Book Review: 'seveneves' by Neal Stephenson

seveneves (2015)
Neal Stephenson (1959)

 867 pages

In one of my recent book reviews I recalled the 50-page-rule --- that a book should be given 50 pages before deciding whether or not to finish it. As I read Neal Stephenson’s seveneves, the rule most definitely did not come into play; I was hooked from the opening line, and when I first checked on my progress I was already 57 pages in, fully engrossed in the world he creates.

Set just a few years into our future, the book opens with, quite literally, a bang: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparently reason."

The explosion leaves behind seven large fragments, plus a cloud of smaller bits and pieces, and, once the initial shock of the dramatic change in mankind’s view of the heavens subsides, appears largely non-threatening. Within days, however, scientists begin to understand that the new arrangement in Earth’s orbit is not as stable and benign as originally thought, and the situation quickly devolves into an inexorable countdown to disaster, leaving humanity in a struggle against time and odds for survival. With a hard, if not precisely defined, deadline in place, the nations of the world organize their citizens around a dramatic build-up of the International Space Station (ISS), to create a refuge for humanity in space.

Stephenson has divided his story of the legacy of the moon’s explosion into three parts. The book opens with the initial disaster, and the reactions of the world’s peoples to the rapidly approaching deadline the Earth faces. The second part slips ahead to the moments immediately before the cataclysm, and continuing on into the first several years after it, as the contingent of humans in space attempt to achieve a sustainable existence from which the human race can again develop. The final third of the novel jumps to the far distant future, to what has developed from the humble re-beginnings of the first post-apocalyptic years.

Starting from a simple premise --- Earth’s people forced to find a way to survive an apocalyptic event by creating a viable, sustainable presence in orbit above the Earth --- Stephenson creates a truly epic vision of our future. He presents a rousing story of action and adventure, as the main characters careen from one predicament to the next, trying to avoid potentially species-ending disasters while they create their future home in space, and then, several millennia later, as they look back toward a radically altered Earth. Fortunately, however, Stephenson does not just settle for an easy, mindless thrill-ride in his novel; instead he works into his story significant detail, through descriptions of the psychological and physical realities faced by the characters. This was a choice that surely complicated the preparation and writing of the book, but adds tremendously to the drama of the telling.

The psychological aspects are perhaps the less surprising of these, given the pre-ordained apocalypse that no one on Earth can ignore. Beyond the obvious issues for those doomed to a certain death, and others crammed into a small space struggling to survive, Stephenson broadens the story to include the kinds of political and social maneuvering and intrigue apparent in even the most superficial review of our daily news, with of course the pressure cooker of an apocalypse to heighten the stakes. Human nature also survives the apocalypse largely unchanged, in Stephenson’s view of the future, complicating a future that may look on the surface dramatically different than our present, but in which not unfamiliar conflicts play out. All of this makes a spicy addition to what would otherwise have been a quite run-of-the-mill science fiction tale.

Stephenson’s novel truly shines, however, with his descriptions of the science of what occurs in the novel, the physics and engineering behind much of what happens. Not satisfied, for example, to simply describe the shifting of a space craft from one orbit around the Earth to another, he explains the many challenges that such a seemingly simple maneuver entails, the why behind the significant planning and energy required. Taking what could easily have been distracting asides, Stephenson works them into the flow of the novel, so that, even if a reader might not be interested in such details per se, the understanding provided actually adds to the intrigue and tension of the moment. And for readers are interested --- in the challenges of living and working and maneuvering in space --- the story becomes a fascinating exploration of what may be possible just short decades into our future (if, hopefully, without the need for an apocalyptic event to make them manifest.)

For most of the novel Stephenson pulls off this tricky integration of added scientific detail into the story. I will admit that one place it felt a little forced was in his description of weapons of the distant future; those few pages felt more inserted than most of the other such topics --- less seamlessly incorporated into the story. But, that quibble aside, I found the novel doubly compelling for having the added level of authenticity.

Fans of science fiction, and particularly post-apocalyptic fiction, will find a lot to enjoy in Stephenson’s engaging novel. With fast-paced action that keeps you pushing ahead for more, and nitty-gritty details that give you a feeling of intoxicating plausibility, it will be hard to set the book down once you start it.

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Other reviews / information:
In an interview in the Seattle Times, Stephenson is asked the question that will be on every reader’s mind when they finish the final page of seveneves:

Q: The end of “Seveneves” cries out for a sequel. Do you have one in mind?

A: There’s nothing currently in the works. A lot depends on what happens in the next few months, how people respond to the book, if there’s any interest in doing media adaptations. All science fiction and fantasy is about building worlds. When I was a kid, I remember reading Frank Herbert’s “Dune” for the first time. (There’s) a glossary of some of the unfamiliar terms used in the book. At first it was off-putting, though now it’s commonplace … by the time I had read through the glossary, I had a picture in my head of the way that this world works. It’s not just one story, it’s a whole world. … Almost any successful fantasy or science-fiction book is going to leave you with the sense that there could be more. 

