is saying is that Jews are really just like anyone else—no better but certainly no worse—and any attempt to categorize them or assign a ‘national character’ is specious.

This enormously interesting book makes immoderate readers of us. Tenenbom is someone we’d like to encounter again. He makes us think, he makes us laugh, and he seems a perfectly ethical sort. His book is divided into chapters called "gates." Those familiar with the Torah will know of the Fifty Gates of Wisdom or the Fifty Gates of Understanding. Well, Tenenbom has fifty-five gates, but the idea is the same: "Being worthy of receiving prophecy requires character improvement." The thing is, Tenenbom is not optimistic about Israel's longevity in the world. Poor leadership, perhaps, and I agree.

Tenenbom has written a new book on travels around the United States in the lead up to the last election, called The Lies They Tell, just published March 2017.



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Blind Spot by Teju Cole

Hardcover, 352 pages Expected publication: June 13th 2017 by Random House ISBN13: 9780399591075

This book of photographs paired with short essays is due out in the next two weeks. I want to give you ample time to order one for delivery on publication. Teju Cole’s art is exceptional at the same time it is accessible. In my experience, the confluence of these two things happens only rarely, which is how Cole has come to occupy an exalted place in my pantheon of artists. If I say his photography can stop us in our tracks, it says nothing of his writing, which always adds something to my understanding. Today I discovered his website has soundtracks which open doors. And there it is, his specialness: Cole’s observations enlarge our conversation.

This may be the most excellent travel book I have read in recent years, the result of years of near-constant travel by the author. Scrolling through the Table of Contents is a tease, each destination intriguing, irresistible, stoking our curiosity. Each entry is accompanied by a photograph, or is it the other way around?

“I want to make the kinds of pictures editors of the travel section will dislike or find unusable. I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after all the performance of tourism has been stripped away.”

Yes, this is my favored way of travel, for “the shock of familiarity, the impossibility of exact repetition.” It is the reason most photographs of locales seemed unable to capture even a piece of my experience. But Cole manages it. In the entry for “Palm Beach,” his picture is of a construction site, a pile of substratum—in this case, sand—piled high before an elaborate pinkish villa. His written entry is one of his shortest, only three sentences, one of them the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego, washing the scene with knowledge of what we are viewing, and what is to come.

Cole calls this work a lyric essay, a “singing line” connecting the places. There is some of that. What connects all these places for me are Cole’s eyes…and his teacherly quality of showing us what he is thinking. It is remarkable, and totally engrossing.

“Human experience varies greatly in its externals, but on the emotional and psychological level, we have a great deal of similarity with one another.”

Yes, this insight, so obvious written down, is something I have been struggling with for such a long time, going back and forth over the idea that we are the same, we are different. Cole tells us that this book stands alone, or can be seen as fourth in a quartet addressing his “concern with the limits of vision.” I want to sink into that thought, in the context of what he has given us, because outside the frame of a photograph, outside of our observation, outside of us, is everything else.

My favorite among the essays, if we can call them such, filled as much with what Cole did not say as with what he did, is the piece called “Black River.” Cole evokes the open sea, Derek Walcott, crocodiles, and white egrets. A tropical coastal swamp filled with crocodiles also had white egrets decorating the bushy green of overhanging mangroves, the large white splashes almost equidistant from one another, the closest they can be for maximum happiness, I like to think, t hough it could also be minimum happiness, I guess. Any closer and there will be discord, like the rest of us live.

The arrival in bookstores of a book by Teju Cole is an event. His pictures makes us look, and his words are like the egrets, spaced for maximum pleasure. Whether or not you read this as a series or alone, make sure you pick it up, just to gaze. You need have no agenda. His magic does not make much of itself. He takes us along for the ride. Bravo!



