Borges' Library

A blog that will interest almost no one...

Hell Bent

TELEMMGLPICT000191855995_trans++pVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08
 
 
First appeared at the Dublin Review on March 1, 2020--read in Caltech Book Club.

The Parade, by Dave Eggers, Hamish Hamilton, 192 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 9780241394496

Dante might have borrowed his idea for hell’s antechamber from the Book of Revelations (3:16): “But because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth.”

Dante’s third circle of hell lies just inside the gates: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But it is still on this side of the River Acheron, across from which is hell proper. This is why the third circle is sometimes referred to as hell’s antechamber. A place for cowards and fence-sitters. Opportunists, wafflers and neutrals. That is to say, this is where most people will end up.

This is the world we find ourselves in in Dave Eggers’s latest novel, The Parade.

There are two men. They have no names (only numbers) and no physicality; no distinguishing features beyond their defining sin. Four is an opportunist. He is a fence-sitter. He is a guy who wants to get the job done so he can collect his paycheck and get back to his family. In contrast, Nine is defined by his insatiable appetites (and so probably belongs in hell proper). Nine is there to drink in the world. He doesn’t think of consequences. He might be a rapist. While neither are good, neither are completely bad either. Four is devoted to his wife and daughter back home, and Nine gives away crucial medical supplies because, he says, “The people need them more than we do.” And Nine notices the beauty of the stars at night, while Four doesn’t care.

In a nameless landscape equally devoid of distinguishing features, Four and Nine have been hired to pave a road connecting the remote south of the country to the capital in the north. This is a development project entrusted to a foreign subcontractor and presumably funded by a first world country. America? Japan? Back in the 1990s, when Japan was the world’s greatest foreign aid donor, my ex-husband was part of a team like this. Funded by the Japanese government, he was hired by a Japanese subcontracting company to build schools and public toilets in Lesotho, in southern Africa. Everyone on the project was Japanese— many of them long-timers in Africa.

Imagine the Sudan. Imagine South Sudan. Imagine any failed country. Eggers does not give us too many clues other than to paint a picture of a place where rebels in mirrored sunglass drive around in chauffeured cars with gun-toting guards and no matter what question you ask you’ll never get a straight answer.

Four is tasked to man the gigantic paving machine, while Nine goes ahead to clear the path. Their only goal is to get the project finished on time. In twelve days, Four is told, the government has planned a great parade along the new road. A civil war has just ended, you see. And the parade is set to mark the occasion.

So, maybe hell is a failed state in Africa? Or is hell really the development aid project working there?

In Lesotho, the members of the team talked a lot about the futility of their work. I asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to help the people in Lesotho to build industries and gain know-how so they can build their own schools? Their own public toilets?”

“Of course, it would be better!” they replied. “All of this stuff we are giving them, the cars, the toilets, the buildings, will become junk if they don’t have local industries to make repairs and maintain the equipment.”

I wondered at the time, if more harm wasn’t being done than good. About ten years ago, esteemed economist Dambisa Moyo wrote the book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. In the book she said that foreign aid to Africa has not only been a failure but that it is malignant. Nine and Four are guys just doing their job, sure. But do they really have any idea ‑ do they even care? ‑ about the consequences this road might bring?     

“Hurting themselves by harming others,” we know from reading Dante that those in hell choose to be there. Feckless and friendless, Eggers’s two characters seemingly live with a terrible void within themselves. With no sense of community, no overreaching authority or collective vision to make sense of things, they utterly fail to “get it”. It is an epic failure of imagination.

Ultimately a depressing book, some reviewers found The Parade unbearably cynical. But is it? Eggers, we know, has seen his fair share of Africa and foreign aid projects. He has travelled widely, not only in Sudan for his nonfiction book The Lost Boys of Sudan; but also extensively in Yemen, when he was working on his bestseller The Monk of Mokha. Eggers is known not only for his literary genius but for his charitable works as well. He is not a guy who just writes a cheque. He thinks about things deeply and acts accordingly.

In his literary style he is reminiscent of Haruki Murakami. That pristine style that will get under your skin in some uncomfortable ways. Reading The Parade, I kept thinking of Hannah Arendt’s description of the Nazi Eichmann. Painting him as a cog in the wheel, that was the banality of evil: its utter lack of imagination. In Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, the librarian Oshima says it like this:

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine … just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities.