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Influencing Machine" by Brooke Gladstone

The Influencing Machine (2011)
Brooke Gladstone
Illustrated by Jeff Neufeld

170 pages


Brooke Gladstone edits and, along with Bob Garfield, hosts the engaging and informative weekly National Public Radio program On the Media, which analyzes how the media reports stories, as well as the complex relationships between the media and its audience, advertisers, and government leaders. In 2011, building off of her many years of experience on the show, Gladstone released a graphic nonfiction book, The Influencing Machine, in which she reviews the long history of the media. She tells the story using a comic book format in which she herself appears as a character, serving as our guide as she distills down for the reader how the media has evolved, and the variety of psychological biases that challenge reporters as they do their work.

The story opens with a summary of the history of the media, starting in the ancient societies of Guatemala and Egypt, where rulers put in place people responsible for documenting their deeds. After brief stopovers in Roman Empire and seventeenth century Europe, Gladstone quickly focuses in on “The American Exception,” tracing the early development of the press in the American colonies, its growth in the newly formed United States, and on up to modern times.

As she traces the development of the press in the US, it becomes clear that this represents a kind of history of the country itself; we discover that many of the contentious issues playing out today between the press and the government have their origins in the early years of our Republic. So, for example, the Sedition Act signed into law by President John Adams in 1798 during an undeclared naval war with France empowered the government to restrict speech that it felt maligned its policies and officials. Though the act was allowed to expire a few years later under Thomas Jefferson, similar acts have reappeared every few decades, whenever the government has felt threatened by too much free speech.

Gladstone goes on to describe the conflicted relationship the press has had, and continues to have, with its audience. She points out that levels of public trust in the media have varied widely over the course of the republic, and that recently, aside from a brief spike after 9-11, have reached painfully low levels. The reason often given for this low opinion of the press is that it is politically biased --- generally expressed as being too liberal.

The real problems for the media, Gladstone claims, are a host of other biases, which she examines in successive, short chapters: Commercial Bias (novelty sells), Bad News bias (threatening events sell), Status Quo Bias (resisting change sells), Access Bias (reporters enjoy contact with powerful figures), Visual bias (pictures sell), Narrative bias (stories with a clear beginning, middle and end, sell), and Fairness bias (bending over backwards to appear balanced sells). She notes that it can be all too easy for the media to fall into these various biases, often under the claim of giving the public what it wants. As she makes clear, however, each of these biases serves only to pervert and distort the reporting being done.

In an extended section she looks at how the negative effects of these existing biases become strengthened in times of war, as reporters struggle between their role as journalist and their role as citizens, and the government and the military balance the need to get the story out that they want told, while keeping secret what they don’t want revealed. Gladstone takes examples from the U.S. Civil War up through the War in Iraq to describe how the press, the government and military have performed a complicated dance with one another, each seeking the maximum advantage. As she points out, the public often suffers from the resulting confusion and obfuscation.

Her discussion on the role of the press in war-time leads directly to her next topic: Objectivity. She calls it “an unreachable goal – because it’s unprofitable to ignore your readers’ emotions, assumptions, and values,” (98) and goes on to describe the challenges to achieving it, using examples from as far back as the early 1800’s.

A particular aspect of Objectivity that she discusses, one that has been addressed extensively by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, is that much of the press constrains its reporting to within starkly defined limits. She cites a description from ‘historian Daniel Hallin [that] divides the journalist’s world into three spheres’, with reporters limiting themselves to a narrow, doughnut-shaped region of what’s allowed to be reported on, a region bounded on the inside side by “consensus ... unquestionable values and unchallengeable truths,” and on the other by “deviance ... the place for people and opinions that the ‘mainstream of the society reject as unworthy of being heard.’” Again citing Hallin, Gladstone notes that the mainstream media not only confines itself to these hard bounds, but also “plays gatekeeper, by defining and defending ‘the limits of acceptable political conduct.’”(105) To go beyond these bounds to be marginalized, almost by definition.

This last thought plays into perhaps the most critical role of Gladstone’s book, her debunking of the idea that there is some sort of conspiracy of the media, through which the media are attempting to control the public --- that is, that there is an “influencing machine” at the heart of the media. Already in the Introduction, Gladstone firmly declares

There is no conspiracy. Even though the media are mostly corporate-owned, their first allegiance is to their public because, if they lose that allegiance, they lose money. … Conspiratorial. That’s a joke. Craven? Not quite so funny. (xiv)

The book comes in at some 170 pages and with its comic book format one could imagine that ultimately there is not much content. Quite the opposite is true, however; Gladstone has done an excellent --- and undoubtedly crazy-time-consuming --- job of condensing a huge amount of detailed information into each page, using the strengths of the comic strip format and the wonderful illustrations by Jeff Neufeld, to reinforce and amplify her message. Someone looking for a clear and yet compact summary of the role of the media, and the issues facing it, would be well-served starting with Gladstone’s excellent book.

