Book Review: "Fräulein Else" by Arthur Schnitzler

Fräulein Else (1924)
Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931)
56 pages

Most of us spend much of our lives only dimly aware of the nearly non-stop inner monologue that occupies our minds – our rushing stream of thoughts as we recall and re-litigate our past, or plan for and worry about our future.

Except for brief periods during which we manage to focus on the present moment – periods so exceptional that they have their own terminology, being in the zone – the typical, uncontrolled flow of our thoughts so captures us that to suddenly emerge from it feels like waking from a dream: the realization that you have no recollection of the past few miles, or even tens of miles that you’ve driven, or no understanding of the last paragraphs, even pages, you’ve been reading. And, to the extent one manages to recall what has occupied one’s thoughts, it is discovered to be a jumbled mix of memories, observations and ruminations that bear little resemblance to the hallowed idea of a rational mind – as has been said, our mind seems to have a mind of its own.

It's precisely this inner monologue that Austrian author and playwright Arthur Schnitzler uses to striking effect in his novella Fräulein Else, by presenting the story entirely through the thoughts of the nineteen-year-old title character. Different from a narrator who can, as people are wont to do, craft their telling to offer a particular viewpoint, readers follow Else’s unmediated thoughts, becoming privy to the messy mix of non sequiturs and tangents that people normally try to hide from others behind carefully constructed façades of coherence.

Schnitzler sets the story in a resort town in the Italian Alps, where Else is on vacation with her aunt and cousin. As the story opens, she bids goodbye to her cousin and his lover after playing tennis with them, and then begins the walk back to her hotel to get ready for dinner. Through her thoughts, we are introduced to a typical teenager: wondering about her cousin’s relationship; imagining how, to whom and when she herself will fall in love and get married; and considering what to do during the remainder of her stay.

The tone of her thoughts changes to unease, however, when upon entering the hotel the porter flags her down to give her an express mail from her mother in Vienna. Once back in her room she opens the letter to discover her concern born out, learning that her father, a lawyer, has gone deeply into debt – yet again – from gambling losses and poor choices in the stock market, and will be arrested if his debt is not paid off within the next two days. With family members either unreachable or no longer willing to help, her mother has turned to Else, pleading with her to approach a well-to-do family friend, Mr. von Dorsday, who happens to also be vacationing in the same town, to ask him for a loan.

Else’s consternation over the request is palpable. She despises Dorsday, who has always seemed far too solicitous, constantly making “cow eyes” at her. Contemplating with dread the task before her, she finds herself trapped in a situation that pits her love for her father against her disgust for having to engage with Dorsday, and her thoughts rapidly devolve into a turbulent and inchoate jumble.

Eventually, she does manage to screw-up her courage however, and, descending to the lobby where everyone is gathering for dinner, she seeks out Dorsday, and relates to him the situation her father is in and her mother’s request. Dorsday agrees to help her father, but then makes a stipulation that shocks Else to the quick. Already flustered by having had to approach Dorsday, his unexpected request sends her thoughts into free fall. As the evening deepens and she must decide how to respond to him, she comes to feel increasingly isolated and abandoned, and the untenable situation causes her to drift ever deeper into hallucination and hysteria.

In Fräulein Else, Schnitzler presents a compelling story of a person facing a soul-rending dilemma, and, by holding readers within the inner monologue of Else’s thoughts, creates a startlingly intimate portrait of the destructive repercussions.

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Other notes and information:

I had an odd experience while editing an intermediate version of the review. I had worked on it for a half hour or so that I had available over lunch. Then, at some point early that afternoon, I noticed that I was humming a bit of a classical piece of music that was very familiar to me, but that I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of. After trying some ineffective searches on the web, I asked my wife, and she immediately identified it as Beethoven’s “Für Elise”.

It's not a tune that I can having recall heard in some years, or for that matter hummed to myself ever, but somehow it had popped up in my mind. Though perhaps I had heard something that morning that reminded me of it, I can’t help wondering if my brain saw “Fräulein Else”, and somehow managed to trigger the memory of the tune, even though consciously I couldn’t then recall the name of what I was humming.

Nothing to do with the book itself, per se, but it does somehow tie-in to the broad idea of the chaotic nature of the workings of the mind.

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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 Much of These Hills Is Gold" by C Pam Zhang

How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020)
C Pam Zhang (1990)
272 pages

Stories set in the American west of the nineteenth century tend to feature unyielding gunslingers, dogged cowboys and rapacious businessmen doing battle in morality plays pitting good against evil. In such stories, the rest of the population, those who came to the west seeking work and a better life, often serve merely as props around which the main events occur. The spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood are perhaps the most iconic examples; and even when Eastwood himself sought to present a more complex portrait in his movie Unforgiven, the plot still culminated in dramatic gunfights.

Author C Pam Zhang’s debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, however, turns these conventions of the genre on their head; though set in the far-western American frontier of the mid-1800’s, cowboys and gunslingers make no appearance. And, while profit-obsessed business owners provide the larger context for the story, they remain largely invisible – powerful, implacable figures beyond justice or mercy. Zhang, in fact, builds her story around the lives of those who came to the west and ended up working for these men, the daily fight for survival of those at the bottom of the social order, scraping by on subsistence wages by mining for ore or laying track for the trains.

By focusing on deeply disenfranchised and often itinerant laborers, and by tending to identify the places in her novel more by their natural and human geography than with specific names, Zhang manages to evoke the eternal struggle of migrant, and particularly immigrant, communities. Through the specific characters of her novel, she evokes the struggle that has been waged throughout history up to the present day by so many to build a viable life.