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My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul

Hardcover, 256 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Henry Holt and Co. ISBN13: 9781627796316

Coming out at this time of year, Pamela Paul’s memoir is reminiscent of a commencement speech, albeit book-length and one just as interesting for the parents as for the graduates. It is a blast to listen to an obsessive reader share her thoughts on books, her travels and travails. Bob is her lifelong companion and record, her Book of Books, the place she can note what she has read. It gives date of completion, and, because Paul tried to read books about the countries or cities she visits or lives, we deduce a sense of location. It is her book of memories then, a record of where she has been.

Paul was the single daughter born into a family of seven sons. Despite the expected in-house torture and rough-housing, her psyche remained remarkably intact, though her parent’s divorce may have had more effect than discussed here. She did emerge as a reader, an introvert, and from a young age wanted to write. In this book she has boldly decided to write about what she’s read in the context of her life, and astonishingly, it is interesting. We enjoy retracing her faltering steps as a burgeoning adult, in which she recalls with uncommon accuracy the embarrassed and confused feelings of a teen.

France plays a large role in Paul’s life. Although her American Field Service (AFS) experience in a small town in suburban France was not as she imagined, it set the table for her next visit and the one after that. Eventually she found a family in France that became a second home, a family that subsequently attended her weddings and met her children. This kind of close long-term relationship defines Paul, I think. We all have trajectories, but not all of us cultivate the path as we go so that it becomes personal, the impact felt on both sides.

Paul’s decision after college to go directly to Thailand without the usual scramble for underpaid work at home was prescient but daring. She’d not get another chance to see that part of the world with any depth, though the China portion of the trip gave me the screaming heebies. It sounded perfectly horrendous, completely uncomfortable, filled with sickness and incomprehension. The China trip was her father’s idea, and it never became hers. The unmitigated disaster of that trip reminds us that we have to own our journey, start to finish, for us to manage it with any kind of finesse.

There was a marriage that lasted a year. The utter heartbreak Paul experienced does not lacerate us: from the moment she begins to speak of her first husband we are suspicious. She is much too happy much too soon. Love is one thing. Blindness is another. In my mind I modify Thoreau to read: beware all enterprises that require giving up a large, rent-controlled flat in New York City...

"…the minute a subject veered from the fictional world, the private world, the secluded, just-us-on-top-of-the-mountain world, into the greater, grittier territory below, the nonfictional world, my husband and I had serious differences…Even when we each happily read those same books about the perfidy of man, we read them in opposite ways…this kind of book contested my essentially optimistic view of the world rather than overturned it…whereas for him, the world really was that bleak, and the books proved it."

Here you have, folks, a political difference so profound it can break nations in two. Ayn Rand’s work became Paul’s personal standard for judging viewpoints. Paul admits--she who practically worships books--that she threw one of Ayn Rand’s books in the trash after reading it, so that no one else would be polluted by its ideas. I laughed. I did the same thing, though I contemplated burning it before I did. In my tiny garage-turned-apartment in New Mexico, I wrestled with Rand’s horrifying vision of a society of go-getters and decided that to burn her book would invest it with too much significance.

I loved reading about Paul’s poor dating experiences after that. She was inoculated against irrational exuberance after her divorce, but she still wanted intimacy. She manages to share with us chortle-inducing instances of “okay, I’ve had enough of that” with some of the men she met later. My favorite might be the time a boyfriend convinces her that he’d been to the Grand Canyon before and so can show her “the best way to see it.” Har-dee-har-har. This memoir is a great example of smart and funny, gifting us many moments of remembering our own worst histories and reinforcing for younger women coming along that our judgment may be the only thing separating us from a much worse time of it.

Pamela Paul is now books editor of The New York Times and no longer has to struggle to find the coin to buy a new book. She is the best kind of editor for all of us because she is has read widely and acknowledges the draw of genre fiction while communicating her admiration for the range of new nonfiction that helps us cope with our history and our future. She is also an interested and informed consumer of Children’s lit and Young Adult titles, which aids me immeasurably since these are not my specialty and therefore necessitate me seeking assistance from a trusted source.