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Other reviews / information:

For Noam Chomsky's take on the limitations within which the media operate, and which they also help to enforce, see for example Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, a thorough and pointed discussion of the history and implications of the situation.
 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Siege in the Room" by Miquel Bauçà

The Siege in the Room (1997)
Miquel Bauçà (1940-2005)
Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent

 149 pages

When you hear about the so-called 50 page rule, the discussion seems to fall into two camps: those who tend to stop reading a book they don’t like after just 10 or 20 pages, and so use the rule to force themselves to always give a book at least 50 pages before quitting on it; and those who generally always finish a book they start, even if they have to struggle through it, and use the rule to give themselves the excuse to sometimes quit a book early. My tendencies place me firmly in that second group: I try to be selective when I choose a book (so probably miss out on some good ones --- there’s no perfect solution when time is limited), but once I start a book, I feel a commitment to the author to finish it. Even when I was in principle following the 50 page rule, I only seldom invoked it; nonetheless there were a few books I gave up on.

Then, some years ago, I read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. As I approached the 50 page mark, I found myself on the verge of setting it aside --- there were another 500 some pages to go, and I wasn’t finding myself engaged. Suddenly, on page 48, Vargas Llosa’s story reached out and grabbed me by the neck, and it didn’t release its grip until I had finished the book. I recall the moment when it took hold of me very clearly, including my realization that, if the typeset or the structure of the edition had been ever so slightly different, and what I read on page 48 had been instead on page 52, I may have quit too early, thus depriving myself of an amazing, thrilling, engaging story. From that point on, my use of the 50 page rule went from seldom to essentially never.

But.

The idea of it, the option, has still been there in the background. And I must admit that, as I struggled through the first of the three novellas by Miquel Bauçà collected into The Siege in the Room, I was tempted to set the book aside. Ultimately I persevered --- in part because the 50 page mark was already a third of the way through the book anyway--- but it was a dogged fight on to the end.

That said, I don’t necessarily want to scare you off from giving these novellas a try. The first, Carrer Marsala, won literary prizes in Barcelona, and brought Bauçà some amount of fame; the fact that, according to the translator’s introduction, Bauçà steadfastly refused to acknowledge these honors, and the resultant renown, may ultimately not be wholly unrelated to his challenging writing style. Picking up this book, you just need to enter with an understanding of Bauçà’s style in these novellas, and your own preference as a reader.

The three stories are each told in a first person, stream of consciousness style, though in each case by a narrator who doesn’t bother to fill in any background, and who is unable to maintain a coherent train of thought for more than a few successive sentences. That is not to say that our narrator’s ruminations are random; rather, he follows a line of thought for a couple few sentences, then suddenly keys in on some element of what he has just told us, and allows it to take his thoughts into a new direction, only to diverge yet again onto another path a few sentences later.

The result is a surreal mixture of introspection that sometimes can seem on the verge of a profound conclusion, before veering again and again into the banal. The overall impact of his style is best comprehended by simply reading several pages of one of the stories, but, to give a hint of what to expect, here are the opening paragraphs of the first story:

Maybe the world hadn’t always been sad. When we say our words are dragged down by inertia, we mean that what we learn as a pup stays with us. The same applies to other things. Girls, for example, use the phone but don’t know its precise function.

I spread my fingers. Carefully I study the outline of their bones. Who can deny me this innocent activity? More than one person might be annoyed by it. Many people believe that it’s impossible to agree with all your neighbors at the same time. Faced with this situation, isn’t it only fair to choose what best suits me? (5)

This first story continues on in this manner, with no definable plot, or even a recognizable order to what we learn about the narrator and his world. The effect is one of tapping into the mental ramblings of a somewhat paranoid loner, who is looking out at a frenetic world, unable to find a stable place within it.

The second novella, The Old Man, is told in a similar style, though it at least contains a single, tiny plot point, around which the narrator’s thoughts revolve. Specifically, he recalls having moved into an apartment building to which came an “officer who, on the first Wednesday of every month, climbed the stairs to give the old man on the first floor a beating.” (67) Curious to learn why this happens, but hesitant to become involved in the loathsome gossip-mongering of the menagerie of his fellow residents, our narrator drifts along on the edge of resolution, and of coherent thought.

In the final novella, The Warden, our narrator is apparently the charge of a female warden, though the precise relationship between the two appears more complex than simply that of a prisoner and jailer. The narrator describes moments of apparent (or imagined?, or past?) freedom, but his thoughts always return to the enigmatic connection he has with his jailer.

In each of these three novellas there is the indication of the passage of time; in the first story, for example, the narrator mentions at one point that “Today … is … Thursday,” and, a little later, that “Tomorrow is Saturday.” But these statements provide no firm handle for the reader to grasp onto. If anything they imply, or perhaps reinforce, that we only get pieces of the narrator’s thoughts, stitched together. The point of the stories seems to be the particular style and structure Bauçà created; the plot remains unimportant. A potential analogy in art, for example, would be the movement from paintings that tell a specific story --- historical or biographical or religious --- to Surrealist art, in which a coherent story can be difficult to fathom.

