Book Review: "Submission" by Michel Houellebecq

Submission (2015)
Michel Houellebecq (1956)

246 pages

The on-going conflicts between Western and Muslim societies have been characterized by some as a “clash of civilizations”. Though the most visible evidence for such a viewpoint has been a series of dramatic terror attacks and protracted wars, such violence tends to overshadow the unavoidable and no less important cultural impacts these two fundamentally different civilizations have had on one another, and the cultural changes that have occurred as a result. In his novel Submission (French, Sumission), French author Michel Houellebecq imagines a France in which liberal democratic values have led to a debilitating cultural malaise, leaving French society susceptible to being deeply and radically altered by just such outside influences.

The story opens in the spring of the year 2022, on the eve of national elections in France. The two principal centrist parties --- the Social Democrats on the left, and the Union for a Popular Movement (renamed since publication The Republicans) on the right --- find their dominant position in French politics deteriorating, as increasing street violence in the big cities and economic stagnation throughout the country drive support both to the far-right National Front party, and, critically, to the nascent, but rapidly growing Muslim Brotherhood party. The Brotherhood is

careful to take a moderate line. It soft-pedaled its support of the Palestinians and kept up good relations with the Jewish religious authorities. As with Muslim Brotherhood parties in the Arab world … the real political action was carried out through a network of youth groups, cultural institutions and charities. In a country gripped by ever more widespread unemployment, the strategy broadened the Brotherhood’s reach far beyond strictly observant Muslims. Its rise was nothing short of meteoric. (39)

When the subsequent election sets the stage for a run-off between the National Front and the Muslim Brotherhood, the two centrist parties suddenly find themselves on the outside looking in, and must decide to whom to throw their support in a coalition government.

These events play out through the eyes of our narrator, François, a professor of French Literature in Paris who, as a forty-four year old bachelor, finds himself increasingly pre-occupied by oppressive thoughts about encroaching middle age. Though he manages to seek out a young coed to date each school year, he is besieged by worries about his looks and his health, and by fears of having irrevocably passed the point of scholarly relevance. His self-indulgent introspection leaves him little time to give more than passing attention to the social and political developments unfolding around him.

When these events finally affect him personally, and so become too consequential to ignore, François filters his understanding of them through the prism of the late 19th century literary figures who have formed the focal point of his academic career. In particular he returns throughout the story to the life and work of novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, who was the subject of his dissertation and the focus of his subsequent scholarly work. We learn that Huysmans’ early writing followed the Naturalist tradition, but that later in life it was considered part of the Decadent movement, a key aspect of which was a rejection of modern progress. Late in life Huysmans had turned to Christianity and taken monastic vows.

François seems to identify deeply with the writing of Huysmans’ Decadent period, turning it into a kind of rationalization for his own listless, unengaged existence. When the surprising changes happening outside his door leave him further isolated, however, he attempts to follow in the footsteps --- figuratively and literally --- of Huysmans’ search for religious meaning. This proves unsuccessful, as he finds himself uninspired by Christianity as an outlet from his forlorn and dispirited view of life. Finally forced to face the new world that has seemingly overnight sprung up around him, his lack of a solid, internal moral center leaves him easy prey for the tempting allures attached to embracing the new order.

In the novel, François appears to represent for Houellebecq the larger reaction of the broad, liberal center in France to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood party. Unsettled by the French nativists of the far right, and reflexively sympathetic to the concept of cultural diversity, liberal, mainstream French society drifts uncritically into support of the Muslim Brotherhood party when faced with the alternative of the National Front.  Exploiting this lack of conviction, the Muslim Brotherhood party manages to implicate itself into political power in France, and through a thoughtful and careful strategy lead French society to gradually re-align itself around the Brotherhood’s far-reaching, longer-term goals.

In what was perhaps one of the more dramatic coincidences in the history of publishing, the original French version of the novel was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, the 7th January 2015. The English translation of the book was released just two months before the more recent attacks in Paris on November 13th. Rather than invalidate Houellebecq’s premise, these events in fact play into it, in the sense that a key element of his story is the ability of the Muslim Brotherhood party to quell the violence of extremists, and so ingratiate itself to a society desperately seeking security.

It seems perhaps far-fetched to imagine that a Muslim party could succeed in a Western country. Houellebecq paints, however, a damning view of Western society as weakened by its own liberal democratic values, and what he portrays as a moral relativism that prioritizes sensitivity to cultural differences and so has no firm basis for defending its own values and principles --- in fact, no concrete values and principles even to defend, in some sense. When these weaknesses combine with natural human desires for security --- economic, social and physical --- Houellebecq envisions a decadent Western society that is an easy target for a fundamentalist group with a patient, well thought-out agenda and strategy.

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Other reviews / information:

In a larger article reviewing several works about Albert Camus, Historian Thomas Meaney discusses how the Algerian push for independence half a century ago tested the French belief that France provides "an exclusive, historically grounded identity for its citizens that it claimed was available to all its subjects"; in The Colonist of Good Will: On Albert Camus in the The Nation magazine, 16th September 2013.