As Zhang’s story opens, Lucy and her sibling Sam, twelve and eleven years old, respectively, find themselves orphaned – their Ba has passed away in the night, and their Ma already having gone some years earlier. Determined to give their father a proper burial, the pair pack his body into a trunk, steal a horse, and set out from the repurposed chicken coop that had been their home on the outskirts of a coal mining town in the mountain west. Traveling across the mountains, they search for a proper burial spot for their father, and some money to bury with him for the afterlife.

Wrestling with the challenges that their Chinese ancestry presents for them at seemingly every encounter, their journey becomes an attempt to make sense of the history that brought their parents to this place, and what it reveals about how their parents raised them. And, as they come to understand better their parents’ past, it begins to inform their own relationship to the American west, and the question of whether there is a future for them within it.

Out of this search for meaning and answers, Zhang brilliantly weaves together a story that explores many of the ongoing complexities of human experience, including: immigrants who come looking for a better life, but find themselves shoved aside at nearly every turn; minorities who, though second-generation Americans who’ve never known anywhere else, find themselves treated as second class citizens, both by attitude and often by law; and, women and girls who find themselves repeatedly at risk in a male-dominated world. Attempting to incorporate so many cultural challenges into one novel could have easy slipped over into becoming a disjointed laundry list of a story; Zhang, however, subtly integrates these issues and others into a profoundly moving narrative that evokes them within the context of the day-to-day lives of her characters.

It is one of those serendipitous events that happen to readers that I began Zhang’s book immediately after finishing poet Cathy Park Hong’s essay Minor Feelings: An Asian American Experience.  The two books deal with many of the same themes, if one in a fictional setting and the other autobiographical: the question of what it means to be a minority in the United States; how someone who is born a minority in the Unites States must constantly deal with the majority culture’s assumptions about them and their ancestry; how such a person thinks about the land of their ancestors and the land of their birth; and, not least, the challenges woman face in the pursuit of equality – at work and in the culture at large.

One can argue, even just from the portrayals in these two books, that much has changed for the better with respect to these issues in the century and half that lies between their settings. On the other hand, it’s hard to not be left with the dispiriting realization that somehow so little has in fact changed – that so much work yet remains to achieve the kind of fundamental cultural awareness and understanding that is needed to achieve a more fully developed community of equality and justice in the United States.

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Other notes and information:

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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: "Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning" by Cathy Park Hong

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)
Cathy Park Hong (1976)
203 pages

Given that poet Cathy Park Hong has presented a very personal exploration of her life in her remarkable collection of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, I’ll open my review in a personal vein, as a path leading to why I found her book so powerful a contribution to the fraught topic of life in the United States as a minority.

I’ll preface my remarks by stating that I’m a white male, and that I attended an all-white, rather rural suburban midwestern school system through high school. So, beyond being raised to treat everyone with respect, I was mostly isolated from questions of race.

Once in college this changed, of course, and one particular idea I recall wrestling with is that someone who was a minority could feel uncomfortable in a setting in which they were the only, or one of only a few, “like them.” It seemed to me – through a blunt, rational analysis – that if others in the room were not unfriendly or standoffish (or, of course, worse) then it didn’t make sense to feel uncomfortable in such a setting. It seemed ‘irrational’ to ‘invent’ such feelings of discomfort.

But then I became friends with someone who is Asian American (a friendship that has lasted to the present), and he invited me to dance parties put on by the campus Asian American Association. It wasn’t long before a majority of my friends were Asian American, and I eventually dated a woman who became president of AAA. At that point, as boyfriend-of-the-president, I became even more deeply involved in the organization, doing whatever was needed around supporting the events being put on.

Despite all the Asian American friends I had, however, whenever I was at an AAA event such as a dance I would have a feeling of anxiety or uncomfortableness – a feeling of being noticed and judged somehow for being there. I tried to shake it off as irrational, knowing I was surrounded by quite a few friends and recognizing that the larger group mostly knew who I was and how I ‘belonged.’ Undoubtedly some there felt I didn’t belong and shouldn’t have been there – and shouldn’t have been dating an Asian American woman for that matter – but nonetheless, my closest friends at school were in the room with me.

It was from those experiences that I came to understand the reality of the tension that can exist for someone in the situation of being a minority surrounded by a majority culture – even when there is no overt hostility. The presence of this unshakable feeling that everyone is looking, judging, rejecting, even if there is no direct evidence of it at that moment.

To be clear, I’m not saying this gave me an understanding of the minority experience. Obviously, I could take a few steps any time I wanted and be back on the larger campus environment that looked mostly like me. And, as mentioned, my earlier experiences were based on growing up in an even more homogenous environment.

Rather, the point is that these experiences opened my thinking, enabling me to acknowledge the validity of the feelings that can arise in such situations. It made clear to me that a simplistic analysis of ‘what should happen’ or ‘what should be felt’ fails to acknowledge reality – that a person’s impressions about and reaction to a situation or something that happens are informed by both the explicit elements of the moment, as well as completely unavoidable subconscious expectations based on previous experiences, both one’s own and those of others one knows. Perhaps an obvious statement, but one that, back those decades ago, I had to arrive at.

And it is in fact exactly these kinds of inner conflicts that Hong explores through her essays in Minor Feelings – the conflicts that have arisen for her out of the complexity of living as a second generation American, a Korean American, an Asian American and more generally part of a minority in the United States.