If you appreciate the surreal, or simply like to experience unusual forms of storytelling, give Bauçà’s three novellas in The Siege in the Room a go. Just prepare yourself for a strange ride.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Our Only World" by Wendell Berry

Our Only World (2015)
Wendell Berry (1934)

 178 pages

… the industries of landscapes: agriculture, forestry, and mining. Once they have been industrialized, these enterprises no longer recognize landscapes as wholes, let alone as the homes of people and other creatures. They regard landscapes as sources of extractable products. They have “efficiently” shed any other interest or concern. (p. 6)

With this emphatic statement Wendell Berry introduces his central theme early in Our Only World, a collection of ten recent essays in which he returns to and further refines ideas with which he has been involved for many years as an author, activist and cultural critic. Over several of the essays Berry highlights the damage done to the land by our modern, industrialized approach to agriculture, which focuses largely, if not exclusively, on the efficiency of farming operations while ignoring the impact of this focus on the land and the people who live on it.

Berry goes on to deeply implicate our modern lifestyle as a key underpinning for the powerful grip that the industrialized approach holds on agriculture. Despite the grim picture he paints of the current state of affairs in our rural areas, however, Berry does also give examples of people developing and implementing ways to return to more sustainable methods of farming and working the land. He argues that these approaches most coalesce into a broader movement, if we hope to survive over the long term.

Reading these essays by Berry, I was reminded of a statement made by Colin Tudge in his 1996 book The Time Before History: 3 Million Years of Human Impact: “… the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people.” A simple sentence on the face of it, but reading it I had both the feeling that it was an obvious and fundamental truth, and that I had a sudden, new-found understanding of reality; it radically altered my view of the world, well beyond agriculture. Tudge, like Berry, did not mean to imply that a particular farmer does not take pride in the food his work provides; his point was instead that agriculture as a system, as an industry, exists not to feed people, but rather, as Tudge goes on to say, “[has] been designed primarily to fit in with prevailing economic norms, or to justify some political conceit or other. Thus, western agriculture [for example] is designed in the end to maximize profit.” (p. 325)

Berry draws the same conclusion in his essays, but as part of a broader point. He argues that prioritizing profit-driven crop selection and efficiency-driven farming techniques, while ignoring the fitness of a particular piece of land to support these choices, causes modern industrialized agriculture to destroy the land, and so, ultimately, all of us. Fritjof Capra makes a similar point in his book The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living: “our complex industrial systems … are the main driving force of global environmental destruction, and the main threat to the long-term survival of humanity.” The destruction may be more gradual in some places, more rapid in others, but the end result is in either case inevitable.

Berry notes that this destruction occurs both directly, say in the erosion of the soil through industrialized farming practices and the degradation of surrounding waterways and forests from the run off of the herbicides and fertilizers needed to sustain these techniques, and also indirectly, through the loss of the historical knowledge of place fundamental to both good land management and a close monitoring of the health of the land. He borrows from the environmentalist and author Wes Jackson the concept of the “eyes-to-acres ratio.” Thus, Berry observes, as farms become more industrialized operations requiring far fewer workers, both farmers and those who support farm-work leave their rural hometowns to find work; and, as these small towns decline in population, they also lose the knowledge that had protected the land for generations. This removes yet another restraint on the implementation of efficiency-focused improvements that result in destructive farming practices, and thus further hastens the ruination of the land.

To counter this growing calamity, Berry calls for a return to a less industrialized form of agriculture, to farming done with an understanding of which crops and techniques best suit the particular land being farmed. This would lead to a shift from a regime in which profit stands alone as the sole priority, to one in which sustainability --- of the land and the people on it --- plays a significant role. He describes nascent, locally-centered approaches to growing food that he says mark a return to smaller farms and markets that operate through a deep knowledge of the land being worked, and he calls for these efforts to be supported and expanded. He describes the 50-Year Farm Bill, legislation that he notes currently has little chance of passing in Congress, but has as its goal a complete revamping of our agricultural systems into a more sustainable direction.

The challenge, as Berry recognizes, is to create the space to implement these more locally-organized, and so sustainable, approaches --- the economic space not present in modern, industrial agriculture. Berry’s solution, in proposals described across several of these essays, is a return to an earlier form of working and living on the land. He acknowledges that for this to be possible, however, we must all of us turn away from a profit-driven society and toward a much simpler way of life, with the ultimate goal of having a significantly reduced impact on the world, and a much closer connection to the land. This ultimately means leading a less energy intensive way of life, one more centered on our local communities, our neighbors and the land on which we live.

At one point he concedes that

It may be that we can keep without harm some industrial comforts: warm baths in wintertime maybe, maybe painless dentistry.

One can read this as a bit tongue-in-cheek, but certainly it’s intended to confront us not only with the extent of his proposal, but also the generally unacknowledged, and often unrealized breadth of connections between our industrialized society and our daily lives, and so the impact of our life-styles on the world. It is not just in the ever more wondrous techno-toys offered us; our industrialized society touches nearly everything we do in a day, unless we are simply out for a walk near our homes, or working in our gardens. His prescription can seem, and in fact is, a tall order. But, as his review of the ecological damage wrought by industrialized agriculture --- on our land and so on us ---- makes clear, such a change of living standards may eventually be “forced upon us” by environmental events. (p.150-151)