Writing in the weeks after the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack and the coincident publication of Submission, Stéphane Delorme, editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, derides Houellebecq's novel as "this fetid and incendiary book", in his article Insoumission, translated into English and re-printed in the The Nation magazine, 4th March 2015.

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Book Review: "Who Owns History" by Eric Foner

Who Owns History? (2002)
Eric Foner (1943)

233 pages

In the Preface to Who Owns History?, Eric Foner notes that “each generation rewrites history to suit its own needs” (xi), and that: “In every country, versions of the past provide the raw material for nationalist ideologies and patriotic sentiments.” (xv)  Such “rewrites [of] history” can occur through intentional exaggeration and misrepresentation, or simply a genuine lack of understanding of the past, but, in either case, they often serve as rallying cries and debating points for political movements, in which groups attempt to define and promulgate a version of history that supports their particular agenda.

Foner goes on to argue that historians must enter into this fray, to deepen public understanding of the full story of the past. Who Owns History? collects nine essays in which he examines how people, consciously or unconsciously, bend history to suit their needs for the present and desires for the future. The earliest of these pieces was written in 1983, the most recent in 2001, and Foner includes short preface for each essay, to provide the original purpose, and context, within which it was written.  Several of the pieces included in the book touch on some of the more dramatic political transformations of the final two decades of the 20th century, while others examine the lives and work of historians themselves, as well as long-standing issues in American history that continue to resonate. Together they provide a fascinating review of the on-going struggle to settle on coherent and accurate interpretations of our particular and common histories.

The essays are grouped into three sections. Part I, entitled The Politics of History and Historians contains two essays; in the first, Foner describes how he came to be a historian, and more specifically how a powerful interest in the civil rights movement during his university years led him to the topic he has spent much of his career studying and writing about, and for which he is perhaps best known: the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. Relevant to the broader theme of the essays collected in the book, Foner notes that the history of Reconstruction represents an archetypal example of how the history of a period can be re-interpreted and misrepresented to serve the political and social interests of a particular moment.

In that opening essay, Foner recalls the important role played by his dissertation advisor, Richard Hofstadter, in his development as a historian. The second essay provides a sketch of Hofstadter’s life and work, summarizing his education and political development, then turning to focus on a series of books he wrote that Foner notes “propelled him to the very forefront of his profession.” (39) In these works Hofstadter examined and critiqued such political phenomena as the rise of Social Darwinism, which was characterized by “the growing use such Darwinian ideas as ‘natural selection,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ and ‘the struggle for existence’ to reinforce conservative, laissez-faire individualism.” (31) More generally, he wrote a series of works that shed light on what he felt were widespread and yet disturbing elements of American history and political tradition, such as the belief that a fundamental consensus of opinion has historically existed in American society, as well as the development of “a deep-seated anti-intellectualism and provincialism in the American population.” (42) Thus Hofstadter directly examined what he found to be mistaken views in historical understanding, and the broader social situation that allowed them to flourish.

The four essays that make up Part II of the collection each touch on different examples of how history has been re-interpreted and re-imagined by subsequent generations in the context of their present situation. The first looks at the evolution of the American idea of freedom since the early days of the Revolution, when it reflected the simple desire for deliverance from what was seen as English tyranny; over time it developed into a vision of “America as a special place with a special mission,” though, as Foner points out: “This vision required a somewhat exaggerated negative image of the rest of the world.” (60). He goes on to trace the changes in the concept of freedom through the 19th century, particularly during the long years of the abolition movement, before focusing in particular on the dramatic transformation in the 20th century, precipitated by America’s increasingly active presence in and interaction with the world beyond its borders. World War II led to a significant broadening of the “perceptions of who was entitled to enjoy the blessing of liberty … [giving] birth to a powerful rhetoric, the division of the planet into a ‘free world’ and an unfree world.” (64) The economic globalization of recent decades has again caused a re-definition of the American concept of freedom, and Foner argues that it has

been largely appropriated by libertarians and conservatives of one kind or another… [with the] dominant constellation of definitions seem[ing] to consist of a series of negations --- of government, of social responsibility, of a common public culture, of restrains on individual self-definition and consumer choice. Once the rallying cry of the dispossessed, freedom is today commonly invoked by powerful economic institutions to justify many forms of authority, even as on the individual level it often seems to suggest the absence of authority altogether. (70)

Foner follows with an essay he wrote in 1980 after having spent four months in Russia. The far-reaching changes initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev were still playing out, and Russia was marked, he writes, by a period of optimism and openness about the future. Foner describes that this led to a sudden blossoming of interest in Russian history, as well as Russia’s relationship with to the west; this included a radical rethinking of Russian and Soviet history, including a nostalgia for the Czarist past. The essay is perhaps the book’s most dramatic example of the malleable and at times swiftly changing nature of the understanding of history in the face of present realities, for, as Foner writes in the lead-in to the essay, when he returned to Russian just four years later, the bloom was off: “Russia had been subjected to a dose of ‘shock therapy,’ and among the casualties were the utopian dreams I had encountered in 1990.” (75) The pain of the post-Glasnost years led to the earlier interest in history being “supplanted by the daily struggle for survival,” (76) and the Soviet years suddenly not seen in quite so negative a light.