Early on, Hong defines her term Minor Feelings as:

the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. (55) 

Through her essays, Hong demonstrates how the buildup for her of these “sediments of every day racial experience” has occurred, and how they have subsequently rippled through the events and encounters of her life. What distinguishes her telling is her willingness to describe the full complexity of her experience, her recognition and acknowledgement of the murky gray area she must contend with in distinguishing between slights that really are racially motivated, and others that may not be, but that given the thickness of the “sediment” can nonetheless still cause a reaction, still leave a mark.

Thus, Hong describes a variety of clearly racially motivated aggressions and outright attacks that she both experienced and witnessed as she grew up. But then she recalls a recent flight to Michigan for a reading of one of her books of poetry:

After the plane landed, while I was struggling to extract my rollaboard from the overhead, a bull-necked white guy in a Michigan football jersey growled “Excuse me” and shoved past me. Was he just being rude or was he acting like this because I was Asian? (29) 

This recollection crystalizes the impact of the minor feelings Hong describes. It would be easy for someone who is not a minority – who has never had even the momentary experience of being in a situation where they are in some sense a minority – to dismiss such a story with words to the effect of “that’s all in your head.” Even Hong herself wonders this, as she points out in her description of the situation. Nevertheless, her lifetime of personal experiences, and her awareness of the experiences of other minorities, make it impossible to discount the possibility that race played a role. How could they not?

In a similar vein, Hong challenges the tendency of the dominant culture to generalize about minorities, as if the fact there are relatively few of a group somehow makes it acceptable to stereotype them. In particular, she rails against the idea of Asian Americans as model minorities, the idea that Asians are next in line to be white, or even that there can be considered to be any kind of coherent generalization of Asian Americans:

Most Americans … don’t understand that [Asian Americans] are this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the “we” in Asian America. Do I mean Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Pacific Islander, queer and straight, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich and poor? (19)

Out of frustration, she takes a rather blunt approach to exploding the simplistic notion of Asian Americans as the model minority – hard working, studious, quiet – by giving specific examples of degenerative, aggressive and even criminal behavior among Asian Americans she knows. That she must resort to such a direct approach of demonstrating that people come in all types whether they belong to the majority or a minority seems, unfortunately, like an extremely necessary dope smack: it’s disturbing to think it needs said, much less demonstrated so concretely, but it clearly must needs be.

The middle series of essays loosely tracks Hong’s experiences from childhood through her years at college, including the sometimes subtle, sometimes painfully explicit and aggressive racism she has endured, and has observed her family endure. She describes how the challenge and impact of living with the resulting minor feelings go beyond her reactions to random encounters with strangers, such as the bull-necked airplane passenger in the quote above. More broadly, the impact of these minor feelings has confounded her thinking about herself and her life, as well as her work as an artist and writer, leading her to question who even her audience should be, and what themes she should engage. As she explores these struggles, she digs her way through the “sediments” of her experiences in search of answers.

In her final essay Hong explores the question of the level of indebtedness immigrants to the United States, and their American-born children, should feel to their adopted country. Here, again, the simplistic traps those in the majority culture tend to fall into are many, such as calling for minorities to go back home, if you don’t like it here – attacks already occurring long before the previous resident in the White House made it more politically and socially acceptable to do so.

Even ignoring the fact that going back home for Hong would mean returning to her birthplace of Los Angeles, she describes the challenges she would face if she were to actually move to her ancestral home of Korea. But this does not, she makes clear, imply that she must feel gratitude that she can stay in the US, since her family came here in the first place to escape the devastation of the US war in Korea and the US-guided social and political aftermath in South Korea.

More generally, she ties this question to the broader dilemma of immigrants escaping the traumas of the global conflicts of the past century and a half. In so doing, she turns directly to face readers among the majority culture, observing:

I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists use to say, “I am here because you are there.” ... My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude. (195)

Unfortunately, knowledge of this history seems largely unknown in the United States; as historian Jill Lepore laments in her essay This America, our understanding of our history as a nation has declined dramatically over the past century and a half. This came about, she notes, as historians developed an extremely negative view of nationalism, and so shied away from writing national histories, even though,

Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will. (19-20, This America) 

With scholars ceding the writing of our history to others, demagogues have seized the opportunity to invent and promulgate historical narratives tailored to their goals, built around destructive images of nativist purity and hatred of others, and calls for violent action to defend a mythical heritage.

Lepore argues that, to counteract this, historians must re-engage in the telling the story of our nation – its full history, warts and all. The return to having a complete, commonly understood history will, according to Lepore, reinvigorate our nation’s ability to act as a defender of a shared set of civic values, and so create a social and political environment that can enable the acceptance and inclusion of minorities into the full set of rights and privileges of our society. (My review of Lepore’s essay linked to at right.)  At the very least it could begin to dispel the misconceptions that drive some of the behavior and attitudes Hong describes.

Ultimately, what stands out about the essays in Minor Feelings, beyond the often harrowing honesty with which Hong speaks about her lifetime of dealing with the racial complexities she has faced and worked through, is her clear message that the point of telling all this is to create a level of understanding about the impact of not only aggressive, obvious racism, but the many subtle versions of it that form such a challenging backdrop to daily life: the implications of constantly encountering the naivete of I’m not racist because I have fill-in-the-blank-minority friends, or Asians are the next whites, or a seemingly endless string of other examples.

And also, as she writes, to make the point that of such an understanding is not to generate feelings of shame or guilt that cause one to become “awkwardly silent” (87), or, worse, to actively segregate from those different from themselves in order to avoid these feelings. Rather, by exploring and exposing the complexities of her life, Hong hopes to create a recognition in at least some of her readers of the complexity of her experiences, and to get us to see past the generalizations and assumptions that lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of the minority experience in the United State, and so a profound inability to successfully engage in improving it.