One essay in this collection deviates from the topic of land use and sustainability. In Caught in the Middle, Berry opens with the observation that

in the present political atmosphere it is assumed that everybody must be of one of only two sides, liberal or conservative, … [that] we appear thus to have evolved into a sort of teenage culture of wishful thinking, of contending “positions,” over-simplified and absolute, requiring no knowledge and no thought, no loss, no tragedy, no strenuous effort, no bewilderment, no hard choices.(p. 73-74)  

He then goes on to write a brilliant and stirring plea for the recognition of a middle ground, a place where complexity is embraced, and easy, thoughtless answers are shunned. He grounds the discussion in what have been, and remain, two highly controversial subjects: abortion and homosexual marriage. On abortion he points out fallacies and inconsistencies in the arguments on both sides of the debate, and, after clarifying his own personal view, makes a strong case for a clear political solution to the issue. On homosexual marriage, too, he debunks the most commonly heard arguments, and concludes by going back to the Bible to define and defend the rights that, two years after his essay was first published, have now been secured by the Supreme Court.

Largely, however, these essays examine the damage our modern way of life is doing to the land, and as a consequence to all of us as individuals on that land and in society. Together Berry’s writings make a forceful call for each of us to embrace a simpler, quieter life, to become more attuned to the land we live on and its needs, and so to play a critical role in stopping the destruction that we, most of us, now contribute to when we ignore the impact our lifestyles have on our planet.

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Other reviews / information:

Along with the Colin Tudge quote I referenced above, reading these essays reminded me also of something from an article  by Bill Kauffman, for the Utne Reader (linked to here),

For almost 60 years, the placeless have waged war on the rooted, stealing their children, devastating their neighborhoods, wiping out local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. … What we have is class war --- though this war has never been acknowledged because the casualties are places and attachments and sentiments, nothings really, everythings, in fact --- waged by the mobile against the rooted, and the winners are the professionals, people so depraved that they would actually move to a different place for mere money. How bizarre.

I recently saw a bumper sticker relevant to this topic: “There is no Planet B”


I have also read by Wendell Berry --- though before I began writing this blog of reviews:

• In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World [2001]: essays that touch on our modern corporate and political society, and also on the importance of moving to more local economies.
• Citizenship Papers [2003]: 19 essays on a range of topics from the national security response to 9-11, to issues related to the agrarian and local economy themes of Our Only World.

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Man of Feeling" by Javier Marías

The Man of Feeling (1986)
Javier Marías (1951)
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

182 pages

As Javier Marías’ novel The Man of Feeling opens, the narrator addresses the reader directly, questioning whether he should tell us about his dreams, concerned that there isn’t a coherent story to be made of them. He assures us, however, that the dream he has just awoken from was different, that it was based on actual events from some years before. He then describe the moment when, while on a train to Madrid to perform in an opera, he raised his head from the book he was reading and took notice of the three strangers sitting across from him in the compartment --- two men sitting on either side of a woman.

In the dream, at least, the opera singer recalls feeling that it had taken him “a while to notice them, as if something were warning me or as if, unwittingly, I wanted to delay the danger and the happiness involved in noticing them.” (2) With this hindsight the reader proceeds forewarned of the conflicted relationship that will grow out of this chance meeting on a train. Indeed, the narrator then goes on to recall a moment, “shortly afterwards,” in which he is with the woman in a hotel room, telling her of his fear of dying alone.

Marías has structured the novel as a kind of letter or recollection, written by the opera singer over the course of a single day, in which he recounts the events from four years before that came back to occupy his dreams of the previous night. During his telling, the opera singer repeatedly warns us that he cannot always be sure whether he is remembering the actual events, or instead the interpretation of them in his dream. Thus we are left to rely on a narrator of uncertain fidelity, his doubts about the accuracy of his memories coloring both for us, and for him, the understanding of those events, and of the motivations and sincerity of those he meets.

After the initial description of noticing the trio of strangers on the train, and of his later conversation in a hotel room with the woman, the opera singer goes on to explain how he had met up with the three again in Madrid. By coincidence, the opera singer encounters one of them in the hotel bar a few days after the train ride, a man named Dato, and ends up in conversation with him. The opera singer soon learns that Dato’s two fellow travelers are a married couple, that Dato works for the husband, and that he has as his principal duty to act as a companion for the woman, Natalia, as she accompanies her husband on his business trips.

Having captured the opera singer’s interest, Dato goes on to explain that the woman is not very happy in her marriage, and that on these trips his job is to keep her from getting bored during the day, while her husband carries out his business activities. He confides to the opera singer that though “it’s completely illogical” (44), Natalia has never taken a lover. When Natalia enters the bar a few moments later, the opera singer finds himself, not unwillingly, co-opted by Dato into helping keep Natalia happy during their stay in Madrid.

We already know the opera singer and Natalia will end up in a hotel room together, and not so very long after their first meeting, thus the eventual outcome is not in doubt. Instead the mystery of the story lies in these four personalities circling one another, trying to divine one another’s feelings and intentions: the opera singer, who falls so precipitously in love with, Natalia, a woman he hardly knows; Natalia, apparently committed to her marriage, though, as the opera singer recalls from his first glimpse of her on the train, appearing to be “afflicted by a kind of melancholy dissolution” (9); Dato, who may be simply looking for some help in keeping Natalia busy, but could also be instigating an affair for her with the opera singer; and finally Natalia’s husband, who the opera singer describes as cold and exploitive, and who apparently has a powerful hold over his wife.