In a similar vein, Foner visited South Africa in 1994, in the wake of an equally dramatic transformation in that society. He discovered that the fundamental and powerful changes that resulted from the end of apartheid led to a fundamental rethinking of South African history. Again, he encountered a country in a transition that precipitated new interpretations and re-interpretations of what had occurred in the past --- as well as what had been forgotten or ignored. In South Africa these discussions also led to a deep and emotionally fraught discussion about what should be intentionally forgotten, to allow the country to successfully move forward.

The second set of essays concludes with one whose topic continues to resonate today: Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?. Bernie Sanders campaign for president may be a long shot, but it has re-opened yet again the question of how Socialism is viewed by the US population. Foner argues that most theories proposed over the years for why socialism has failed to succeed in the U.S. tend to be either demonstrably simplistic and inadequate, or end up begging the question. For much of the essay he refutes explanations that have been put forward by historians since the second half of the 19th century, such as: the success of capitalism; the level of social mobility in the U.S.; the idea that Americans have a long history of consensus in their ideological outlook; and the diverse background of the American working class. Foner concludes the essay by arguing that the question itself in not appropriate, noting that what Americans consider to be the Socialist parties in Western Europe are actually more precisely engaged in “the equitable distribution of the products of capitalism,” and that the more appropriate question is: “Why has there been no socialist transformation in any advanced capitalist society?” (143) By changing the premise, Foner argues that the blinding fallacy of American exceptionalism is removed, and historians can focus on why socialist movements in the U.S. have failed to gain long-term traction. Left open is also the question of whether Socialism could, under certain circumstances, successfully develop in the future.

In the third and final set of essays, Foner includes three on The Enduring Civil War, the ground for which he is most well-known as an historian and writer. The first of these essays, Who is an American?, describes how the common answer to this question has changed since the writing of the Constitution, in which it was defined as “free white persons.” (153) Going beyond the simple facts, that “Blacks were added in 1870, but not until the 1940s did persons of Asian origin become eligible,” (153) Foner examines how attitudes on race evolved, a process that he demonstrates was anything but smooth, with periods of social and political progress followed by others of significant regression.

The civil war and its aftermath are the most obvious case in point, as the Emancipation proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments together formed a leap forward in the political definition of who was considered American, but were then, within a few short decades, largely curtailed and rejected in the post-Reconstruction period, thus offering a striking demonstration of the consequence of social attitudes not progressing as fast as public policy. Fonder notes that “the ‘failure’ of Reconstruction [i.e., its forced roll-back by southern Democrats] strongly reinforced the racialist thinking that reemerged to dominate American culture in the late nineteenth century, fueling the conviction that non-whites were unfit for self-government.” (160) A long, slow road followed, culminating in the civil rights movement of the 1960’s --- nearly a century later --- when attitudes shifted substantially in just a short period, both socially and politically. The definition of who is an American continues to be a touchstone of debate, as evidenced by debates in Congress and during the current Presidential primaries.

In a separate essay, from 1989, Foner focuses more specifically “on the long, complex constitutional history of African-Americans.” (167) Though he covers the entire period form the writing of the Constitution through to the Supreme Court cases of the 1980’s, the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction marks a dramatic turn in his analysis. Writing that

The Civil War and Reconstruction produced not simply three amendments but a fundamentally new Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, established a national citizenship whose rights, enforced by the federal government, were to be enjoyed equally by all Americans, and protected the right to vote of black men. These measures altered the definition of American citizenship, transformed the federal system, and engrafted into the Constitution a principle of racial equality entirely unprecedented in both jurisprudence and political reality before 1860. (177)

Focusing specifically on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment, Foner traces how these clear and broad measures would be circumscribed and circumvented in the decades after they were enacted, as successive local and national legislatures and judiciaries sought to limit their scope. He notes these battles continue into the modern era, in discussions such as those on discrimination and reverse-discrimination.

In the final essay, Foner presents a critique of Ken Burns’s documentary from the 1990’s, The Civil War. In particular he focuses on the final episode, covering the post-war period, in which, he argues, Burns glossed over the true gains made by Blacks during the Reconstruction period, and the subsequent significant set-backs that came as that period was brought to a harsh and bitter end. The topic provides a concise and telling example of the broader themes of the essays collected in this book, as Foner demonstrates how a simplified and ingenuous view of history can lead to fundamental misunderstandings about history that in turn make it more difficult, if not impossible, to clearly understand our present. To return to the quote from James Baldwin with which he open the Preface:

History … does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. (ix)

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In an article in the New York Times, When Anger Trumped Progress, Jon Grinspan recalls the rapid decline of faith in government in the years after the Civil War due to wide ranging scandals and failures, and the resulting reversal of Reconstruction policies and progress less than a decade after their introduction.  He makes parallels in that essay to present day distrust of government and the difficulties it introduces into attempts to make progress in race relations.

An essay by Timothy Shenk, What Was Socialism, describing the history of Socialism, and its evolution in relation to Capitalism, appeared in The Nation magazine in May, 2014.  The article uses the historical summary as a starting off point to discuss recent books on Capitalism and in particular income inequality, among them the then newly published Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty. (The on-line title of the article is Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of Inequality.)