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Other notes and information:

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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 New Wilderness" by Diane Cook

The New Wilderness (2020)
Diane Cook (1976)
398 pages

An enduring fantasy in reaction to the challenges of modern life has been that of escaping to a form of living more closely aligned with the rhythms of the natural world. It can be easy to imagine that exchanging the concrete dissatisfactions of one’s daily life for the seeming simplicity of a more rustic existence could be a worthwhile trade. But is this perhaps rather more a case of needing to be careful what one wishes for?

In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a couple of dozen people make precisely this choice, volunteering to leave their established lives behind and move to an uninhabited area to live off the land as nomads. Nominally taking part in a study on the impact of people on the wilderness, the group, known as the Community, must follow strict guidelines outlined in a book called the Manual; to ensure they leave no impact beyond taking what’s needed for food, clothing and shelter, a team of Rangers closely monitors their activities.

Cook motivates the situation by setting the story in a not-too-distant future of worsening ecological conditions and growing economic disruption. She implicates a combination of global warming and increasing pollution as the culprits but leaves ambiguous the origins and extent of what has happened to the world. The members of the Community make clear, however, that they had found their lives, in a place referred to simply as the City, becoming increasingly intolerable, and so had eagerly embraced joining the study and moving to a region called the Wilderness State.

The novel opens several years into the Community’s time in the wilderness, by which point they have already lost several members, with some dying in accidents and others giving up and returning to the City. The group has also worn out most of its original clothing and equipment, settling into a life of producing what they need out of what they can make for themselves from hunting and gathering. Along with the ongoing challenges of the natural world, however, they also find themselves repeatedly at odds with the Rangers, whose aggressive tracking of the Community’s impact on the Wilderness State represents a constant irritation for the Community, never allowing it to settle down or find peace.

Within the broader context of these daily challenges faced by the Community in the Wilderness State, the story develops around the relationship of two its members, Bea and her nine-year-old daughter Agnes. Agnes had grown up sickly, her body unable to cope with the heavily polluted air in the City. When her stepfather, a professor of archeology, learns of plans for a study involving a group living in the wilderness, he and Bea decide to volunteer in the hope that the fresh air will offer Agnes a chance to become healthy.

Now, four years later, Agnes only dimly remembers her former life in the city; she has grown up in the Wilderness State and feels comfortable and in-tune with the nature around her. For Bea, however, life in the wilderness with the Community has been a mixed blessing: though happy that her daughter has become healthy, she misses her own mother terribly and remains conflicted about the sacrifices she’s made, reflecting that although “she loved Agnes fiercely, … motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.” (18)

Agnes, for her part, recognizes this ambivalence within her mother.  Late in the novel, when the two are speaking about Agnes’ childhood, Agnes realizes that “she didn’t need her mother to tell her that it was both nice and not nice to have a child. It was always there on her face.” (327) 

Too young, however, to make sense of her mother’s feelings – and her mother unwilling to explain them – Agnes struggles to understand her mother’s choices and behavior. In the structured life of the City this may have led to the typical kind of mother-daughter drama, boiling at or near the surface, until eventually Agnes would have grown up and moved away. But here, Bea’s cryptic behavior leaves Agnes ever more trapped between her love for her mother and a deepening alienation from her, exacerbated by Agnes’ own growing connection to and harmony with the natural world. With the engagement and cooperation of the entire Community required in the constant struggle to survive, the estrangement between the two inexorably comes to a head.

The disastrous environmental changes that define the world of the novel have apparently occurred in the relatively recent past and seem to have worsened quickly. While Bea describes her mother as having grown up in a house and community that seems very much like our present day, she herself seems to have no direct memory of that time. Even her familiarity with the current world outside the City and the Wilderness State seems surprisingly limited, as if the ongoing environmental and social decline has narrowed her focus down to her local, daily life – or, more ominously, has been actively curtailed by the ruling elite, through a government referred to cryptically as the Administration. Thus, when Bea and Agnes one day see geese at a pond near which the Community has settled, and Agnes asks whether there are geese in other places:

Bea assumed there must be geese elsewhere, just not in the City. But now she didn’t know. And what of those other lands in heavy use? The cities of greenhouses, the rolling landfills, the sea of windmills, the Woodlots, the Server Farms. What of the lands that had long ago been abandoned? The Heat Belt, the Fallow Lands, the New Coast. (79-80) 

This uncertainty is reflected too, in the repeated speculation among the members of the Community about rumored Private Lands, where those rich enough to avoid the deteriorating conditions in the City supposedly live in clean and comfortable conditions.

Cook’s ambiguousness about the origins of this dystopian future and its full implications recalls her approach to many of the wonderful stories in her collection Man V. Nature, which I described in my review (linked to at right) as a delightfully strange brew. In those stories, like that of The New Wilderness, Cook introduced a dystopic alternate reality or future without revealing much about its causes or full implications – dropping a reader into a kind of Twilight Zone setting. As was done in that old TV series, Cook focuses more in her stories on exploring the reactions of the characters to the world in which they find themselves, the impact on their lives and relationships, rather than explaining how that world came about.