Though he serves as our narrator, we never learn the opera singer’s name, and, of the four main characters, his intentions remain at once the most banal and the most mysterious. He tells us about his life as a singer, traveling from city to city, constantly on the move, and of his success in his occupation, but he seems judgmental and utterly shallow in his observations about his own life and about the lives of the people he meets and interacts with. He complains about the loneliness and lack of stability associated with his constant traveling, but he clearly enjoys his success and is accustomed to pursing and getting what he wants. And, during his stay in Madrid, his attentions turn to capturing Natalia from her husband.

In his recollections of the events that brought him together with Natalia, he tends to describe the pursuit not in terms of his love for her, but rather the challenge of winning her from her husband. He recalls his struggle to understand the couple’s life together, based on the strange and cryptic information Dato has provided him, the pas de deux he watches play out between Dato and Natalia as he accompanies them on shopping trips and other excursions around the city, and brief encounters with Natalia’s husband. In an extended thought-scene that is vintage Marías, the opera singer imagines Natalia returning to her hotel room in the late evening, after having spent the day with him and Dato, and meets up again with her husband; jealously playing out different scenarios of this reunion, he creates versions alternatively hopeful and damning to his intentions to win her. Oddly, however, even looking back four years later, he seems unable to articulate what drew him to Natalia in the first place.

The novel, in fact, though nominally a love story, does not present the typical encounters and physical interactions of attraction and love one might expect. In the opera singer’s telling, he describes his pursuit of Natalia, but we hear little about moments when they are actually together. Natalia and her husband share a hotel room, but after the initial train ride we only briefly see them together; we are left to learn about their relationship second hand.

Marías engages the reader here not with physical action, but rather with the labyrinthine psychology of desire. The drama plays out in the mind of the opera singer as he recalls, through an uncertain mix of his memories and his dreams, the sudden appearance of three strangers into his life, and how this meeting led to unexpected changes in his life. In a subtle and compelling approach to storytelling that Marías has perfected, we recognize in the opera singer’s reminiscences --- in what he highlights and what he ignores, in how he interprets and is affected by what he has experienced --- our own insecurities, quirks and obsessions.

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Other reviews / information: Other works I have read by Marías, though I read all but two before I began this blog of reviews:
 • The Infatuations: A woman learns that the male half of a couple she has seen repeatedly at a café has been killed, and she becomes involved in trying to understand what happened to him; my review here.
• While the Women are Sleeping: A collection of short stories; my review here.
• When I was Mortal: A collection of short stories.
• A Heart so White: A novel of a man who upon getting married reconsiders his past.
• Dark Back of Time: A novel written as a kind of imagined biography; a study of human nature that will pull you in deeply and force you to consider ideas and fears you had tried to leave buried in your subconscious.

You can find quotes from some of these works, and from The Man of Feeling here.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Meaning of Human Existence" by Edward O. Wilson

The Meaning of Human Existence (2014)
Edward O. Wilson (1929)

207 pages

With The Meaning of Human Existence, renowned biologist and Pulitzer prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson could hardly have made a more ambitious, and alluring, choice for a title. Fortunately he rises to the challenge in this slim volume. Building on recent discoveries in genetics, biology and other scientific fields, he describes how certain critical aspects of human nature may have developed due to the evolutionary advantage they conferred. Based on these new understandings, he calls for a re-thinking of millennia-old philosophical and theological doctrines that have attempted to illuminate the “meaning of human existence,” claiming that there is an urgent need to search out new answers to this eternal mystery through a close collaboration of science and the humanities.

To be clear, Wilson does not address in this work the related, though also fundamentally different, question of the “meaning of life.” He does not delve, for example, into why the universe exists, or what constituted the beginning of the universe, questions that science cannot participate in answering, at the very least for the foreseeable future. Wilson focuses here instead on how we humans can pursue a deeper understanding of the meaning of our existence --- of our lives as individuals and as a species.

Wilson notes that for much of history, this question remained the purview of the humanities, that is, of philosophers and theologians. Then, during the age of enlightenment, it suddenly seemed possible that science could answer the question on its own, without resorting to the soft, non-scientific explanations of the humanities. Wilson notes that this path failed to deliver on the early promises of its promotors, as it became clear that --- not surprisingly, in hindsight --- the answers science discovered led only to deeper and more fundamental questions.

Along the way, however, significant steps forward have been taken in our scientific understanding of the development of human nature, according to Wilson, and he argues that in light of these new findings, we can reassess our understanding of the meaning of human existence. As a particular example, he points to the inherent tension in most human beings between their instinctive desire to follow their own self-interest, and their equally instinctive desire to belong to a group, which often requires suppression of self-interest. He argues that recent advances in such fields as genetics and biology support the proposition that there is an inherited predisposition in humans toward holding both of these conflicting instincts, simultaneously.