Imagination is essential for human understanding and compassion. What Hannah Arendt taught us, however, is that this imagination must be collective. In her words, the human heart must go visiting, otherwise we lose our power to be moral. The ability to look at the world from another’s point of view in an imaginative way. Kant required this of us. And perhaps novels like The Parade and Kafka on the Shore help us to see it too. Even in times like our own, when we think “nothing will come of it”, now more than ever, novels like The Parade serve an important purpose. In allowing us to see the consequences of our failure of imagination, we see the harm that is not only done to others, but to our own selves as well.

1/3/2020

Leanne Ogasawara has worked as a translator from the Japanese for over twenty years. Her translation work has included academic translation, poetry, philosophy, and documentary film.
 

Comments (0)

Piano on the Left Bank

GetImage

 

Today was the last day of Caltech Women's Club Morning Bookclub for the 2018-2019 Year. My third year with the club, I am still not okay with an 8am bookclub! Though my whining for pushing our meetings back till 10 fell on deaf ears, we did read Towers of Trebizond this year, which I had wanted to do since the first year! The ladies seemed to loathe the book--but it was still a great year of reading over all! And it was really lovely having our last meeting of the year on the beautiful Caltech Library. Already looking forward to next year--highlights will be Rings of Saturn and Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Also Huckleberry Finn! We talked a bit about Notre Dame (our club is graced by a French lady named Micheline and our French speaking Francophile Anne). I shared my post on Chartres with Anne.  And I learned that Bev has some 4,000 bottle of wine!!! This reminded me that I had wanted to read Lawrence Osbourne's An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World! 

 

IMG_5272My review of today's book The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier, by Thad Carhart:

This is such a wonderful book about love of music and the way cities and things can capture our attention and enchant us. The beginning of the book, when he discovers this miracle of a piano shop on the Left Bank--but being an outsider (an unknown in the neighborhood) he is denied entry without an introduction, reminded me so much of my experiences studying tea ceremony in Japan. It is a world where making a sale or quarterly profits is simply not the bottom line. Like the piano shop, I arrived for my lessons with personal references (!!) and becoming a student was a serious commitment--not something light to try and maybe quit if it "didn't work for me." My son likewise when he wanted to study violin, had to observe other students in the studio for many months before the teacher would take him on. Like the piano shop, money is never the bottom line. The community spirit and shared love of music is. When money is mentioned it is very much the honor system. In Japan, once I was amazed to watch my teacher purchase a very valuable teabowl (more expensive then a small car), without mention of money. Her name was written by hand in the salesman's note book and she took possession of her new bowl.

I loved learning about this world of the piano shop and the way the customers and craftspeople formed a real community. The author had lived in France as a child so language was not an issue--music was a bit more of an issue, since he had left behind his piano playing days in childhood. A really moving part of the book was watching the way he toyed with the crazy idea of buying a piano and taking lessons again. Isn't this what life is about? New adventures? Falling in love with life again? And also the power that objects can exert over our human imagination?

IMG_5139I am beginning piano lessons at 50. Part of the reason for my own desire to take up an instrument so late in the game is quite simply that my husband once fell madly in love with a beautiful old Steinway. This instrument exudes such charisma in the house that I have found myself really drawn to it. This made Carhart's story even more real to me.

In America, we are mainly accustomed to Steinways on stage and also I think Japanese uprights. For example, I had never heard a Bosendorfer until recently in Vienna, I overheard someone playing on a piano behind a closed door in Beethoven's Eroica Hall, in Palais Lobkowitz. Even through the closed door, I could immediately hear it was not a Steinway. It sounds more like huge chimes or bells. I fell in love with the sound. Later that day on a music tour, I went back to the room (pianist now gone) and saw it was a Bosendorfer. The lady sharing my tour was a piano teacher from Florida who said she had worked her entire life to finally feel herself ready to play on a Bosendorfer--a piano which she treasures. I have never seen nor hear a Fazioli but was fascinated by that chapter in the book!

This book is an old-fashioned story of love. No tedious personal details, no strong opinions or conclusions... just a delightfully charming read!

The list for this year was (my choices with a *):

September 10 Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng) 

October 8 Reservoir 13 (Jon McGregor)

**November 12 The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (Sy Montgomery)

December 10 The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (Lisa See)

January 14 Cannery Row (John Steinbeck)

February 11 The Paris Apartment (Michelle Gable)

**March 11 Towers of Trebizond (Rose MacCauley)

**April 8 Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman (Richard

Feynman)

**May 13 The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (TE Carhart)

Highlights were Other Minds, Towers of Trebizond and I loved the Piano Shop. I also LOVED re-reading Cannery Row. Surprisingly, I disliked the Feynman book. 

IMG_5144

 

Comments (0)

Take My Camel, Dear...

Caltech libraryBy, Leanne Ogasawara

[Originally Published at 3 Quarks Daily]

There were not many things that drew me back to America, but the thought of joining a bookclub seemed like one potential perk of moving back. I am not sure if bookclubs exist to this extent in other countries, but in the US they are incredibly popular! More and more people I know had been joining, taking part and talking about their bookclubs... And, I became --slowly but surely--intrigued. 

So, when the time came and I found myself back in Los Angeles, I started thinking about--and really started heavy-duty dreaming about-- joining one. And not just any bookclub, but I was imagining a kind of glittering evening gathering, which could take place in various refined rooms filled with books and art. And obviously, there had to be alcohol. And definitely my bookclub needed men. Part of my fantasy involved a blurring of bookclub, cocktail party and supper club. I had visions of Turin-style appertivo; discussing Nietzsche over our campari; or a dinner inspired by the gourmand extraordinaire, Detective Mantalbano--featuring my famous caponata (in my fantasy, my caponata is legendary). 

My longings finally reached a crisis point last November when I read a really charming post at aNewscafe about a ladies' monthly bookclub in Northern California. The post was about the bookclub's most recent read: A Gentleman in Moscow, about which I was also reading and imagining a dinner party of my own. In my fantasies, I would have prepared a lavish dinner beginning with (of course) champagne and blini and then moving on to the mouth-wateringly-described Latvian stew with Georgian wine of the novel. The author of the blog post, Hollyn Chase, seemed to have it all--a gorgeous dining room filled with books, a fabulous menu plan and best of all, great friends.

Hollyn described her bookclub like this:

My book club started in 1993. There used to be eleven of us, but Linda moved to Seattle. Now there are 10. What I’ve learned over the years is that how people react to books reveals their core character and quite a few of their secrets.  After all these years, I can almost always predict who will like the book and who won’t and why. From an outsider’s perspective, we’re not very diverse. We’re all white woman of a certain age and privilege who have the luxury of being able to spend a bit of  time reading novels and entertaining.  But, we run the spectrum of deeply religious to atheist, very liberal to quite conservative. And there is almost a generation of difference in age from youngest to oldest. Each of us has been shaped over many years by many factors. We have seen our children grow—and some die—we have married, divorced and widowed. We have shared a lot; we understand each other. But we do not always agree.

This was last year, remember. She was therefore concerned about the then President-elect....who, she feared, would be the topic of the day (supplanting all discussion of the novel).

Reading her delightful post, I realized how old-fashioned bookclubs can be. In the old days, people broke bread and acted in "neighborly" ways with those whom they didn't always agree. Neighbors are neighbors--even if they aren't on the same page as you politically and otherwise. There is something great in this idea of friendship that moves beyond narrow requirements. I would say it has more of a chance element (like you can't choose your neighbors, your kids or your family...?) There are deal breakers, don't get me wrong, but I've always really felt it is important to break bread with people I do not see eye-to-eye with. And, there is the idea that family and friendships do "trump" politics and religion. Not long ago in these pages, I had written about my mom's gourmet club... those ladies have sat down to share meals for over thirty years --month in and month out; and like Hollyn's group, they range from Hillary to Bernie to Trump supporters; a rainbow of religions and backgrounds. And yet every month they sit down together. And more incredible, they can eat whatever is served--if there are dietary restrictions, no one makes a big deal. I overheard my mom's friends once remarking that they feel their own kids are incapable of this kind of flexibility (one kid is a vegan and the other has allergies and so on and so on...) Shared meals, they lament, are a thing of the past. Even within families, it is becoming harder and harder. A sense of play and flexibility, not to mention tolerance, seems to have disappeared from our world, where people take themselves more and more seriously.

Anyway, enough was enough, I thought. I need to join a bookclub.

Not knowing where to look, I checked out Caltech and discovered not one but two (as a "faculty spouse" I was already a member of the women's group first).

Okay, it didn't meet many of my "requirements." But beggars can't be choosers, right?

Rumer goddenFirst off, it was all women.

Fine, I thought.

But also no alcohol.

Challenging-- but I was still up for it. But get this: it meets at 8am. OK, this was totally and completely crazy. 8am???? But, still I went forward! My strategy involved repeated cups of coffee starting two hours before I leave the house at 7:30 am and then a race out to campus hoping the cold morning hour will help revive me. And while there is food involved (breakfast), it is a restaurant situation at the Caltech Athenaeum, where each person can order what they like. (Also unfortunately, we don't meet in the library--pictured above-- but in a small room next door).

I must say, all these issues above were nothing when faced with the real problem: I didn't get to choose the books! Yikes.... (This was turning out to be more challenging than I had imagined!)

I should have thought of this because I am incredibly picky about what I read. For example, I don't read a lot of American fiction. Much of what I read is history, philosophy or novels in translation. And what is worse, I quickly found myself in the strange position of complaining to the other ladies about how I dislike "women's fiction."....(Did I really say that??)

Here was our list:

  • November 14 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gwande
  • December 12 Astonish Me, by Maggie Shipstead
  • January 9, 2017 This Life, by Karel Shoeman
  • February 13 Rise of the Rocket Girls: the Women Who Propelled Us From Missles to the Moon to Mars, by Nathalia Holt
  • March 13 The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough
  • April 10 Miller’s Valley, by Anna Quindlen
  • May 8 The History of Great Things, by Elizabeth Crane

I should say, all the books were recognizable great-sellers, many with New York Times reviews and no one could deny people love these books. So what went wrong? Well, I was bored to near death by Gwande, Holt and McCullough--but it was the novels by Shipstead, Quindlin and Crane that truly became my cross to bear. Reading these novels felt something like punishment (for a crime that must have been very bad indeed). Astonish Me in particular traumatized me--because the characters were such a perfect blend of unkindness and utter banality. A boring book filled with total narcissistic and petty jerks. One character more mediocre, petty and lowly than the next. But Miller's Valley and Great Things were also really challenging for me (those two in particular killed me because I had to put down this fabulous book called Galileo's Dream twice to catch up with the bookclub readings). As a woman, it felt like a form of betrayal to announce that I never read women authors but these books were not just written by women but they were for women (as all the reviews were overwhelming by women). I simply couldn't stand the over-focus on relationships in lieu of the world-creating novels of great ideas that I preferred. But it was, I suppose mainly that these novels reminded me of the romance novels I devoured when I was in my early teens (I was very precocious at 13 and luckily that stage only last a few years). 

It all made me think of something I read in Tom Robbins' memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, in which he also complained about the current state of American publishing. After all, he asks, “How many protagonists can one watch come painfully of age, how many bad marriages resolve or dissolve; and after a while who really gives a damn if the butler did it?” I was, in the end, saved by a French lady in the bookclub, who hated the books every bit as much as I did and would complain about what a bad mood they put her into and about how "banal" and "pathetic" the characters were. Phew! Totally agree. Anna Karenina was about a dysfunctional marriage, after all, but I think the individual stories about people are not the main focus, but rather are the hinge around which an entire world, religion, philosophy, great themes of humanity are explored. It is the narrowness of these “women’s” books, their lack of creativity, uplift, inspiration, unexpectedness, nobility, exploration, playfulness, etc.

Anyway, the good news is I love the group so much!! And this year I can have a part in choosing what we will read --and, and being mightily embarrassed by my pronouncement about "books for women," I certainly want to recommend one of my absolute favorite novels of all time, which happens to be by a woman--but definitely not for women only! 

TrebizondHave any of you read Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay?

Friends with EM Forster and Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay's novel is counted by Anthony Burgess as one of the twenty top novels of the century and by Joanna Trollope as "the book of a lifetime". The 1956 novel is fabulous and funny; delightful and inspired!

It also has one of the most famous opening lines in modern literature:

'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

A novel about love and the mysteries of faith, you could be forgiven for missing its main themes since the entire novel is mainly taken up with the details of the characters' Alice in Wonderland-like travels around Turkey on a camel. Yes, they travel by camel! Traveling about with Aunt Dot, who is there to convert the natives to female emancipation, and a priest (with the last name of Pigg), who is there to check up on the progress of his rivals Billy Graham and a gaggle of Seventh Day Adventists; the story takes a slight turn when the priest and Aunt Dot up and disappear across the Iron Curtain, leaving main character Laurie to ponder alone the problems of trying to be religious in the modern world (not to mention love and adultery). We are never even sure whether Laurie is male or female till the very end of the book--though we find out quite a lot about the camel as well as all manner of wonderful details of Trebizuntine (is that a word?) history along the way!

Oh, to be able to see the frescoes and painted dome ceilings of the basilicas of Trebizond ~~and the magical forests of Armenia, which she wrote about so beautifully....But suddenly, thanks to this wonderful lady writer (so nice to be reading female novelists!), I have it in my mind to try and see its westernmost edge. To travel along the southern banks of the Black Sea, wouldn't it be an adventure to head east toward Georgia to try and discover what is left of this vanished Greek-Byzantine-Ottoman civilization.....famed for its gravity-defying cliffside churches and Byzantine tunnels and fortresses. In the novel, the camel journey ends all the way in Jerusalem--Yes, all roads lead to Jerusalem.... 

It sounds like a real dream journey, doesn't it?   

 

  **

Picture of another favorite lady writer, Rumer Godden

Favorite novel of 2015: Relic Master

Favorite Novel of 2016: Laurus

Favorite novel of 2017: Galileo's Dream

Other Favorite novel of 2017: Carrere's The Kingdom

More on communal activities: Heaven and Hell in Modena

 

IMG_7333

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments (0)

Wesley the Owl

IMG_2773 2Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
by Stacey O'Brien

[Originally posted at Goodreads]

This is an amazing love story of a barn owl and his girl. It will make you cry-- for it is so incredibly sweet and moving. Before starting this book, I didn't know a lot about owls. I never realized how intelligent they are; never realized they mate for life or what dedicated fathers the males make! If someone had told me that one could form a bond and be able to communicate with an owl as one can with a dog, for example, I might not have believed it...

The story of the owl and his girl begins when the owl is only four days old. Author Stacy O'Brien is a lab assistant working in the owl lab at Caltech when her supervisor asks her to take on the baby owl. The owl was badly injured and would have died otherwise. She is tasked to adopt it and try and learn as much as she can about this remarkable creature. And he *is* remarkable!

He thinks of her as mommy. And later as mate!!! And Stacy O'Brien is very convincing in how well Wesley the owl can communicate. Interesting to imagine an owl can understand, "in two days" or "in a few hours.."

For me, this book went beyond the amazing story of the animal. It reminded me a bit of the the TV show, Durrell's on Corfu (and the books by Gerald Durrell who also loved animals so much) in how totally uplifting the story was. Indeed, we are living in such sad times that like the famous Wendell Berry poem about the Peace of Wild Things, this story really did make me feel hopeful. Just reading it, I could feel something like the poet described of:

"For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

The author had to struggle through an illness and it was heartbreaking to imagine what she was going through--but she had these friends who would do seemingly anything for her and then this glorious owl, who adored her more than anything in the world. My favorite parts of the book, in fact, involved those quiet moments when she looked into his eyes and described the peace and quiet she felt. In fact, she said, his eyes led her to God. It is such a beautiful story of a magnificent and dignified creature and a deeply compassionate and intelligent lady.

Anyone interested in Caltech will love the tidbits about Feynman and life on campus at a time when physicists worked nude or someone could walk around in a medieval jester's costume and still command respect. She described the trolls who live down below in the labs and her descriptions of the biologists were really engaging. I loved the book and really recommend it to everyone (am buying it for Christmas gifts this year).

My favorite quote of all:
'Live your life not by staying in the shallow, safer waters, but by wading as deep into the river of life as possible, no matter how dangerous the current. We have only one chance at this life.'

Comments (0)

Categories

  • About (1)
  • About the Librarian (1)
  • An Astronomer's Wife (32)
  • Baroque Science (3)
  • Bavarians (12)
  • Calendars (2)
  • Caltech Bookclub (4)
  • China (3)
  • Climate (2)
  • Dante and Columbus (4)
  • Don Quixote Diaries (22)
  • Dublin Review of Books (5)
  • Entropy (1)
  • Goodreads (11)
  • Habsburgs (7)
  • Heidegger's Translator (1)
  • Italy (2)
  • Japan (17)
  • Jerusalem (2)
  • Jolabokaflod (1)
  • Jottings on the Library (3)
  • Lists (4)
  • Medieval Predilections (2)
  • Mini-Syllabus (3)
  • Morning Bookclub (1)
  • Music (1)
  • Natural World (2)
  • NOTES (40)
  • Novels (2)
  • Philosophy (3)
  • Quantum Generation (1)
  • Re-reading (1)
  • Read in 2017 (11)
  • Read in 2018 (21)
  • Read in 2019 (8)
  • Read in 2020 (16)
  • Read in 2021 (12)
  • Read in 2022 (1)
  • Science (3)
  • Signorelli (25)
  • Silk Roads (2)
  • Spain/New Spain (2)
  • Tea (5)
  • Tears and Pictures (20)
  • The Librarian (1)
  • The Library (1)
  • The New Rambler (1)
  • The Sages (4)
  • The Sun Gallery 朱雀 Vermillion Phoenix (2)
  • The Tower 玄武 (1)
  • Three Quarks Daily (19)
  • Top Reads by Year (5)
  • Totem Poles (8)
  • Translations (6)
  • Vanishing Point (1)
  • 冬 (Advent/Christmas/Oshogatsu) (5)
  • 秋 (Fall) (2)
See More

Search