However, what worked so engagingly in the short story setting – a twisted present with little or no indication of how it came about – disappoints in
The New Wilderness: the world that Cook creates supports the psychological drama that plays out but seems distractingly improbable. Certainly, dystopian stories that leave the details of their origins hazy or even completely undefined are legion – in author Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight, as a particularly extreme case, the main character finds himself alone at an Arctic outpost with no hint at all of what has happened to the outside world beyond that he appears to be the last remaining survivor (my review linked to at right); Brooks-Dalton leaves what has happened to the rest of the world completely to the reader’s imagination.

But what we learn about the world Cook has created in The New Wilderness seems oddly unconvincing. Thus, although some kind of developing environmental catastrophe is occurring, Cook’s description of life in the City is an odd combination of seeming normality along with intense pollution, worsening lines for food and other extreme situations. And then there is the implication that there is only one City, which is not explained and seems unlikely in any reasonable scenario. Are there truly no other cities? How could such a civilizational contraction occur without a complete collapse of society? The story suffers a bit from what could be called the uncanny valley problem: different from our present-day society, but sufficiently similar that the differences subconsciously distract.

Taken as a psychological drama of characters struggling to survive the whims of nature and their fellow man, however, The New Wilderness works well, an engaging story of a group of people who carry on against difficult odds. Beyond this strength of will, however, Cook paints a dark future for our civilization. The world she has created has a haunting resemblance to the disturbing future historian Yuval Noah Harari warns of in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari worries that current advances in “biotech” (medicine and genetics) and “infotech” (data mining, AI and robotics) risk, if we are not careful, pushing us toward a society in which biologically enhanced super-rich isolate themselves ever more completely from the rest of humanity. Those others who gradually become less and less needed to perform the work the super-rich need to live will discover themselves to have become irrelevant, in Harari’s words, and so the recipients of declining civic and economic support. (My review to Harari’s book at right.)

For Harari’s bleak, if startlingly plausible view of our future, the world of Cook’s novel, with its increasingly dysfunctional City and mythical Private Lands, seems a disturbingly fitting and all too imminent waypoint.

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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: "This America" by Jill Lepore

This America: The Case for the Nation (2019)
Jill Lepore (1966)
150 pages

In her essay This America: The Case for the Nation, historian and author Jill Lepore proposes rehabilitating the term nationalism from the extremely negative connotations it has come to have. Allowing the current pejorative image of nationalism to dominate has had the consequence, she argues, of sullying by association the concept of the nation, and so undermining the critical role of the nation-state in defending common, civic values.

Historians have been culpable in enabling this situation, according to Lepore. In the mid-1900’s, having witnessed a long series of destructive civil wars and international conflicts enflamed by national pride and prejudice gone mad, scholars hoped to help this dominant, destructive form of nationalism disappear by ignoring it. In its stead, they turned their attention to studying and writing about globalization and the growing interconnectedness of the world, as well as groups and identities within or across national boundaries. But, Lepore notes: “Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.” (19-20) And so, as scholars left the writing of the stories of nations to those who invent and promulgate historical narratives tailored to their goals, the void was filled with narratives built around destructive images of nativist purity and hatred of others, and calls for violent action to defend a mythical heritage.

Having established her concern about the current nature of nationalism and its impact on our social and political situation, Lepore looks back, to the origins of nations. She notes that, originally, nations formed around people who shared a common descent and lived in a fairly contained region. Gradually, however, nations came to be defined more in a geographic sense, often encompassing people of varied, at best loosely related, backgrounds. To govern these nations of peoples, political communities then arose, leading to the idea of the nation-state.

Turning her focus on the United States in particular, Lepore points out that the US turned this typical origin story of the nation-state on its head: the government (the state) came first, with a national government established to rule the original, fairly independent, thirteen colonies, and the concept of a nation having to be developed in the wake of the creation of the state. Thus, she writes, the US originated, in a sense, as a state-nation.

As a consequence, in the early 1800’s, the original “nationalists” in the US were those who sought to develop and enhance federal power over state’s rights. By creating a story of the nation as centered around the founding of American democracy, they aimed to generate a feeling among the distinct populations of the states of belonging to a single, common polity. With the growing political and social conflict over slavery and finally the Civil War, however, this concept of nationalism split into two opposing strands: “liberal or civic nationalism, an attachment to a set of civic ideals, [and] illiberal or ethnic nationalism, nativism, racism, and recourse to aggression.” (58)

Lepore argues that both strands have remained present over the past century and a half. Describing their evolution, she notes that, on the one hand, a “race-based nationalism … endures, a scourge to the country and the world” (59), leading to the justification of violence and terror toward anyone not considered part of the “true” America, as the country has witnessed coming to a head again now, in early 2021.

On the other hand, a liberal nationalism, as embodied by, for example, Abraham Lincoln, has also remained present. It has defended civil rights, and supported an on-going expansion of these rights to a broader set of groups within the country. Admittedly, she notes, these advances have come in fits and starts, with whole segments of American society – Native Americans, women, blacks – having to agitate and fight to have their past honestly told as a part of the story of the nation, as well as to be acknowledged as active participants in forming its future.

In This American, Lepore argues that it is high time for scholars to re-engage in the defense and support of liberal nationalism, to write the true history of the American nation, telling a comprehensive story of the good and the bad that has occurred in American history. In so doing, historians can make the case for the importance of the nation to engage as a defender of the values of civic liberalism for its citizens, as opposed to continuing down the destructive path of illiberal nationalism.

For while it may be, she notes, that at some point in the future nations no longer exist – that civilization arranges around some other structure – for the moment and the foreseeable future nations are here to stay. And so the nation, and the political states that govern them, remain the best hope for realizing and protecting the civic goals of “equality, citizenship and equal rights” (137) for a nation’s people.

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Other notes and information:

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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: "This Brilliant Darkness" by Jeff Sharlet

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers (2020)
Jeff Sharlet (1972)
320 pages

In her solo work and as part of the group Dead Can Dance, the wonderful musician Lisa Gerrard’s bewitching and incantatory voice animates her many amazing songs. Among them, her performance of the melancholy piece Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow has always created in me one of two wildly disparate moods: I experience it either as an exaltation of the first dawn of the first human on Earth (for whatever reason visualized as the closing scene of George Lucas’ film THX-1138), or as a requiem to the world, performed as the first explosions of a global, thermonuclear holocaust mushroom into the sky. Somehow Gerrard’s powerful voice and the rich melody manage to engender, in one song, a profound sense of either hope or devastation.

In reading author and journalist Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, consisting of a set of intensely personal portraits of people he has met in his recent travels, I’ve discovered this same quality to evoke powerful and quite opposite feelings.

Sharlet opens by explaining that the book grew out of accidental meetings with random people as he drove regularly through the night between his hometown and that of his ill father, worked late at night public places, or traveled on organized reporting trips. He used the camera on his phone to take pictures of strangers he met, to which he then added accounts of his discussions with them. Thus, he writes, out of

two years of reporting, … this is a book of other people’s lives, lives that became, for a moment – the duration of a snapshot – my life, too.” (5)

In some cases, his accounts constitute extended captions to the accompanying picture, a couple-few paragraphs; in a few others, however, he provides a deeper, more extensive narrative.

In these encounters, he asks those he meets about their lives in a clear-eyed and direct manner, but, critically, without any hint of condescension or rejection. For all the natural and inquisitive questions Sharlet asks, he has the compassion and awareness to not ask that last question, the one that shifts from engaging fairly with someone, to humiliating them – transforming them from a human being into an oddity in a zoo.

The result is a series of portraits of people who live at or, more often, beyond the margins of society: people working the night shift, hiding from ‘normal’ society or wandering the alleys, visible but somehow at the same time easily overlooked and ignored. Instead of passing on by, however, eyes averted or giving a perfunctory nod, Sharlet has stopped to not only acknowledge but engage these strangers.

And here, then, the challenge of this book, the disparate emotions experienced while reading it. For, on the one hand, these portraits too often reveal the seemingly boundless depth of our society’s inhumanity: our willingness to allow entire segments of the population to be left behind, whether as homeless or scraping by at a low paying job to stay just ahead of the threat of homelessness – or worse to violently suppress them as a dangerous other. On the other hand, we witness the intense humanity of these lives, the hopes and desires Sharlet discovers even in people with lives filled with struggle and heartache. As I read Sharlet’s descriptions of the people he met, my feelings oscillated between these poles of despairing the inhumanity of their situations and celebrating their powerful humanity.

Granted, Sharlet’s vignettes about these strangers provide readers a certain distance. We are spared those potential aspects of such encounters that might trigger the typical response of turning away – the smell of a life on the streets, the slightly unsteady or even frenzied look in an eye; through Sharlet, we are able to look closer, to follow along as he engages with people, without the threat of directly facing that reality. But, not having these strangers in front of us, in person, we do miss out on the opportunity for the more fundamental connection that engaging someone in person allows; we must rely on Sharlet’s ability to build that connection for us, through his prose – which he does brilliantly, even if it can’t completely make up for not being there. Perhaps, though, it’s the best possible compromise for all those readers unlikely, for whatever reason, to actually go out and meet such strangers, as Sharlet has.

Sharlet hints at this connection he is providing readers in an epigraph to the book that comments on the quality of pictures a phone camera can take (versus a professional one). Reading that note again after completing the book, it captures well the nature of his role in writing the vignettes of the people he has met.

The phone camera comes close enough for the viewer to guess [at what I saw that made me snap the picture], and in between that guess and the light-as-it-was stands me. The mediation. Perfect camera tech creates the illusion of unmediated vision. That amazing picture that looks like it’s real? That’s a deception. This – sort of what it looked like, something like what I saw, something like what I felt – is the truth.

This mediation is what readers get, not only in the photos Sharlet includes of the people he encounters, but more importantly in the accompanying prose of his discussions with them, the discoveries that ensue. “The deception,” in this case, would be the “perfect” newspaper or magazine article that describes the challenges of working the night shift, or living on skid row, or being caught up in social support services: readers learn some facts, but can miss the humanity. Instead, Sharlet’s narrative presents us individuals, distinct people, with particular histories; yes, with challenges, but also hopes and, more critically, the drive to live on one more day, and then one more.

There is no denying, however, the powerful effect on readers of Sharlet’s narrative, particularly of his encounters with the people struggling most to carry on. And, toward the end of the book, he acknowledges how what he has seen, heard and experienced has irrevocably impacted him: the growing recognition of the fragility of our lives, and that the world, our civilization, “is like an ocean and our seemingly stable lives are little boats we mistake for land.” (288)

Beyond the individual impact he felt, came the implications of the reality he discovered for his role as a parent. Considering what he has seen of the precarious nature of so many lives, he acknowledges the fear he is left with, one that must needs lurk in any parent’s heart:

I don’t have the words: The fear that comes with the love that as soon as you have a child you can lose the child, that you can do all the right things and still it won’t matter.” (288) 

These words may seem obvious read here, in isolation, but read them late in Sharlet’s book and they become much more freighted with a profound melancholy.

This fear that Sharlet describes for his children’s future recalls an exchange in Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man. The protagonist, after her friend’s challenging pregnancy and then delivery, meets with the attending physician; she wants to understand the potential impact on the baby of what has happened during the pregnancy, but the physician gives little solace:

“… as with any child, you won’t know if he can run until he runs.”

“Okay, I see. And besides running? Should we keep an eye out for anything in the future?”

“Oh, the future, I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.” He swiveled and walked away.

Perhaps not the best bed-side manner, but the hard reality, nonetheless.

And the author Jennifer Senior also brilliantly captured this fear for our children’s future, during an interview on Fresh Air (4 February 2014) for her book on parenthood All Joy and No Fun:

I think Christopher Hitchens described having kids as 'your heart running around in somebody else's body,' and that feeling is so powerful it's almost scary, because there's almost like an implied sense of loss about it, it's like you love somebody so much that you are almost automatically afraid of losing them, that this connection is so deep that you can't think of that connection without thinking of that connection being broken.

For some in Sharlet’s book that “loss” is the death of their beloved child; for others, however, it is the similar, terrible fate of losing a child who has slid irrecoverably beyond the margins of society. (Complete quote here.)

In This Brilliant Darkness, Sharlet invites us to consider such fears squarely, by meeting people who those with “stable lives” too often push out of consciousness – and asks that we look them squarely in the eye. In writing filled with deep compassion but without a sugar-coating of the reality, he reveals the hard edges of the society we’ve created, and the humanity of the people who struggle to survive out along, and beyond, its edges.

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Other notes and information:

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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: "Berlin" by Jason Lutes

Berlin (2018)
Jason Lutes (1967)
577 pages

Germany’s Weimar Republic teetered on the brink of collapse as the 1920’s came to a close. Successive administrations proved incapable of righting a decade long decline in the economic situation, and equally powerless to tamp down increasingly violent skirmishes on the streets between partisans of the National Socialist and Communist parties. Actively attempting to undermine the existing government, the leaders of these organizations fomented conflict, rallying their members toward ever more polarized positions and training them for combat. Stuck in the middle of this power-play: a besieged population left to fend for itself.

These conditions were particularly manifested in the capital city of Berlin. A large and growing metropolis in the heart of the continent, Berlin attracted all manner of immigrants from throughout Germany and across Europe as those desperate for work, grasping for power or simply escaping their past poured into the city in search of a new beginning. And, while some arrived with extreme political ideologies, others contributed to radically new and disruptive social, cultural and artistic mores and practices that for many, particularly in the middle class, seemed a piece with the deterioration of order on the streets.

This chaotic mixture of uncertainty and change has been captured brilliantly by Jason Lutes in his graphic novel Berlin, which is set in the period from late 1928 up through the installation of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in early 1933. Lutes’ gorgeously drawn scenes evoke both the grandeur and the grit of Berlin during the final, dramatic years of the Weimar Republic. Whether presenting streetscapes in which political violence disrupts people going about their daily business, or interior settings that reflect the variety of conditions under which people lived in the city, Lutes’ richly rendered drawings pull readers into this turbulent moment in Berlin’s history.

And he complements his artwork with an engaging story that explores the confusion, anger, and hysteria of the time through an extensive cast of characters representing the messy diversity that constituted Weimar Berlin. Beyond hardcore partisans of the National Socialist and Communist parties, Lutes builds his narrative around characters from groups caught up in a situation beyond their control: middle and upper classes looking to protect their position amid growing violence and a dysfunctional government – averse to the Nazi’s brutish populism, but receptive to their promises of a return to order; a working class barely scraping by and feeling abandoned by the ruling Social Democrats – perhaps disgusted by the violent methods of the communist party, but finding nowhere else to turn for support; and an educated elite of journalists, artists and others, eager to separate from the old ways, and yet disturbed by the growing political breakdown.

Lutes artfully weaves together these many lives around the central character of Marthe Müller, an “art student and daughter of a middle-class family from Köln (Cologne)” (as described in a helpful Character list at the back of the book). Marthe arrives in Berlin in September 1928 to attend art school, but more generally looking to escape the limitations she perceives within the middle-class life of her parents, and so to start her life anew in the big city.

On the train to Berlin, she meets Kurt Severing, “a writer for Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), a weekly magazine of politics and art,” who is returning home from an assignment. The two become friends and then lovers, and – the ingenue artist and the grizzled, world-weary journalist – our guides through a Berlin in which, as Kurt describes to Marthe on the train ride in, “many factions … clash in the streets with increasing frequency. Communists, socialists, nationalists, democrats, republicans, criminals, beggars, thieves and everything in between. All mixed up together.” (10)

An early scene of such a “clash in the streets” captures perfectly the character of the violence, as well as the confusion of a populace resigned to its presence in their lives. It opens with a young Jewish boy selling copies of a Communist newspaper on the street; when three neighborhood boys whose sympathies lie with the National Socialists first verbally and then physically assault him, he must run for his life. In the next frames, a friend of Marthe’s, looking down from an apartment window, describes to her the confrontation occurring below. When Marthe asks, “Why do you think they were chasing him?”, the woman waves her hand, saying, “Maybe they’re Sozi’s and he’s a little Nationalist.” She’s gotten the motivations exactly backwards, but then, for those in the center, the reasons for such skirmishes could seem opaque and the details unimportant, their personal political outlook often guiding what little explanation they could be bothered to discern.

Avoiding overly simplistic generalizations, however, Lutes brings to the depictions of his characters the complexity of real human lives. In the pages shown at right, for example, a woman is being interviewed in the summer of 1929 by Severing, who asks her why she had participated in the Communist party’s recent May Day march; she concludes her reply by saying that she attended not out of any desire for violence, but “to demonstrate my objection to the way things are going.” (247) After the interview, the woman returns home to her husband and their evidently comfortable, middle-class existence. Later, in a scene from the following summer, the husband has just witnessed yet another confrontation between the Nazi’s and the Communists on the street below their apartment, and declares, over his wife’s unease and objections, that the two of them will vote for the Nazi’s in upcoming elections, because “they’re the ones keepin’ order.”

This complexity of the last years of the Weimar Republic in Germany, and particularly Berlin, has provided a rich palette of source material for many writers. For example, the chaos and conflicts the Severing reports on and describes to Marthe have formed the background of a series of noir novels by Volker Kutscher centered on the fictional detective Gereon Rath, among them The Fatherland Files (Die Akte Vaterland). 

The pre-war noir novels of Philip Kerr series featuring detective Bernie Gunther have also had Weimar Berlin as their setting, including the stories in Berlin Noir. (My reviews of these stories linked to at right.) Lutes, however, with his richly drawn graphic novel, brings a powerful evocation of the physical reality of the moment that even the best descriptions in such novel leaves to readers to summon.

Beyond noir, an engaging and disturbingly realistic account of the human cost of the period can be found in journalist and author Ernst Haffner’s novel Blood Brothers (Blutbrüder). Haffner describes the lives of a lost generation of German youth in the wake of the destruction of families and livelihoods in World War I. Homeless and fighting for survival on the streets of 1920’s Berlin, his characters encapsulate the abandonment of a generation who would come to fuel disorder, as well as a desire for security – for those with nothing, a life free from the rough streets, while for those in the middle class, protection from a pack they consider beggars and thieves. (My review of Haffner’s book at right.) 

While in Haffner’s story the political dynamics remain in the background, in Berlin, Lutes focuses directly on the trumped-up excuses for violence that come to destroy the Weimar Republic. Late in the story, Lutes has one of the real, historical figures he includes, the poet Joachim Ringelnatz, wandering the streets of Berlin pensively. Observing the escalating violence and reflecting on the Nazi’s significant gains in recent parliamentary elections, Ringelnatz recalls a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, that includes the lines 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
More anarchy is loosed upon the world.
…
The best lack all connection, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (504) 

This vision – that “anarchy is loosed upon the world” – permeates Lutes’ graphic novel, both visually and through its narrative.

Lutes produced and published the stories collected into Berlin over the past couple of decades, so beginning before the most recent political events in the United States; but his completed novel seems nonetheless a cautionary tale for our times. Although we have yet to witness anything like the levels of violence and disruption that afflicted the Weimar Republic, Lutes’ story makes evident the parallels some find between that period and our present worsening social and political environment of seemingly unresolvable partisanship and polarization.

Certainly that is the case in the United States for the growing unrest over our current economic situation and direction. From economist Thomas Piketty’s analysis in Capital in the Twenty-First Century becomes clear, for example, the dramatic swings in wealth concentration over the past century. The extreme concentrations of wealth capitalism generated in the late 1800’s dramatically declined in the wake of the destruction of World War I and the progressive policies implemented after the Great Depression, but this proved a temporary reprieve from the logical extremes of unfettered capitalism, as Piketty also notes that over the past several decades wealth concentration has again steadily risen, returning to levels last seen a century ago.

This growing inequality has helped fuel populist uprisings over the past decade. And, though the wealthy elite have thus far managed to redirect that anger at other targets – racial divisions, immigrants, urban liberals – the anger is real, and may, as witnessed in the Weimar Republic and its aftermath, be difficult for any group to control over the longer run. Though the details may be different, the words of a worker being interviewed in Lutes’ story ring familiar in our current moment: “The November revolution [in Germany, 1918-19] started something that must be finished. The old nobility, the Kaiser and his barons, have just been replaced by the middle class, the landlords, the bosses.

Things are better than before, but the doors is closin’. We need t’drive a wedge in there an’ keep it open.” (231) 

As workers and the middle class today watch the doors of economic opportunity that had opened, at least for some, in the middle of the 20th century close again – parents see their children ending up worse off than they were – is it not surprising that some eventually decide it is time “t’drive a wedge” into the system, and to fight for a better future?

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Other notes and information: 

Lutes lists an extensive “References & Inspirations” at the end of the novel, including fiction and nonfiction books, as well as “visual references” and films. Among this latter set of titles is director Wim Wender’s remarkable movie Wings of Desire (Die Himmel über Berlin), which presents the story of angels moving among the inhabitants of Berlin, with one in particular longing to become human and experience life directly. The angles can listen in on the random thoughts of people as they go about their quotidian lives, and Lutes nods to the movie at various points by giving readers a look into the thoughts of passersby going about their daily shopping and business in his story. 

In her 17 January 2021 editorial in The New York Times (The Inevitable), journalist Michelle Goldberg highlights the modern American version of the tension illustrated in Lutes' story between the Nazi's role in creating violent disorder and their promises to reestablish order:

An animating irony of Trumpism – one common among authoritarians – is that it revels in lawlessness while glorifying law and order.  "This is the central contradiction-slash-truth of authoritarian regimes," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and N.Y.U. historian and the author of "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present."  She cited Mussolini's definition of fascism as a "revolution of reaction."  Fascism had a radical impulse to overturn the existing order, "to liberate extremism, lawlessness, but it also claims to be a reaction to bring order to society."

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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