Wilson describes how the presence of these aspects of human nature, and the resulting tension between them, would have conferred advantages on our ancient ancestors, and so would have represented an evolutionary preferred outcome that became built into our genetic code. The argument is that pure self-interest may have been beneficial to a particular individual in the short run, but would have been disadvantageous to that individual’s tribe in its competition with other tribes, and so, in the long run, also to that individual,. On the other hand, having no self-interest at all would have turned us into what he refers to as “angelic robots” (p. 33), perhaps advantaging the group in a short-term sense, but dooming it over the long run when faced with more dynamic groups, whose members held the two instincts simultaneously and in tension.

The presence of this internal conflict can seem undesirable and unpleasant in the moment --- for an individual faced with a decision between following their self-interest or supporting their community --- but Wilson argues that it is critical to our human existence, to our rise beyond other species in the development of “human-level intelligence and social organization.” (34) Wilson in fact carries this argument a step further, specifically warning against the seemingly imminent use of genetic engineering to improve the human race, in the sense of eliminating such conflicting feelings and emotions, and creating, say, a more emotionally stable version of ourselves. He feels such a move would only diminish a key strength of our humanity, and so place us at risk of stalling in our development as a species.

More to the main point of his work, Wilson goes on to cite recent studies claiming a genetic predisposition in humans to embracing religious beliefs and religious structures. He notes that such instincts would have enhanced the cohesiveness and strength of a tribe relative to others whose members did not have the same genetic pre-disposition, thus fitting neatly into the larger picture of human beings advantageously balancing self-interest and group-interest. He argues, however, that these instincts toward religious and cultural belief systems, which support a group over its rivals, have cohered over the past millennia into dogmas that have resulted in a legacy of on-going discrimination and violence between groups, as we witness so evidently in the world today. What in ancient times provided advantage for one tribe over another, now leads to seemingly intractable conflict.

Building off these and other discussions in the book, Wilson makes a clarion call: the world must use the understanding that science has made in recent years to step back from the various dogmas --- whether religious among the spiritual, or political among the secular --- that pit groups against one another in violent opposition. Through renewed efforts in the humanities, we must move forward toward a new philosophy of human existence, a broader meaning that spans the species, as opposed to the current myriad of ideologies that exist among the groups we’ve divided ourselves into. He argues that science and the humanities must take this step forward together, that neither alone can suffice.

In lucid and engaging prose that invites a reader into a conversation on these topics, Wilson lays out his views on the current understandings of human nature and consciousness, and then coalesces these views into a proposal for a new path forward. To be able to solve the problems we face today --- environmental degradation, fundamentalist violence --- Wilson calls on science and the humanities to develop a new understanding of the meaning of human existence around which humanity as a whole can come together.

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Other reviews / information:

In his chapter Free Will, Wilson discusses this ancient question of philosophers and theologians, again from the context of the latest understandings of science. He concludes that human beings do not, fundamentally, have free will, in the sense that it is at least theoretically possible to capture the set of events that will predict our next decision. Despite that, he argues that we humans can, and in fact must, act as if we do have free will, do have control; he writes “… does free will exist? Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.” (p. 170)

This lines up with the thinking of scientists such as the theoretical physicist Brian Greene; check out, for example, his interview in front of a live audience for On Being, with Krista Tippett, January 2014.  In the final, on-air version there is a comment that parallels Wilson's thoughts above; follow the links to either the transcript, or the audio of their discussion .

At the audio link there is also the unedited version of the interview, including the following exchange with an audience member (starting around 1 hour, 6 minutes), in which Greene notes that even quantum theory is deterministic.

Audience Member: “… it sounds as if, um, your proposal situates us in a very deterministic universe, and that we are simply, in some sense, um, almost robots acting out of these general laws, and that there’s no novelty within this very, very complex and creative entity that we are as conscious beings.  That’s my first question.

BG: Ah, so, ah, yes, it, it is hard to accept.  [Long pause, audience laughter]  But I wouldn’t go as far as to say there’s no novelty.  You know, when you bring complex systems together, even when they’re governed by deterministic laws of physics, which, as we understand them … and some people would say ‘well, what about quantum mechanics, doesn’t that sort of take away the determinism,’ no, it doesn’t at all, not at our current level of understanding.  So, the mathematical laws that Schrodinger wrote down for the quantum evolution are as deterministic as the laws that Newton wrote down, they determine probabilities, but there’s no place in those laws for anything other than deterministic evolution.   Now you can get novelty, because when you bring complex things together they can co-mingle and interact in ways that may be surprising, and I’m using human language to describe it, sure it comes right out of the equations but it still can be novel by any human barometer.  So, I wouldn’t say that novelty goes away, but yes, free will may, go away.   

AM: So, free will, meaning choice, there’s no such thing as choice.

BG: That’s right.

AM: I do not choose to love, I do not choose to extend myself, I don’t choose to live, to get back to [?]