Access to all there is out there comes with its own set of stresses, but Paul has extended her reach by asking some of the best writers in the country to read and review titles in the NYT Book Review, and to talk about their selections on the Book Review Podcast, available each week from iTunes as an automatic download. Her guests and her own considered opinions help to narrow the field for us.

This is a great vacation read, not at all strenuous, yet it is involving. Imagine the unlikeliness of the concept: an introverted reader and editor writes a book about her life…reading…and it is interesting! Totes amazeballs. It occurs to me that Goodreads is one big Bob. I’m so glad Paul put the effort in to share with us: big mistakes don’t have to be the end of the world. It depends what happens after that. See what I mean about commencement?



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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Hardcover, 240 pages Expected publ: March 7th 2017 by Riverhead Books ISBN13: 9780735212176

People are on the move in Hamid’s latest book, south to north and east to west. This strange small novel definitely has the feel of a season of sense8, the Netflix Original production about shifts in consciousness, space, and time. Hamid’s characters, Nadia and Saeed, experience the bending of time and place, as when they leave their own war-torn country on the Asian subcontinent, a "passage both like dying and like being born."

Hamid’s female character Nadia, who insists on being draped in a black cloak or abaya, is more risk-taking and forward-thinking than Saeed. Nadia, not religious, wears the abaya to deflect attention, and it works, usually. Sometimes she does draw the anger or ire of men, when she is riding a powerful motorcycle or working in a store, but she doesn't back down, staring at the men steadily, aware and awake but not showing fear.

Perceptions of the abaya change in the course of the novel. Once a means of conformity and of escaping notice, in the west and in the future the abaya becomes a statement of nonconformity and defiance. Nadia likes this gesture even better.

Saeed, on the other hand, is good, kind, compassionate, nonviolent: he does not enjoy a tangle and avoids rather than confronts. He’d learned to pray from his father, much as one is taught to think critically or handle difficulty. Praying became “a lament, a consolation…a hope” that steadied and centered him.

Throughout the novel these alternate approaches to life gently grate on the two young lovers who had not decided to spend their lives together until they found they had no option. The genuine love they feel for one another feels like displacement, since the families of each are lost.

The refugee life, landing on Mykonos and somehow being smuggled to London, is hazy in process, but not in content. The danger, the hunger, the uncertainty, the resistance from light-skinned natives…these feel some years in the future, despite our current history, because electricity is becoming scarce, and times are harsh. Time in this novel is intentionally fluid and hard to reckon.

One day when Nadia sees on her phone a woman in a black abaya reading something on her phone, “she wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news.” Time was bending around her: she might be from the past reading about the future or she might be from the future reading about the past. She might be two Nadias…going in different directions.

Hamid also dislocates the reader in space, in one paragraph describing Nadia and Saeed in London and in the next describing a family in Mexico, just miles from the Pacific on the U.S. border, facing a paradoxically dry environment so close to water. No explanation is given for this wild shift west, as far west as one can get before entering again the east.

What happens in the novel is that time moves away from us. Hamid imagines our future, folding time and location. Remember Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being in which time is folded? Ozeki makes a statement about physics, love, and life on earth, and I think Hamid might be pointing to this also. His characters love one another, but the stresses of their needs wear them out. They find sometimes that it is just easier to try to slide through the cracks alone, though sometimes one wouldn’t survive alone. Think electrons. Think quantum theory.

The lifetime Hamid describes in this novel feels like it could be now and also a long time in the future: a Muslim country torn apart, population movement via smugglers, a Greek island, Europe. But interspersed we are also getting news from Japan, South America, Northern Africa. Something big has happened. The policies of control at first are harsh and then loosen, so we suspect a big event. Borders are no more and groups of people try to decide the best way to govern, to protect, to provide.

In one of the narrative shifts, Hamid points to a woman of advanced years and Asian descent living in Palo Alto. The woman lives in the same house she’d lived in since childhood, the house having passed to her from her parents. She’d been married more than once, had children, all while living in the house and yet now she felt distant from her neighborhood. Everything had changed around her while she stayed still. She was a migrant, too, Hamid suggests, because time had made her own insular unchanging world anachronistic. "We are all migrants through time."

This was a difficult book to understand through listening. I had the Penguin Random House production read by the author (thank you PRH Audio). Hamid read the book as though it were poetry, with stylized stops and breaths and some distance from the material. At times I felt totally involved, understanding it cognitively, but his sudden shifts to different parts of the world seemed intentionally dislocating.

The final quarter of the novel really threw me. I listened to it five or more times and within a few sentences my mind was wandering each time. There must be something in there that sends me off, not computing. I downloaded a print copy (Thank you Riverhead & Edelweiss). This work is a good candidate for Audible's Whispersync option.

This novel breaks new ground for Hamid. You are going to find yourself mulling his meaning as you examine our recent past, live through our near term, and contemplate our future. Below find a clip of the audiobook.





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Couturier of Milan by Ian Hamilton (Ava Lee #9)

400 pages Published January 16th 2017 by House of Anansi Press

More than once I have called this series of books about a Chinese-born Canadian my guilty pleasure, but now I wonder why I should feel guilty. Ava Lee is a forensic accountant with deep ties to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. For several books in the series she investigated improprieties in international trade and business deals, but then she invested her earnings in new businesses on the mainland as a venture capitalist. Anyone with even a cursory interest in how the world turns is gong to be fascinated by the mysteries revealed in this series.

Ava Lee is smart, savvy, sexy, and…a lesbian…which is no big deal when she is residing in Toronto. In China, however, that lifestyle choice is not appreciated, nor even permitted. At the end of this installment of the series, the author puts a little pressure on those restrictions and I expect we will just see how far they bend.

One of Ava’s investments is in a clothing designer trying to break into the European market. The designer attracts the attention of a major Italian luxury goods provider who doesn’t take kindly to the smallish company rejecting his takeover bid. Ava calls on her friends in the Triads to push back, and the Mafia becomes involved.

What’s so fascinating in this installment is the discussion about sourcing and supply for luxury goods. We must all have had our suspicions about how luxury goods makers were able to survive in the era of Chinese low-cost production and competition, and here we get a few details that might help us to figure out for ourselves how much of those expensive products are actually “Made in Italy,” or perhaps just assembled in Italy.

There is no doubt that shipping plays an enormous part in costs, both time and money, for the materials are often shipped in and [mostly] finished goods shipped out—across the world. Besides the enormous marketing efforts, quality of the scarce materials, plus the real design genius behind some of the products…all of these things add to cost, but a little deep dive into the metrics and the kinds of markups on these products sort of takes away our enthusiasm for these ‘luxury' products: luxury for whom?

Hamilton imagines for us a meeting between the Mafia and the Triads in Macau, that city of casinos, where residents, curiously, live in one the most densely populated areas on earth and yet have the world’s longest life expectancy. He discusses along the way the changes in Macau’s landscape when foreign concessionaires were finally allowed to build, making a kind of Vegas on steroids. Millions of gamblers leave $45 billion there a year, compared to a take of $6 billion a year in Las Vegas.

There is no bloodshed in this novel, but I have to admit I was expecting it every second once everyone arrived at the Italian restaurant on Macau to talk an unreasonable and profane billionaire magnate into moderating his expectations. That man did not fit the mold I was expecting for someone “with everything.” He seemed too disbelieving that anyone would refuse his incentives, and too rude when he finally got the message. There was something authentic missing in his characterization.

After all this time, after 9 episodes of Ava’s experiences, I am still trying to come to grips with author Ian Hamilton, and why he does not seem prurient when describing the sex life of a woman. First, Ava is pretty restrained, and in all that time has had only one fling…a one-night stand with a hotel manageress in Iceland. Second, Ava has had a steady girlfriend in Toronto whom she barely ever saw, from readers’ point of view. And thirdly, it occurs to me that maybe the male Hamilton has an easier time writing about a gorgeous sexy woman than he does a man. That’s a bit of a challenge for him.

All in all, I always enjoy reading about Ava’s next challenge, where she’s been, and what she ate. There have to be some advantages to making millions of dollars after all, and it is a lot easier (and I argue even more fun) to read about it than it is to actually go out and do it. It looks like she’s off to the Philippines in the next installment and I have to admit a little danger does my heart good. This novel was a little more talky than usual, but a lot happened in a couple days. It takes time to explain.

Recent reporting in the New York Times discusses the case of a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire banker who has been thought to have been abducted from Hong Kong, North Korean-style, and kept under some kind of arrest in mainland China. Apparently some Chinese officials are purchasing large shares in national power companies for their own enrichment, like what happened in Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they don’t want their machinations known. I wouldn't mind seeing Hamilton wading into this criminal circus and political controversy, just for fun. Many thanks to author Hamilton, editor Yoon, and publisher Anasi for the high-class entertainment.



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All That Man Is by David Szalay

I’ve just found my best book of the year…in a year filled with best books. Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy) writes nine stories about men, different men, each approximately seven years older than the man preceding him. The men are white Europeans, visiting or living in a country not their own. The youngest man is seventeen, the oldest is seventy-three. I laughed my way through this tragicomic look at what it means to be a man, for Szalay put in more than enough to qualify this as the best sort of literature.

Some critics have raised the point that a collection of stories about white heterosexual males isn’t rounded enough without a diverse population. While I crave the author’s take on the immigrant experience or that of a black male in London, the truth is I want his opinion on everything...with jokes, please. He has chosen to share this delicious, mordant look at what adherence to the masculine role has done to several generations of white males adrift in their culture, and that has produced an entirely sufficient and complete work of art. I look forward to what he comes up with next.

Women are the sun and stars about which the stories revolve. Their roles appear to be supporting ones, waitresses, prostitutes, mothers, wives, vacationing lushes, but any woman would recognize that there is ample going on behind their eyes. Their power is undeniable, if only they would seize it. A few of them do. Szalay “fleshes out” several of his female characters, but the most gorgeous one is never physically described, except by the double exclamation, “Wow. Wow.” That was a wise cop-out, sparing the author attacks for focusing on a woman’s physical charms, or for mistakenly forgetting to emphasize a reader’s most fantasized-about body part.

The whole collection of stories together are unforgettable in their descriptions of the haplessness of European white males, but the amusement we experience is tempered by the knowledge that men like these are responsible for fighting wars, closing borders, electing nitwits, denying climate change, and any number of other scourges plaguing our societies. Their lack of self-examination is our annoyance.

Murray Dundee on the “Croatia Riviera” had me screaming with laughter and weeping tears of hilarity. At the beginning of #7, Dundee returns to his mother’s memorial service in Scotland, sleeping overnight in his sister’s house, in his nephew’s bed. He doesn’t sleep well, though he claims he does. Too much thinking going on. Murray has hit a few speed-bumps settling in Croatia in his attempts to 1) make friends, 2) start a business, 3) bed a woman. A local man Murray can’t call a friend, “short, muscular, untalkative - the sort of man that Murray instinctively defers to,” suggests Murray might be cursed, and he does seem that. Murray goes to see a woman about it.

She’s in a dressing gown, A solid, surly woman…like someone who sells you a train ticket to Zagreb, frowning at you through the perforated glass as you try to explain what it is you want, while the queue lengthens. Short hair. Little buds of gold in her earlobes, Breath that smells of cigarette smoke, bacteria.

She says something to Murray in a sharp, imperative voice.

“She says you should relax,” is the translation…

...He has the weird fear that she’s going to ask him to strip.

The stories begin strong and just get deeper and richer as we progress though the novel. The glitz and glamour and misplaced attention in story #8 brought to mind the outsized ambition of Donald Trump (can I ever not see this man in the novels I read?) but I found myself slowing my reading as the stories went on. There is something about the accretion of sorrow and of despair, no matter how funny, that makes us feel these men. There is always the edge of the precipice in sight. Each new story presents the prospect of fulfillment: would you be happy if you…took a sun vacation in the Mediterranean? Had a luxe apartment in the Alps? Took your retirement on the Croatian Riviera? Owned a multi-storied yacht? Unexamined lives and denial bring them there…alone…and their fate, when they realize it is too late to change anything, describes our pain.

In a Paris Review interview Szalay tells us that he originally thought of calling these linked stories Europa. It does seem like a good title, but perhaps the current title with the word “man” in it is more appropriate. Certainly one gets the sense of Europe in this novel, in much of its diversity, but the subject is both broader and narrower than that.

All I can say is if you don’t read this one you are missing something very special indeed. I won’t expect Szalay will top this one immediately (isn’t that the problem with writing something so very good to begin with?), but whatever he comes up with next is going to be interesting. All my chips on the man with the x-ray vision.

This novel has just won the 2016 Gordon Burns Prize, and has been shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.




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The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré

Audio CD Pub September 8th 2016 by Penguin Original Title The Pigeon Tunnel: A Life of Writing ISBN13: 9780241977545

These stories are pure enjoyment. David Cornwell makes up for all those years he refused interviews, answering questions we never got to ask. If he doesn’t quite “bare all,” within are things we may have felt strongly about at the time, but now excite us just for the pleasure of hearing a different voice tell us indeed, we may have been right all along.

The written word is fine, but I am going to urge readers to consider the audio of this memoir which is read by the author himself. His accents and inflection make for riotous listening in parts: his plummy enunciation explain moments of real learning, like when he was sent to Paris as a sixteen-year-old to pick up a debt for his father, or his learning the ways of Hollywood.

Society’s view of spies changes with the times, and David Cornwell acknowledges this, and along with us is horrified at the waste and destruction many of those pointed in the direction of the interests of state have wrought through arrogance and incompetence.

What is most appealing about le Carré’s writing is that David Cornwell has never stopped being the man that attracted MI-5 and-6 when he was recruited early on in his career. He is capable of enormous leaps of understanding—and judgment, when it comes to it. A few of his books will remain in the stacks, long-lasting as literature, because he managed to capture something we acknowledge as real, if dark and depressing and somehow enormously sad.

This le Carré autobiography is arguably even more engrossing than his novels because he applies his writing talent and unparalleled observation and pacing skills, but he shares the sources of his inspiration, highlighting for us where his characters diverge from their real-life counterparts. Real people in real crises are almost always more interesting than their fictional counterparts, aren’t they? Best of all, we get cameos of famed leaders and crooks, winners, losers, and those who tried.

The most affecting bits he saved for the end, where he talks about his “confected” childhood memories, including a mother, all angles instead of curves, whom he met at the age of twenty-one and who talked nonstop about Ronnie (his father), but supplanting the “he” with “you.”

A family of storytellers, then, and it all manifest in a man torn between the truth and it’s opposite. Cornwell could tell a scam from a mile away, which is why he never went public with the “tell-all” offered to him by Nicholas Elliott, best friend and colleague of Kim Philby, one of the most infamous double agents in British Intelligence history. But hearing Cornwell take on the voice of Elliott as he ostensibly spilled the secrets regarding the still-classified debriefing with Philby in Beirut is something you do not want to miss, even if you aren’t aware of the significance of that confession.

A couple of meetings with Yasser Arafat stand out, as does his unrehearsed seventy-five minute live interview with French television personality and host Bernard Pivot. Cornell speaks so glowingly of what a phenomenon Pivot was on television that I will forever regret not knowing enough French to understand Pivot's wit and sense of style.

This book gives enormous pleasure, whatever your preferred method of consumption. The revelations may seem out of date to some, but it is actually one of those memoirs that never go out of date. Classic, I think they call it.

Below, an excerpt from the audio, read by le Carré:




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Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, this novel comes after a long history of successful poetry, novels, and screenplays by Levy, so we are primed to find it praiseworthy. And it is, but she very nearly tips us into the deep, endlessly cycling the trauma of caring for someone apparently suffering a psychosomatic illness. To make it thrilling, Levy throws in parallels to Europe’s debt crisis and America’s pushy Big Pharma colonization. If you take the cover story as what Levy was trying to convey, you miss the beauty of her satire and the humor in her (wo)man-made disaster.

Sofia Irina is a half-British half-Greek anthropologist, trained to look for cultural memory which links the past to our present attitudes and actions. She quit working on her Ph.D. ostensibly to care for her mother, who is unable to walk. No explanation can be found for the mother’s malady so mother and daughter travel to Spain in hopes a specialist there may be able to elicit a cure.

The Doctor they have contracted with in Spain is a traditionalist who eschews Big Pharma, represented by a handsome gnat of a young man who seeks to discredit the Doctor’s carefully staged proofs that the illness Sophia’s mother suffers are in her head. The Doctor has a sexy Sunny vodka-swilling daughter who works with him and represents Spain’s youthful disdain for the old ways. It goes on like this, each character representing something larger than themselves, culminating in Levy's masterpiece: a luscious blond German autocrat attractive to both sexes who manages to import old fabrics from China and export them again at a markup after she adds her skillful embroidery.

An early scene which derailed a fine reviewer was the one where Sophia, delighted to find herself by the beach in sunny Spain, swims far out only to be stung by the swarms of medusa jelly-fish that have become a menace due to overfishing. (The birthplace of Medusa is Greece.) She runs back to shore to be treated for the painful stings, only to realize late that her bikini halter has broken and she is topless, jiggling insanely as she stomps about with the pain.

Besides the enormous fun we have with Levy’s impersonation of financial crises, there are other themes Levy raises about an adult daughter caring for her mother in illness. Again and again in the course of the novel, we are pointed to the notion that some people would never consider doing things that are not to their own advantage. This notion is first explicitly stated when Sophia visits her estranged and happily remarried father to ask for financial assistance or, at the very least, moral support for her efforts to care for his first wife. What some might consider his debt or obligation, he refuses to honor. His new young wife snorts with derision that he would consider doing anything not to his advantage.

Women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters—often do things not strictly in their best interests. They do it out of love, usually, or say they do. But when one is the head of one’s own household, one is responsible for oneself—to oneself—to manage, to persist, to succeed. How one succeeds is not always by putting oneself first. [I might point out that people who put themselves first in every instance are the most unbearable and uncivilized bores, to say nothing of the possibility of culpability in a large societal context.]

There is more in this novel: forbidden love and lustful sex, fabulous deep white cotton sheets from Berlin, blue embroidery thread that spells out a mistaken and potentially lethal message, a pregnant white cat and a chained dog who howls whether or not he is leashed. I don’t want to take all the fun out of this novel by speculating on possible meanings of these for readers. Keep your eyes and mind open for the delights this novel offers and try not to be frustrated with the air of post-adolescent confusion. The claustrophobia of a strictly line-by-line reading might lead one to underestimate what Levy was attempting. If the stage is set for a close (re)reading, I think you will find yourself instead enjoying Levy's facility with keeping many balls in the air at one time, once again earning our respect.

I was helped in understanding this novel by many reviewers at the online site Goodreads, including one in particular, whose great insights pushed me to examine my initial lackluster evaluation more closely.


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