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Book Review: "Hausfrau" by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Hausfrau (2015)
Jill Alexander Essbaum (1971)

351 pages

“Anna was a good wife, mostly,” serves as both the subtitle, and the opening line, of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s novel Hausfrau. The title translates from German as housewife, and to her family, friends and neighbors, Anna does appear to be “a good wife.” Within the first few pages, however, the “mostly” aspect becomes clear: for reasons she herself struggles to understand, Anna is desperately unsatisfied with her life, and is cheating on her husband, having sex with relative strangers. She drifts impetuously into these affairs, though she finds that they bring her little real pleasure, filling her instead with a melancholy and self-doubt that only exacerbate her depression.

Essbaum sets the story in Switzerland, where Anna lives as an American ex-patriate in a small town outside Zurich, with her Swiss husband and their three young children. Despite having spent the past nine years in Switzerland, Anna speaks only elementary German, and the local Schwiizerdütsch hardly at all. She has only a vague idea of what her husband does as a mid-level bank manager, and she has made little effort to either integrate herself into the local society or make any close friends. Her feelings of loneliness and isolation are compounded by her recognition that she plays a significant role in creating the conditions of her own unhappiness. This realization fails, however, to be sufficiently powerful to shake her out of her precarious behavior; it serves instead only to tighten her spiral of despair.

As the story opens, Anna has begun taking a German class, at the urging of a psychiatrist she has been seeing in the hopes of understanding and overcoming what her husband refers to as her “melancholy huffs.” Already on the first day of class she hooks up with a fellow student, beginning an affair with him that has them meeting after class, and even skipping class altogether, to have sex in his apartment. As she swings between a self-loathing that makes her what to stop the affair, and a rationalization that makes it seem acceptable and even justifiable, the risk of discovery from her erratic behavior mounts. When her world is suddenly turned upside down by a shocking and tragic event for which she feels complicit, Anna's carefully constructed, if wildly fragile web of fiction --- both in what she displays to those around her, as well as in what she tells herself --- begins to rapidly unravel, to a dramatic conclusion.

That conclusion, I will say, felt a bit improbably when it arrived, though admittedly upon reflection it was quite clearly foreshadowed in the opening pages of the story. Without giving too much away, the novel for me did not generate enough sympathy and empathy for Anna in its first half, to allow one to convincingly follow her to the eventual conclusion of the second half.

Essbaum splits the story into three sections, labeled September, October and November. Within that overarching, linear time-line, however, she moves freely between the past, present and future, even over the course of a single scene. Thus, moments when Ann is at a party, or in her German class, or cheating on her husband, will contain flashbacks to earlier events, and will also not necessarily play out in real-time --- we sometimes learn the outcome or some aspects of a scene before we find out earlier portions of it.

Interspersed throughout the story are snippets of appointments Anna has with her psychiatrist; these discussions serve as a view into Anna’s psyche, as she is forced to confront her true feelings, at least in her own thoughts, if not always what she tells the psychiatrist. Anna’s participation in the German class provides a window into her internal struggles, as she compares aspects of her feelings to vagaries of German grammar --- a minor plot point, but an intriguing one for readers who have learned German.

The pacing of Hausfrau has a bit of watching someone construct a house of cards, though the stakes are of course far greater. The first half of the novel develops gradually, almost languidly, as the reader watches Anna haphazardly pass through her life assembling a framework of lies. Long periods of her slowly piling casual, if conflicted, deceits one on top of another are interspersed with brief moments of terror as the rickety structure threatens to collapse from close brushes of discovery. The pace accelerates to a breakneck speed in the second half of the story, however, as Anna frantically tries to hold herself together in order to sustain the untenable fiction of a life that she has created.

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Other reviews / information:
The blurb at the top of the cover of the paperback version reads

“In Hausfrau, Anna Karenina goes Fifty Shades with a side of Madame Bovary.” --- TIME 

Though there are bits of similarity to each of those novels, I find the quote more than a bit overdone in terms of the plot comparisons. Just taking, for example, the Fifty Shades reference: although there are a few paragraphs of explicit verbal foreplay --- indeed with quite ‘Grey-ish’ activities mentioned --- a few paragraphs in over 350 pages doesn’t seem to warrant the comparison.

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Book Review: The Perennial Life (La vida perenne) by José Luis Sampedro

The Perennial Life (La vida perenne) (2015)
José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013)

189 pages

The Perennial philosophy (Latin: philosophia perennis), also referred to as Perennialism, is a perspective in the philosophy of religion which views each of the world’s religious traditions as sharing a single, universal truth on which foundation all religious knowledge and doctrine has grown.

Agostino Steuco (1497–1548) coined the term...

The term was popularized in more recent times by Aldous Huxley … in his 1945 book: The Perennial Philosophy.

Wikipedia; opening lines of the article on Perennial philosophy

In the prologue to Spanish economist and author José Luis Sampedro’s The Perennial Life (La vida perenne), published posthumously earlier this year, his wife Olga Lucas notes that in an earlier novel, October, October (Octubre, Octubre), Sampedro wrote “I began to lean on a very well-known work of Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy.” (“Empecé apoyándome en un obra muy concida de Aldous Huxley, La filosofía perenne.”) Sampedro pays homage to Huxley both in this latest book’s title, and through the inclusion of several passages from Huxley’s work.

The Perennial Life serves as an encapsulation of Sampedro’s life-long immersion in the philosophy of humanism, a pursuit that was clearly guided by the concepts of Perennial philosophy.  In his book he integrates together thoughts and ideas from a broad range of Eastern and Western spiritual and religious traditions, as well as passages in which he presents his own thoughts on the texts, his own interpretations and conclusions. Collectively the text represents a bequeathal of what he learned about how one might most appropriately live one’s life.

The passages range from a few lines to a couple of pages, and are grouped into fourteen chapters, each reflecting a particular theme. The opening chapter Quiet the Voices, Awaken (Aquietar las voces, despertar), for example, considers how one might best turn away from hectic, quotidian concerns, to truly see and comprehend the reality of the world. Here he quotes Huxley’s observation that the

... one [divine] Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts which we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible or unlikely they may seem.

Already in these early lines, it becomes clear that true understanding first requires a willingness to open ourselves to, and make ourselves vulnerable to the world beyond our immediate concerns.

In another chapter, Die to Live (Morir para vivir), Sampedro notes that “we live in a society that skirts around the problem of death as much as possible,” (75) (“vivimos en una sociedad que escamotea el problema de la muerte todo lo que puede”). He quotes lines from Chuang Tzu (as translated by Thomas Merton) that conclude “[A man’s] thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.” (79), and he himself observes that in striving for immortality, human beings become “vain” (“endiosarnos”), which leads to a belief

... that we are the kings of creation, that the world is for little more than our pleasure, for our enjoyment, for our exploitation.” (81)

(... que son los reyes de la creación, que el mundo poco menos que está para nuesto goce, para nuestro disfrute, para nuestra explotación.”)

Thus, again, what prevents human beings from becoming more aware of the reality of our world is a blindness of the spirit.  In this context, it is a blindness resulting from a willful desire that lies outside the realm of nature's possibilities (immortality), and which impels us to subjugate or ignore the natural world instead of opening ourselves up to it.

In the concluding chapter, Sampedro portrays our lives as being “no more than the spark of a grand bonfire” (163) (“no es más que la chispa de una gran hoguera”). It is within our lives, ourselves, that he says we must look to understand reality. He includes a story from the Sanskrit text Chandogya Upanishad, in which a teacher leads a student toward an understanding of his place in the universe, concluding:

The spirit of the entire universe is an invisible and subtle essence. That is reality. That is truth. YOU ARE THAT.” (171)
(“El Espíritu del universe entero es una esencia invisible y sutil. Ésa es la Realidad. Eso es Verdad. TÚ ERES ESO.”)

Sprinkled throughout the book are wonderful photographs by Chema Madoz, an example of which can be found on the book’s cover, pictured above. Madoz takes common, everyday objects, both man-made and from nature, and creates subtle, yet striking images that can perhaps best be described as visual poetry. These photographs form an ideal accompaniment to the themes in the book's passages, in that they reinforce the notion that, for those prepared to learn how to seek them out, rich and unexpected wonders exist in the world around us.

In The Perennial Life, Sampedro adeptly blends selections from Eastern and Western philosophical traditions with his own thoughts summarizing what he has learned from studying these texts, and from integrating aspects of them into his own life. The result is a coherent and deeply engaging meditation on how one can approach the critical and rewarding task of living a conscious and fulfilling life. Centered around the concepts of perennial philosophy, Sampedro’s work provides a view that inherently sidesteps the (often violent) disagreements that develop between followers of particular religious dogmas, by embracing instead a broader outlook, one that seeks out the unifying principles that lie behind these varied traditions.

This is a work that you will find richly rewarding to read carefully, from the first page to the last, as Sampedro crafts his beautiful and hopeful invitation to turn away from one's daily concerns to instead behold the beauty of creation.  There are, however, also rewards to be found later, by simply turning to a random page and considering the particular reflection on life and nature that presents itself.

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Book Review: "California" by Edan Lepucki

California (2014)
Edan Lepucki (1981)

 

393 pages

In apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, the event that precipitates the apocalypse often occurs over a short period of time; it may be minutes, say in the case of an asteroid, or hours or days, in the case of a nuclear war, but a clear and evident before and after exists that separates the normal world from its dramatically altered future. What if, however, no such single, evident triggering event stands out? Suppose only in hindsight, looking back over a series of apparently unconnected events that may have spanned years, could one say “there, that was the final straw, since then everything’s been different.” Do the words “apocalypse” and post-apocalyptic” still apply?

Edan Lepucki’s novel California, set in the mid to late 21st century United States, has many elements of post-apocalyptic fiction --- but constitutes the apocalypse has played out through an extended series of natural disasters. Some of these disasters were apparently random, such as earthquakes that stagger a number of cities, such as Los Angeles, while others have the implication of human causes, such as devastating superstorms and flooding in the northeast. In Lepucki’s telling, no one of these events represents the moment marking the clear onset of a country (and by extension a world) that has succumbed to an ineluctable decline, but she clearly imagines a U.S. population and economy that has not had the capacity to overcome an escalating rash of calamites of the natural world. How many among us, observing the growing acrimony and fractionalization in what passes for public and political debate these days, and the resulting inaction and feelings of disenfranchisement, might not believe that such a dystopian future could result?

Set in the California wilderness west of Los Angeles, Lepucki’s story follows a young couple, Cal and Frida, who have fled the city in search of a better life. As the economy has collapsed, LA --- and seemingly the whole of the U.S. --- has devolved into secured enclaves of wealth called Communities, surrounded by large swaths of impoverished masses struggling to survive. Cal and Frida find that the wilderness has its own challenges, however, from bands of pirates rumored to be terrorizing the countryside, to the unsurprising but still stark reality that none of the infrastructure of modern life they grew up with, frayed though it may have become, exists to support them: no stores, no doctors, little more than what they can wrestle from the land around them.

As the story opens the pair have survived their second year in the wild, living in a small, unoccupied shed they discovered in the woods. They grow food in a small garden, supplementing it with some hunting and gathering in the surrounding forest, and items from a trader who occasionally passes by; life is difficult, but they have made a go of it.

When Frida realizes she is pregnant, however, an already solitary and arduous existence becomes overwhelming for her. Eager to find a more hopeful situation in which to raise her coming baby, she convinces her husband that they should seek out a settlement that they have heard lies just a couple of days walk to their west, and ask to be taken in. The two know little about this settlement except its general location, and that it has a reputation for being unwelcoming to strangers. Frida is undeterred by their sketchy knowledge, however, and the couple soon depart their shelter of two years in the desperate hope of find a larger group of people to join up with.

Upon reaching the settlement they are shocked to find themselves welcomed by the townspeople, though this is only the first surprise of many for them. The breakdown in authority throughout the country, and so in formal law and order, has created new norms, and vying political and philosophical outlooks on how to survive in the unstable new reality. As they build relationships and take on responsibilities in the settlement, Cal and Frida must not only come to grips with how much they value independence versus security for themselves as well as for their future baby, but also how they will balance their individual desires and fears with their love for one another.

A significant portion of the novel involves flashbacks by Cal and Frida to the time before they left LA, or had even met, years in which the crisis in the US was well underway, but had not yet reached the levels that would eventually drive them from the city. This part of the story, as well as the couple’s initial introduction to the settlement they seek out, worked best for me. A subtle yet unnerving tension fills the otherwise bucolic setting, potential danger lying around every corner, lurking in every interaction.

The final part of the novel, on the other hand, felt too compressed, as though Lepucki made a sudden decision that the story had to be wrapped up in a relatively few pages. The conclusion of the novel would perhaps seem less abrupt if the reader knew there was a sequel waiting for them to turn to, however that’s not immediately clear. In an interview Lepucki suggests that she has “an inkling of possibly writing a sequel to California, but not in a way that even really picks up where I left off."

The focus of the story in California remains tightly drawn to the immediate world within walking distance of Cal and Frida, to what they can see and hear and feel. The details of the situation in the larger, outside world remain ambiguous, no one quite certain exactly what, if any, political and legal authority still exists. This uncertainty for the pair, as well as for the reader, subverts any attempt to make sense of the rules and expectations of the wider world --- every encounter becomes potentially fateful. In the quotidian details of the couple’s lives becomes clear the harrowing reality of what it would truly mean to live without the infrastructure of goods, services and safety we, particularly in the U.S., often take for granted.

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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: "How Jesus Became God" by Bart D. Ehrman

How Jesus Became God (2014)
Bart D. Ehrman (1955)

404 pages

One of the delights --- and challenges --- of reading a book that explores human history, whether it looks back a few decades or several centuries, is the frequent discovery that assumptions and understandings now widely taken for granted about particular events can be discovered to be oversimplifications, if not grossly incorrect interpretations of what occurred. A second similar benefit is the realization that views now considered established and unquestionable about an historical event may have once have seemed beyond the pale, perhaps even unacceptable to consider.

In his book How Jesus Became God, Bible scholar Bart Ehrman examines one such case of evolving understanding, which he summarizes in the book’s subtitle as: “The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.” Modern day Christians view Jesus as a part of the Trinity, along with God and the Holy Spirit, and believe that Jesus is of the same stuff as God and has existed as long as God has existed. Ehrman argues, however, that these were not the beliefs of the very earliest Christians. Analyzing the words of the New Testament, Ehrman traces how early Christian understanding of Jesus’ divinity evolved during the years and decades immediately after his crucifixion. He then goes on to demonstrate how, within a couple of centuries, the concept of Jesus as part of the Trinity developed.

According to Ehrman, early Christian views of Jesus as something more than human, as in fact divine, began with the belief in the resurrection. In the book he does not attempt to prove or disprove that the resurrection occurred, noting that such discussions lie outside the realm of historical analysis, being ultimately a matter of faith and belief. Instead, his starting point is that early Christians believed that the resurrection occurred, and that subsequent understanding of Jesus’ divinity then grew from that core belief.

In the opening chapters, Ehrman recounts the ways that humans were understood by people in ancient societies to be able to become divine. Anyone familiar with the myths of ancient Greece and Rome will not be surprised by the three models he describes from these early societies, captured in sections descriptively entitled: “Gods who temporarily become Human,” “Divine Beings born of a God and a Mortal,” and “A Human who becomes Divine.” After reviewing these models, he goes on to provide examples of them, both to demonstrate their widespread conceptual acceptance in pre-Christian times, as well as to serve as a basis of comparison to statements made in Paul and the Gospels.

More surprisingly, Ehrman describes how versions of these same three models appear also in ancient Judaism, despite its monotheistic tradition; thus these concepts were present in the Jewish society in which Jesus was born, raised and preached. After a general overview of Judaism up to the time of the crucifixion, he gives examples from the Old Testament of each of the three models of human divinity. He also points out that there existed in Judaism an understanding that there could be gradations of divinity, for example the angels in heaven relative to God.

Having established the existing societal modes of thinking about divine beings around Jesus’ time, Ehrman then turns to the central question of his title: “how Jesus became God.” The key concept for Ehrman here, and throughout the book, is “in what sense”, within the gradations of divinity thought possible (from angels, say, to God himself), was Jesus thought of as divine?

He begins with a summary of the sources available to an historian examining this question: the Old and New Testaments, focusing in particular on the letters of Paul, and the Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. He describes how theological historians study these texts, and the analytical tools used to discern what historical facts can be establish from them. He includes a summary of the current scholarly consensus on such topics as when each of these sources was written, how they appear to be, or to not be, reporting similar events, how they appear to have had one or the other earlier, yet unknown, source material. Thus, he demonstrates how historians analyze these texts to tease out both an historical understanding of Jesus life, as well as the development of early Christian beliefs in the years after the crucifixion.

Based on these approaches to analyzing the texts, Ehrman first examines how Jesus most likely thought of himself; that is, whether he thought of himself as God. Analyzing what Jesus is reported to have said about himself in the earliest works of the New Testament, Ehrman claims that while Jesus called himself (and so thought of himself) as the messiah, from an historical perspective of the sources he cannot be shown to have called himself (or considered himself) God. Ehrman argues that though Jesus claims in John, the latest of the Gospels, that he is God, such claims do not appear in any of the earlier Gospels, and so “are part of John’s distinctive theology; they are not part of the historical record of what Jesus actually said.” (125)

Turning then to the resurrection, Ehrman uses the historical record available to us (that is, the Gospels) to point out key events associated with the resurrection that cannot be known. He focuses in particular on two: whether Jesus received a decent burial; and whether his tomb was later found to be empty. In both cases he demonstrates that based on an historical analysis of the Gospels, as wells as our current understanding of Roman crucifixion and burial practices of that period, these events “are subject to historical doubt” (151).

He then describes events surrounding the resurrection that he feels can be considered known, based on the historical evidence in the Gospels, of which three key points are:

(1) some of Jesus’s followers believed that he had been raised from the dead; (2) they believed this because some of them had visions of him after his crucifixion; and (3) this belief led them to reevaluate who Jesus was, so that the Jewish apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee came to be considered, in some sense, God. (174)

To substantiate each of these events he presents evidence from the Gospels, including evidence that aligns with what historians and scientists of other fields understand of the belief systems and behaviors of those times.

Having laid the foundation, in the opening half of the book, of the history up to the point just after Jesus’s crucifixion, Ehrman then goes on to address his primary question: how, and in what sense, Jesus came to be understood to be God.  Over the final four chapters of the book, he presents evidence from the Gospels demonstrating that in the decades after the resurrection a rapid shift occurred in Christian understanding of when Jesus became divine, as well as the extent of his divinity (i.e., how similar to God he was believed to be).

Based on evidence from the Gospels, Ehrman argues that in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion, Jesus' disciples and others came to believe that he had been resurrected and exalted to heaven by God.   Thus the very earliest Christians believed that Jesus was a human who became divine after having died on the cross.

This understanding quickly evolved, according to Ehrman, in the years after the crucifixion.  Though he acknowledges that the process was not smooth, and that it happened in different ways and at different rates across the various groups and congregations, Ehrman argues that there began a "backward movement of Christology." (236)   Thus, belief in the moment of Jesus’ exaltation moved to ever earlier points in his life: in Mark to the moment of his baptism by John the Baptist, and later in Luke and Matthew to the moment of his birth (or more precisely his conception).  The common thread in these views, however, was that Jesus was a human who became divine.

Subsequent Christians took a significant, further step, developing "incarnation Christologies, ... maintain[ing] that Christ was a preexistent divine being who became human before returning to God in heaven." (249).  Ehrman reviews evidence from the letters of Paul that describes Christ as an angel come to Earth in human form, while the writings of John describe Jesus as God come down to Earth.   This was a part of the transition in Christian belief sometime around the end of the first century C.E. to the view that Jesus was a part of the same stuff as God, an understanding that would culminate, in the early fourth century C.E., with the Nicene Creed, which effectively established the idea of the Trinity.

The path from John to Nicea was not smooth, however, and Ehrman dedicates a chapter to examining various "Christological Dead Ends."  He notes that "within Christianity ... there is a right view and lots of wrong views" (285), and he provides a sampling of some of the "wrong views" that demonstrate the variety of ways in which Christian theologians of the second and third century C.E. attempted to explain the relationship between Christ and God, and how the vast majority of these views were eventually deemed heretical.

A substantial step forward in settling the matter came under pressure from the Roman Emperor Constantine.  Ehrman notes that in the early fourth century Constantine converted to Christianity, and made it a "favored religion" (345) of the empire.  Aside from his personal religious beliefs, Constantine did this at least in part to accrue the benefits of Christianity as a unifying social, cultural and political force.  When he learned, however, that Christian views of the relationship between Christ and God were creating contentious rifts among Christian theologians and their followers, he called upon them to come together and settle their differences, leading to the declaration of the Nicene Creed by the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E., and the formalization of the idea of the Trinity.

In an Epilogue, Ehrman looks beyond what was settled at Nicaea, presenting a sampling of the on-going controversies inside the Church in the years that followed concerning the finer points of orthodox doctrine. He points out repeated instances in which what was considered orthodox at one point in time becomes redefined just a few years later as heresy, in the face of a new, more developed orthodoxy.

Ehrman, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill, has written a number of books on Christian history and traditions, and so is far from a newcomer to this field of inquiry. He mentions in the book that he was born-again in high school, converting into a conservative, evangelical Christianity, and that later, after having studied at a bible institute and while pursuing an advanced degree at a Theological Seminary, began to have doubts, doubts that grew to the point that he now considers himself an agnostic.

So, in a sense, he has the scholarly background as a theologian, and the skeptical aspect as an agnostic, to be able to examine the evidence, and report out his interpretation, while acknowledging that there is a critical and clear distinction between what is taken as faith and what can be analyzed from an historical perspective. He in fact points out near the beginning of the book:

I have tried to approach this question in a way that will be useful not only for secular historians of religion like me, but also for believers like my friend who continue to think that Jesus is, in fact, God. As a result, I do not take a stand on the theological question of Jesus’s divine status. I am instead interested in the historical development that led to the affirmation that he is God. This historical development certainly transpired in one way or another, and what people personally believe about Christ should not, in theory, affect the conclusions they draw historically. (3) 

Later in the book he does acknowledge that fundamentalists (such as he himself was in the past) who interpret the Bible literally and as the infallible word of God will likely not countenance this historical approach as being appropriate.

Anyone interested in a more thorough understanding of how early Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus developed in the decades after his crucifixion will find Ehrman’s book a clearly explained and fascinating examination of the historical record that comes to us through the Gospels and the letters of Paul. Ehrman deftly combines these New Testament writings with descriptions of beliefs and practices in the Greek, Roman and Jewish societies of that time, achieving just the right balance between convincing detail and engaging overview.

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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 Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

The Library of Babel (2000; originally published in 1941)
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Etchings by Erik Desmazières
Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley

39 pages

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel opens

The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

The people who live among these galleries are called librarians, and Borges’ narrator is one of them; he describes the bookshelves that line the walls of each of these hexagonal galleries, and how each gallery connects to others exactly like it, stretching out to unknown distances above, below and beyond. He tells us that over many centuries librarians have postulated and eventually accepted as true certain fundamental axioms about the Library, such as that each book is filled with a combination of a fixed set of “twenty-five orthographic symbols,” that the Library contains books with every possible combination of these symbols, and that no two books in the Library are the same.

Starting from this deceptively simple structure, Borges creates a strikingly intricate short story, filled with emotional and intellectual complexity. As generations of librarians build on their ancestors’ knowledge to develop a better understating of the Library’s structure and purpose and origin, some among them challenge the accepted understanding, and promulgate contrasting views, sometimes forcefully. The result is a messy, complicated, fabulous world, whose inhabitants experience hope and melancholy, awe and despair, as they spend their lives moving among the vast expanses of hexagonal galleries of books.

Told in compact, vivid prose, this story can be enjoyed by a reader as simply a creative piece of fantasy fiction. It becomes transcendent, however, with the recognition that Borges’ imagined library serves as an evocative allegory for our own universe, in which we, like the librarians of the story, seek to divine from our limitless surroundings some enlightenment about the structure of our reality, the meaning of our existence, the circumstances of our beginnings.

This piece was originally included in a book of Borges’ short stories published in the early 1940’s; a few years later it was included in perhaps Borges’ most well-known collection Ficciones (in English, Fictions). Though the collection has been translated into English, I encourage you to read this story in the gorgeous edition from the publisher David R. Godine (2000). It includes a series of eleven etchings by Erik Desmazières, which, as Angela Giral points out in her introduction to the book, “are no mere illustrations of the writer’s words; they are the product of a parallel imagination, inspired to create in visual images his own, equivalent universe."  (The cover picture is a partial example of one of the etchings.)

In this beautiful edition, which you will enjoy returning to again and again, the combination of Borges’ captivating story and Desmazières’ evocative etchings demonstrate the power of a book to transport readers to another world.

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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