BG: Well, it all depends on what you mean by ‘choose’.  So, if by choose you mean that you could have done otherwise, then I would say, yes, but I would say that you need to redefine the meaning of the word choose.  Choose is the sensation of choosing; now it is the fact that the laws of physics were just playing themselves out, and that is fundamentally why you did what you did, but to choose is to have the sensation of making that choice.  And we all have that sensation, and that is a definition which I think works well.  It does require a little bit of re-jiggering of your intuition, to recognize that it may be the case that it, the laws of physics that are behind the scenes doing it all, but yes, that sensation of choice is real.  And that’s what we should re-define free will to mean.  Free will is the sensation of making the choice, even though behind the scenes, the laws of physics were pulling the strings.

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy" by Jeff VanderMeer

Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)
Jeff VanderMeer (1968)

 

595 pages

Faced with the unknown, people display a range of reactions, from immobilizing fear to mindless aggression, from cautious wonder to impetuous curiosity. The struggle often becomes one of recognizing whether our natural reaction will put us at greater or lesser risk than some other possible response --- will a quick, aggressive action be what saves us, or will it only make things worse? Encountering something not only unknown but possibly profoundly unknowable heightens these stakes. Just such dilemmas face the characters in Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, which bundles three recently released novels into a single volume.

The Area X of the title is a stretch of coastline, blocked off from the public behind vague government reports of some kind of environmental disaster. Officials, however, find themselves with a much more challenging and mysterious truth, as a kind of force field has descended around this piece of the coast, comprising an area of both land and the off-shore ocean, which prevents access except through a single portal on land. Through an agency called the Southern Reach, the government has been organizing an ongoing series of expeditions into Area X, ostensibly to investigate the environmental disaster that has occurred, but in reality focused on understanding the strange force that has gripped this region, and what it may mean for the future.

The first third of the book, entitled Annihilation, opens shortly after the four members of the designated twelfth expedition have entered through the portal into Area X. They soon discover a kind of tunnel in the ground that they had not been expecting, despite the extensive training and information about the region that they had received in preparation for their mission. Descending into the tunnel to investigate, they begin to encounter phenomena not only unexplainable but seemingly otherworldly. The expedition soon falls apart in the face of what seems to be the natural world in Area X rising up against them.

The focus in the second third of the book, Authority, turns to the organization coordinating the expeditions. The Southern Reach, located just outside the one known entrance into Area X, has had little to show for its long-standing efforts to investigate the phenomenon on its doorstep; many expeditions have been sent in, with results from catastrophic to uneventful, but what information makes it back only generates more questions than answers as to the nature of what is happening, and of what sort of long-term threat it may pose. Decades of failure have in fact created a debilitating hopelessness among the employees of the Southern Reach, made worse by a toxic stew of company politics within the secret agency, all of which undermines any new efforts to make progress.

In the final third, Acceptance, the reader is thrust back into Area X, as the struggle between Southern Reach and the forces that hold sway in the strange region comes to a head. As the confrontation escalates, the characters begin to get closer to an explanation for the strange phenomena occurring. Even as their understanding deepens, however, they find themselves left with only more profound questions about the nature of what they face, and its potential threat to the outside world.

In telling the story, VanderMeer manages to deftly control and manipulate a reader’s understanding of what constitutes the full truth of events. For one, he plays extensively with time in the novel. Though the story broadly flows forward from a point early in the mission of the twelfth expedition on toward the climactic engagement with the power at the center of Area X, along the way VanderMeer shifts continually back and forth between the present and the past. Extended flashbacks and jumps back in time to events prior to the twelfth expedition slowly reveal hints about the motivations of the characters and pieces of knowledge the different characters have about the true situation inside Area X. More unsettling for a reader, VanderMeer manipulates events in the novel by revealing them in fragments: a moment will play out, but then some pagers later a main character will remember back to that moment and recall and relate information not covered in the first pass through it. Thus, not only does the reader only gradually build up an understating of the main characters, even the reality of the story must be pieced together from stingily dribbled out bits and pieces.

A second, more unsettling factor for the reader is the knowledge that some characters spend part of the time under hypnosis, ostensibly to protect them as much as possible from realities of Area X that might overwhelm them and so jeopardize the mission of the Southern Reach. But it can be unclear at any given moment in time whether a particular character is under hypnosis. This leaves a reader wondering, as the focus shifts among the main characters in the story, how much of what they relate can be trusted as actual fact, and how much of what they do is of their own free will.

Oddly unsettling too is the lack of definition of time and place in the novel. A few hints and clues leave the impression that the novel is set a few decades into our future, and in the south-eastern United States. But a reader can’t be quite sure. Other than the diverse names of the characters, and the American sounding names of the local towns and establishments, nothing places the story particularly in the United States. A secret umbrella organization, Central, rules over the Southern Reach, and no other government entity is ever mentioned in the novel. Combined with hints that the country has been suffering under increasing terrorist attacks and environmental disasters, the subtle indication is of a dictatorial state; does the government or country of the United States even still exist as we know it today?

VanderMeer has crafted a gripping novel that engages a reader on every page in the search for the truth. Taken together, the vagueness of place, the constant shifting in time and finally the uncertain agency of the main characters enhances the mystery of what has happened and will happen in Area X. Through these techniques a reader remains effectively as uncertain about what may constitute the realities of Area X, and the full extent of the government’s attempts to understand and control it, as are the characters themselves.

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf