Review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been thinking recently – and this one has helped me crystallize some of my loose ideas – that there’s a distinction in what they call “high fantasy.” By definition such work imagines empire, imagines some idea of order that stands in contrast to the “low” chaos that some antagonist offers. (Never mind that most of the best recent fantasies – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Night Circus, The Vorrh, Jerusalem, Harry Potter, and even The Magicians – don’t deal with empire at all.)

In any case, I think there’s a line to draw between books that have a yearning for empire – as Tolkien taught all of us – and those that have a memory of empire. The distinction sets up much of the action of the novel, but I think it also establishes its politics. Books like The Lord of the Rings are, whether we realize it or not, fundamentally conservative. They want to restore that lost order and, even if they champion the capacity for characters to conceive of something new, that diminishes the potential of the individual outside the whole. Frodo is magnificent, of course, but he is so – as he only gradually learns – within the context of a great and lost kingdom of men. He can never be great by the standards of that empire; at best (and he is at best) he can be only a heroic commoner whom the great condescend to reward.

In books that have only a memory of empire, though – and that’s mostly the case with Game of Thrones – we get abiding skepticism about what came before. Empire isn’t lauded as a lost Eden; it’s seen as a persistent threat to the individual, to the character who has real and personal dreams.

I say all that because, while Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City has its flaws, it opens with a refreshing contempt for empire. Orhan is an engineer who finds himself accidentally the ranking officer in charge of defending a great city – think Rome or Byzantium – from an existential threat. He’s no fan of the empire; its clients wiped out his village when he was a child, and he has risen in its ranks even though his milk-colored skin marks him as an outsider and other.

Still, he takes on the task as if its another of the bridges he knows how to design. He’s drawn less by loyalty and ethics than by the simple engineering challenge of the operation.

That tells you much of the politics of this novel. In many ways, it has a deep cynicism toward everything. Orhan turns out to be more of a scoundrel than we might imagine. On top of that, Parker explores some of what it means to have an unreliable narrator recording his own deeds. Yes, Orhan makes one brilliant (or fortunate) decision after another, but he admits outright that it’s his story and he might, every so often, be exaggerating.

The primary fun of this is its focus on the problems of design. Orhan has to solve one crisis after another and, early on especially, it’s refreshing to get such nitty-gritty. This is an empire that turns not on the hoped-for return of the king but rather – literally – on a nail. Can they recover or fashion enough of them to repair and sustain the siege engines they need to resist the attackers?

I’ll confess that I think this gets weaker toward the end. [SPOILER:] I’m no fan of the plot twist that has the leader of the assembled army be Orhan’s long-lost childhood friend; as the two survivors of their village, they’ve both risen around the threat of the empire and its troops.

[Second SPOILER:] While I like the tone of the end of this when an accident alters the course of Orhan’s life and we’re shown how the siege looks to observers centuries later, it felt a bit as if Parker had run out of ideas. That’s not entirely a bad thing, though, since it largely reflects that he offered so many terrific and clever ideas in those early parts.

In the end, though, what redeems this from just a clever premise is its willingness to question the prevailing perspective of the genre. A little like Joe Abercrombie in The Blade Itself – but with a very different tone – it remembers what its world was like when an empire put everything into an order that gave little room for the self to blossom. It remembers empire, but it doesn’t yearn for it.



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Review: Birthright

Birthright by Erika Dreifus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m proud to call Erika a friend, so I can’t pretend to an unbiased reading of this, but I also can’t pretend I don’t admire many of these poems very much.

The central project here is Erika’s exploration of “birthright,” of that which she – and many other contemporary Jews – have inherited from our theological, cultural, and genetic forebears. In multiple ways, she explores how we can recognize what those named and unnamed ancestors have left for us. She doesn’t seize; instead, she reaches out gingerly. She doesn’t claim to own; she suggests instead that what we have today others will have in their turn.

Much of that project becomes clear in the opening poems (where some of my favorites are) but it also slowly becomes clear that the project is larger than simply understanding herself as a contemporary Jew. Yes, that’s central, but one moving element of this work is that Erika insists that all of what she experiences is part of her “birthright.” That’s true whether the subject is what it means to buy haircare products, to have a warm interaction with an old crush on Facebook, to deal with surgery for fibroid growths (that one with the powerful title, “Kaddish for My Uterus”), to acknowledge the mixed feelings of seeing armed security at her niece’s religious school, or to imagine various Biblical stories in the fresh light of the 21st Century.

There is in all that, a kind of implicit prayer. If you read the translation of Jewish services, it might surprise you to see how little we ask of the divine. I associate Christian prayer (perhaps wrongly) with petitioning, with praying for some particular blessing or outcome.

Jewish prayers, in contrast, are about gratitude, about acknowledging the power of the divine and praising it. With the exception of our prayer for healing, we spend our worship working to be appropriately grateful for existence itself.

That, I think is Erika’s project here. She names her experiences, her joys, and her disappointments, owning her gratitude for the life she’s been given.

In that light, my favorite of these may be “This Woman’s Prayer,” which begins:

Blessed be the One
who made me.
Yes, the One might have aimed higher:
made me smarter, nicer,
more loving, more generous.
But the One could also have done far less:
given me limitations and burdens
and weaknesses that might have broken me.

Another of the strongest ones here deals with that same owning of what is over what might have been even better. While a number of these grapple directly with the politics of Israel, my favorite is “Sisters, or Double Chai,” which concludes:

Like my younger sister,
Israel shares my blood.
I decided to keep any quarrels quiet,
because those outside the family
do not love her as a sister can
and does.

In perhaps the same vein, and opening the entire collection, comes “Puntlichkeit,” a poem in which Erika considers her family’s habit of being on time, perhaps too much so, to all events. It’s a funny series of reflections, conjuring awkward early arrivals, but it concludes with the revelation that it was just such a compulsion to be early – or some related impulse – that caused her grandparents to leave Germany while it was still possible for Jews to do so. It’s a haunting story, and the gratitude in it still registers even as the tone becomes dramatically more serious.

I have to include one more, the title poem, as a way of reflecting one what I’d sum up as Erika’s praise of a broken world. As she writes in “Birthright”:

Eyesight dimmed, aged Isaac
could nonetheless discern
the sound of one twin’s voice
from the other’s
and detect the scent
of each from his garments;

alas, how the story
might have shifted
could the patriarch have distinguished
Esau’s skin from a goat’s.

What a pleasure to be able to hear the work Erika is doing as she reflects on the wide range of the birthright that she experiences, and that she has shared. There is a lot to be grateful for in this world, and it doesn’t diminish our praise when we see the limits of that which we have been granted.


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Review: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stephen Greenblatt was one of the heroes of my graduate school era. He was perhaps the foremost of the Shakespearian New Historicists who provided a counterpoint to the deconstructionism that had overwhelmed the field several years before I arrived. Where the deconstructionists – calling themselves post-structuralists – were fundamentally concerned with structure (or its aftermath), the New Historicists insisted that texts took their meaning from context.

Greenblatt developed a method where we could show that texts didn’t simply rest on top of history (which is a shorthand for describing the “old historicism”) but that they shaped the history of which they were a part. Shakespeare didn’t simply observe Elizabethan politics; in perhaps the most famous example, Robert Devereux commissioned a performance of Richard II (a play about an uprising against a sitting English monarch) the night before he began his own failed uprising. That is, New Historicists see texts as shaping the way people see their age and, as a consequence, how they see new possibilities for themselves and their culture. And, incidentally, they showed a way beyond the nihilism of deconstruction – or at least what I came to see as its frequent nihilistic applications.

So, I’m all in on Greenblatt. People doing similar things in American literarature – like Sacvan Bercovitch and Anne Douglas – became the thinkers who guided my own eventual work, but he was the first to make clear what was possible.

That said, this a very interesting set of observations, but I’m not sure it’s an entirely coherent book. In some ways, it’s doing three different things – things that are largely incompatible as a straightforward story – and pretending they line up more neatly than they do.

One part of this is an explanation for the power of philosophy out of the epicurean school. It’s very interesting work, and I absolutely enjoy what Greenblatt has to say about the early thinkers in the field. Naively, I’d bought the case against those early thinkers. Epicurus, was not – as I’d heard – a supporter of gluttony, but rather someone who believed that, with the heavens disinterested in our human condition, we ought to achieve the highest happiness possible in our own lives.

Another, final part, is Greenblatt’s claim that Lucretius, the Latin poet whose De Rerum Natura turned that philosophy into poetry, was a central influence on the Modern world. I confess to some skepticism in all that, but Greenblatt does an impressive job of showing that the first wave of early modern philosophers – like Thomas More, Erasmus – and then later thinkers like Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and many others, were inspired directly by Lucretius (and therefore by Epicurus) as they created the modern world.

But the main part of this is the connecting story between those two points, the story of how an Italian humanist scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, found what might have been the only extant copy of De Rerum Natura in a monastery, had it copied, and then championed it so that, within a couple decades, it had become a major source of ideas for the early Renaissance world.

I like to think I’ve been in Greenblatt’s position in my own work. There are dozens of great stories to tell about various Jewish gangsters whose careers intersected but rarely ran parallel. The challenge is to find “a hero,” one character who sits at the middle of the story and ties it all together.

That’s who Poggio is in this. Greenblatt writes affectingly – sometimes over-the-top – about the implications of Poggio’s discoveries. (I can’t quote it, but there’s at least one line about how – had he known it – he was taking the future off the shelves and putting it back in the world when he pulled down the manuscript.) Never mind that, in a kind of mumbled voice at the end, Greenblatt confesses that there were at least a couple complete manuscript copies of De Rerum Natura extant in other libraries – manuscripts that survive today even as the one Poggio found has been lost. And never mind that, influential as Lucretius is, he was not the only source for Epicurian thought to survive into the Renaissance and into the Modern world. And never mind that, for all that Democritus and other proto-Epicurians talked about “atoms” that construct all things in the world, there were other significant scientific and philosophical sources for that general way of seeing the world.

So, by forcing what amounts to a wide range of Classical thought through the eye-of-the-needle story of Poggio’s recovery of Lucretius down to the notion that Lucretius is central to most Modern thought, Greenblatt seems to make his case too tightly. Epicurus apparently moved beyond Democritus by insisting that atoms could “swerve,” that there was what we might today recognize as a kind of quantum uncertainty that make free will possible. That’s good stuff, but it seems more parallel to what we understand today rather than – as Greenblatt insists – its origin.

And yet, this is ultimately enormous fun. Just as Greenblatt long ago taught me (and many more talented others) how to understand the ways that text can reshape the culture of which they’re a part, he makes a broader and ultimately fabulous claim. Lucretius may not be as central as he claims, and Poggio – central as he is to the story – isn’t the only reason Lucretius’s work came to be recovered, but it’s a great near-fantasy for the enduring power of philosophy and poetry to remake the world.

The bottom-line test of this for me is a simple one: now that I’m finished with this, I’m itching to read Lucretius.


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Review: The Good Earth

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had multiple, not-quite-sufficient-alone reasons for reading this. Above all, my student Alexis is doing very interesting work around the way Westerners imagine China, and this is a potentially crucial text in that argument. I’m also at least casually interested in those books that “mattered” at mid-century, the ones that may have been middlebrow but were also influential. And, it was on sale.

I mention that haphazard set of motives because I experienced the book in a strangely mismatched way.

I enjoyed the first several chapters very much when this seemed an unusual economic history. It’s compelling to read as Wang Lung slowly rises through his hard work and focus. Unlike his uncle and cousin, he guards his hard-won profits and turns them into additional land. The tiny copper coins he manages to save add up slowly to his path out of the peasantry.

I liked as well that he found such a partner in O-Lan, a woman clearly smarter than he is who is willing to work just as hard to overcome the indignity of slavery. Her generally impenetrable mien is powerful. We recognize the work Wang Lung puts into accruing not just wealth but dignity; we can only dimply sense the deeper and even more compelling incentive O-Lan has for rising from slavery to respect.

The general excellence of this continues through to the awful experience of famine that the family knows, but I confess it begins to work less well for me once they are in the city, away from the land. That may be to Buck’s credit – her thesis, after all, is that the land can give wealth and dignity to those who respect it – but it begins to feel like a different novel.

But then, [SPOILER:] I am troubled that the big leap forward comes not through the gradual accrual of wealth but through the happenstance of Wang-Lung and O-Lan each committing something like a crime. Each seizes property from the wealthy during an army attack and, suddenly, they have the money to return to the land and buy more. And eventually even more.

That change in focus from a careful economic rise to a sudden one troubles me, I think, because it glosses over the steady work the novel earlier praised. Wang-Lun is special originally only because his dream of rising is so focused. Later, he seems the beneficiary of a specific providence.

By the end, this feels much more conventional to me. It seems almost required that Wang-Lung will buy the estate where he was made to feel so diminished on the day he arrived to buy his slave wife from the mistress. (For what it’s worth Faulkner uses a similar trope a few years later in Absalom, Absalom! when he imagines Sutpen working his whole life to overcome the humiliation of being less than a slave when he visits a plantation as a child. No offense to Buck, but Faulkner wears it better.)

And [FINAL SPOILER:] with the concluding revelation that the sons intend to sell some of Wang-Lung’s hard-won land, we see what sounds like the beginning of the unraveling of the family fortune. (There are a pair of sequels, but I doubt I’ll read them.) The basic idea – the earth is good; you should trust it – seems simply overdone.

I look forward to talking with Alexis about ways this fits into her project, and I might care enough to read some summaries about the sequels. And I am glad finally to have read a book that still cast something of a shadow into the 1970s when I would see it on the shelves of many of the older relatives and friends I visited. But, as a novel that has a lot to teach us about how we experience the world today, I think this one is past its time.


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Review: The Alchemist

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My wife beat me to the punch with the line I’d intended to start my reflections on this: The Alchemist is this generation’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Then she took it a step further, reminding me that she enjoyed Jonathan Livingston Seagull when she was 13.

In many ways, I think that says it all. I didn’t know that much about the book except for the fact that a lot of people seem to have enjoyed it. It seemed to have acquired a reputation as contemporary ‘wisdom literature,’ something someone would encourage you to read if you were feeling down or uninspired.

If I squint, I get some of that. This is a fable, so you have to accept a certain amount of easy narrative and simplified conflict. Santiago sets off on a quest, and everything lines up to make that quest possible.

Still, there is something unquestionably adolescent about the whole business. We are told repeatedly that the universe is built to make true the dreams of those who believe most firmly. We’re assured that certain true believers – loosely defined so as to include those who fall truly in love – have a kind of secret path laid out for them; they just have to be earnest enough in its pursuit.

I can see how some people might be inspired to hear such a message at certain low points in their lives. I can’t see, though, how they can take it at all seriously. This is every bit as much a fantasy as Harry Potter, but, unlike there, we’re never invited to weight the real burdens of growing up. Instead, we are invited to stay within the confines of this comfortable, imagined strategy for confronting our individual destinies.

Perhaps worse, this sort of “prosperity gospel for the irreligious” seems to imply that failure is simply a lack of true faith in one’s destiny. It suggests that, if we aren’t fulfilled, we need to see how we passed up on the opportunities and “omens” that would have made us so.

As a result, this is pernicious in the way it gives us a fantasy for the privileged. Santiago may begin as a poor shepherd, but he’s always rich – literally so – in his capacity to choose the way in which he lives his life. This may not be about a seagull who see the world differently from his peers, but it’s the same entitled escapism. Most people fail to live their dreams because they are born into a poverty or connectedness that prevents them from self-indulgence. This book ignores that. Like the notorious Marie Antoinette, it invites everyone without sufficient bread simply to eat cake instead.
There is some fun here, and I like the way Coelho peppers the work with so many admiring references to Islam and the wisdom of other cultures. Plus, it reads easily, though I confess I grew bored with parts of it even though it’s a very short book.

Bottom line, I should have listened to my wife.


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Review: The Only Story

The Only Story by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m tempted to quip that this one is The Graduate meets Weekend in Vegas. And, at a basic plot level, it is something like that. Nineteen-year-old Paul falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, and they embark on a multi-year affair. Then, sometime later, Susan becomes an alcoholic, and Paul works in vain to “save” her from herself.

Barnes is a powerful writer, and describing the book as those stories well told does begin to do it justice. As this goes on, though, it becomes all that and something more.

Above all, this is a novel exploring the way the world looks to someone who has lived it. The frame narrative here comes from Paul, looking back on his own long life, and recalling what he has experienced. Early in their affair, Susan explains to him that everyone has a love story. It may be a failed one, it may even be one that never happened outside private imagination, but everyone has one such story. And it is, for everyone, “the only story,” the private and powerful experience of reaching out to someone else in a love he or she can’t then understand.

So, while the original love story comes with real grace and detail – their “court”-ship takes place over tennis and her husband is a three-dimensional boor – and her descent into alcoholism works as a powerfully sad story, what elevates this to the status of top-tier world literature is Barnes’s capacity for reflecting on the nature of story as self-definition.

It’s striking that this begins and ends in the first-person yet, for a stretch toward the end, it lapses into third-person. That feels like breaking the rules, but it works. And it works because Barnes insistently pushes us to consider the experience of how we narrate our lives to ourselves.

There are parts here that might be condescending in the hands of a lesser writer. Paul reflects on how, as an older man, he understands things he could never have understood in his youth. That could so easily be banal, but here it’s subtle and earned. As an older man, Paul is unfulfilled and idiosyncratic. He could not be the man he is without having experienced Susan. Susan is largely gone for him, though, and he can understand the relative disappointments of his later life only through story – as the titular only story.

It’s hard to say much more than that Barnes is justifiably one of the great writers working in our time. I understand him as one of those Booker-prize regulars, someone the British recognize as the best they have. I have admired a number of his earlier novels, and now I realize I have a real pleasure in front of me as I catch up on some of the others.


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Review: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is tough to read right now in this Age of Trump and McConnell.

On the one hand, it gives us Franco’s Spanish Nationalists as evident “bad guys,” as characters who are simply wrong. They were barbarous in their methods and execrable in their philosophy. Adam Hochschild says at one point that scholars quibble over whether Franco was an outright fascist, but it’s hard to think the difference matters much. He walked like a fascist, talked like a fascist, and slaughtered his “enemies of the state” like a fascist.

And, most chillingly of all, he won. His death didn’t come until the dawn of my own near adult understanding of politics, and I remember – from when it first appeared as a Saturday Night Live joke – Chevy Chase declaring, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Yeah, we laughed, and yeah, I didn’t get it. But, still, part of the joke was the uncomfortable notion that, into the 1970s, he was the embodiment of what we thought we’d destroyed in World War II.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know about the Republicans. I am confident I’d have sympathized with them, and even decades later I still wish they’d won. They spoke of equality. They were two generations ahead of most of the world on women’s rights. They had a sense of economic justice. And they had, in Lorca and others, a kind of poetry that the fascists could never have understood.

But, were they good guys or simply less-bad guys opposing the bad guys? Hochschild plays it both ways here. He finds elements of the Republicans – especially the anarchist POUF that attracted, among others the young George Orwell – the kind of idealists whose vision holds up. Other elements, though, were different. I cannot forgive the Republicans for killing an estimated 50,000 of their own “enemies.” (For perspective, the Nationalists are estimated to have killed three times as many during the Spanish Civil War and then many others after they won.) I also can’t forgive the slaughter of so many of the priests who, even if they’d given comfort to the authoritarian tendencies of some Nationalist supporters, were still fundamentally non-violent participants in the conflict.

Hochschild reminds us that the Republicans certainly lost in large part because the U.S. and others insisted on a neutrality that extended to an international arms embargo. The Republicans had the money to buy arms, but no one would sell to them. The Nationalists had no trouble getting things from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, though.

That left only the USSR to outfit the Republicans, and that imbalance gave ever greater power to the worst elements of the Republic, to the would-be Stalinists rather than to the more idealistic POUFs and other groups.

It’s in that midst that Hochschild studies the experiences of some of the Americans who were there. He talks at length about Bob and Marion Merriman. It’s a moving story, and he even implies that Bob is one model for Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bob was an academic, an economist, who – after a stint studying Soviet economic models – decided he needed to pick up a gun and defend the Republic.

What’s fascinating is that, at the same time as he experiences a love story with Marion, Bob finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into conflict. And, as he does so, he in particular is ever more beholden to the Soviets.

The result is that Bob, and the handful of others Hochschild explores most fully, were betrayed by the philosophies they most admire. The Soviets imported a cruelty to the experience that hardened it; the Americans, playing an awkward game of international and national politics, refused to enter the fight, which tipped it the wrong way.

So, to end where I began, what makes this hard to read right now is the sense that, faced with a clear wrong, there may not have been a right way to fight it. Franco and his allies were, at the beginning, a minority, and their philosophy was an ugly one that could have won supporters only through violence.

But the Republic, and the brave and admirable Americans who went to fight for it, was flawed as well. Heroic as the subjects of this book are, they lost, and their loss was prelude to the World War that would follow.

All of that is simply too hard to think about right now.


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