Review: Kapka Kassabova Border

It’s much easier to read a book about something you already know something about; harder when you are ignorant and so have to simultaneously read and store new information all the time. Knowing nothing about Thrace (Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish) I thought I would find this book hard, but most of the time it is very readable and at times moving. I struggled a bit with the constantly changing cast of characters.

In the most general terms it is a book about how people find it hard to get on with their neighbours, and quite often are forced to reject them even against their wishes, and how borders end up not just fortified with leylandii but barbed wire and machine gun posts. It’s also a book about how easy it is to turn young men into killers.

In this context a wonderful chapter about a hopelessly ecumenical Greek orthodox priest (a cadre not noted for ecumenism) is both beautifully written and deeply moving:

“ ‘Thrace without borders. Just as it should be,’ Father Alexander said when I first visited them at home, dropping in without notice. I hoped they didn’t mind, I said.

‘Mind?’ Alexander said and bit into a cheese pastry. ‘We only like guests who drop in without notice’” (page 154)

I can see how it merited its shortlistings and prize. I was a bit surprised to find a number of repetitions which are not stylistic but  failed copy and pasting – something which an editor should have picked up.

The Return of Radical Philosophy

The following (improved) version was posted on 19 July 2020 and replaces the original 2018 piece:

I had a partner who teased me whenever I informed her that I’d worked something out in my own head. She had a sharp ear for pleonasm and so I made attempts to avoid being teased.

Recently, I discovered that the journal Radical Philosophy has been revived. The old one started in 1972 and ran to two hundred issues before running out of steam. This morning in the shower - and nearly fifty years after contributing to the first issue of the original Radical Philosophy [1] -  I had the thought (in my own head), Isn’t the expression radical philosophy a pleonasm?

All philosophy tries to get to the root/s of things, to get beyond the repetition of conventional thoughts, the reliance on unchallenged assumptions, the polite acquiescence in received wisdom. That does not entail that philosophical conclusions must end up being sceptical in character. You may dig down to the roots and discover they are very strong and hold up the tree very well. Your task then becomes that of re-familiarising others, of getting them to look afresh at what has become so familiar that it is too much taken for granted. Take a look, give that root a big kick, and you will find it hurts you more than it hurts the root.

But to confine philosophy to just sceptical and non-sceptical versions is too limiting, anyway. Raymond Geuss titles a recent book Changing The Subject (2017) and broadly speaking argues that philosophers repeatedly change the state of the question. Marx was very explicit about the change he wanted to make: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. [2]

It’s a commonplace in the philosophy of science at least since Thomas Kuhn’s work (1950s – 1960s)[3] that when a scientific revolution occurs, it’s not just a theory which changes. It is the questions asked, the bits of the world which seem in need of study, the definition of the subject itself. Geuss is casting the history of philosophy as possessed by a similar dynamic. But for both science and philosophy, it does not exclude the claim that they aim at truth.

There is art and literature which might be described as philosophical and which also tries to dig down to the roots, either to refresh our understanding of our world or suggest we might be better off shifting ourselves into a different one. William Wordsworth seeks to refresh, to re-imagine our familiar world, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday as Coleridge puts it in Biographia Literaria. 

In contrast, there are those who use literary and theatrical techniques of estrangement or alienation to upset our habitual responses, hoping to lead us into questioning the normal, into imagining a world different from this wearying reality of ours. In the recent past the names of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht [4] are closely linked to such an approach, but the techniques are not new. They are deployed in a long procession of older works in which the morals and manners of other cultures are held up as mirrors to our own.

Of course, art and literature and philosophy too are often enough produced as comfort food, offering no challenge and packaged like candy. On that, my philosopher’s advice is to refuse substitutes and only curl up on the sofa with real ideas and fairtrade chocolate. [5]

---

[1] “Sanity, Madness and the Problem of Knowledge”, Radical Philosophy, 1, January 1972, pp. 22-23.

[2] . The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, dating from 1845.

[3]  Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

[4] “English Formalism and Russian Formalism”, in my Materials and Medium: An Aesthetics (2016), pp. 71-80.

[5] Here Dr Pateman enters into competition with Dr Peterson who in 12 Rules for Life (2018) recommends a masculine diet of Heidegger and fry-up breakfasts. Cousin Medicine publicly despairs of us both but  kindly whispers, Peterson’s diet is much worse.

It's Official: I'm an Author

It's official. I'm an Author. This morning I googled my name (in scare quotes) and there on the right side of the page is a recent photograph of me, my name, and the word "Author" - all selected by Google without human intervention, as far as I am aware.

It remains only for the Author to tempt some people into reading his Books, which languish unsold everywhere from Amazon to Waterstones. Time to do your bit to support the Judgment of Google!

Review: Olga Tokarczuk Flights

On my desktop there are a dozen or more folders containing a few hundred Word docs which claim to be essays, chapters, very short stories, vignettes, aphorisms, plus many more beginnings of the same. I am convinced that since they all come from the same brain, I ought to be able to arrange enough of them into something which could Pass as a book. So far, I have yet to convince anyone else, and not really myself either. 

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights has given me fresh hope. Her publishers, in original Polish and in this English translation, have allowed her over four hundred pages of compilation – and they are very readable! Her bits and pieces can be loosely arranged under such superordinate themes as “Travel” (which is converted to the title Flights) and “Anatomy” and surely if I scratch around a bit I can find a couple of overarching themes for my stuff.

Most of us nowadays read books (if at all) in fits and starts, and Tokarczuk’s book slots perfectly into our habits. I have been reading a couple of sections – they all have helpful bold titles  to break up the text – and then turn, as one does, to check emails and the latest bits and pieces which make up the day’s World  News. It has all felt quite seamless. This is the way to go, I tell myself. Now you have a weapon to beat sceptical editors!

Tokarczuk has the cast of mind of an obsessive and like many obsesssives, she has accumulated a splendid cabinet of curious bits of knowledge: “The shortest war in history was waged between Zanzibar and England in 1896, lasting thirty-eight minutes” (page 109). I loved that and immediately linked to the kind of Wittgensteinian puzzle which undergraduates used to ponder and may still ponder (though “pondering” does not really capture youthful minds): Can you be in love with someone for thirty eight minutes? Does the concept of being in love apply only in relation to something which is a bit more enduring than that?

You could say that Tokarczuk’s book is “about death” because it contains a lot of dead bodies, usually preserved in formaldehyde or subject to other techniques of preservation (the author catalogues many with considerable panache). You could say it is “about love and loss” because there are the beginnings of quite long short stories spliced into the book which fit that category. You could say that it is “about being a middle-aged woman” because there are wistful  asides on the subject, scattered through the pages, just as there are scattered remarks about Catholicism and Communism. You could say that it is about human lives without a centre, the fact disguised by endless displacements (flights).

Or you could just say that it makes an interesting and unusual book to pick up and put down, on a train journey, on a flight. But the absence of a main plot line is probably disconcerting for the reader who likes to be drawn along for two or three hours without a break and wants to feel that they are travelling to some destination.

John le Carre A Perfect Spy

Each man kills the thing he loves.

When his mother Dorothy disappears from his life and her adored substitute Lippsie kills herself, Magnus Pym blames himself twice over: to lose one parent may be someone else’s fault; to lose two re-directs the finger of blame back to oneself.

In Bern, Magnus Pym betrays his father-substitute Axel and back in England betrays his actual father, twice over: once when he hides the fact that he is studying Modern Languages, not Law, at Oxford and a second time during the Gulworth North by-election when he passes incriminating evidence to his father’s nemesis, Peggy Wentworth. His father only confronts him with the former betrayal, but the text is heavy with the suspicion that he has guessed the second.

In my edition, the bravura narrative of the Gulworth North  by-election takes up pages 396 to 439. It is being written by Magnus, holed up at what will be the end of his life, writing his autobiography addressed to his son. At the end of the Gulworth narrative, le Carré writes, “It was dawn. Unshaven, Pym sat at his desk, not wanting the daylight. Chin in hand he stared at the last page he had written. Change nothing. Don’t look back, don’t look back. You do it once, then die” (page 440).

It seems to me entirely plausible at this moment to imagine not Pym at his desk, but le Carré. He has just written forty pages of remarkable Dickensian comedy. He has also offered an extraordinary portrait of his father, both the real one and the fictionalised Rick Pym. And through the character of Peggy Wentworth, haunting his father and telling her tale to Magnus, who is also le Carré, he has an epiphany about his father’s character which leads him straight to betrayal.

The novel runs to 680 pages, cutting constantly between past and present, and cinematically between scenes occurring at the same time in different places as the net closes on the fugitive Magnus Pym. The author remains in full control throughout: a clue handed to Jack Brotherhood at page 166 is not turned to account until page 367, just the kind of thing one would expect an accomplished writer of spy fiction to deliver.

But it’s not really a work of spy fiction. It’s about love and loss and betrayal, ambition and defeat. It’s about growing up – a Bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe, evoked more than once but most explicitly at page 292:

            “…he imagined himself as the young Werther, planning his wardrobe before committing suicide. And when he considered all his failures and hopes together, he was able to compare his Werdegang with Wilhelm Meister’s years of apprenticeship, and planned then a great autobiographical novel that would show the world what a noble sensitive fellow he was compared with Rick.”

A Perfect Spy is a great autobiographical novel, the prose driven (and thus driving the reader) by extraordinary intensity of emotion (none of the main characters are less than intense) which often enough finds expression in remarkable turns of stylistic inventiveness. So the young Magnus discusses radical politics with his father’s loyal lieutenants, the gay couple of Ollie and Mr Cudlove, and it is

            “…heartily agreed over stolen canapés and cocoa that all men are brothers but nothing against your dad. And though political doctrines are at root as meaningless to me today as they were to Pym then, I remember the simple humanity of our discussions as we promised to mend the world’s ills, and the truthful good-heartedness with which, as we went off to bed, we wished each other peace in the spirit of Joe Stalin who, let’s face it, Titch, and nothing against your dad, ever, won the war for all these capitalist bastards." (page 192)

Here the intimacy of discussions over cocoa is doubled by the style in which the formality of Magnus turns into the informality of Ollie and Mr Cudlove and the different voices harmonise to sing that all men shall be as brothers.

When it was published in 1986 and John le Carre was fifty-five, the same age as Magnus Pym, Philip Roth described it as “The best English novel since the war”. I am not widely read enough to know if that claim stands up if repeated in 2018. I can only say that there are not many 680 page novels which have held my attention like this one, which I have now read three times.

*

In the essay “Never Mind. E Weber Love You Always” included in my book Prose Improvements (2017), I discuss the themes of unconditional love and salvation as they figure in A Perfect Spy.

Summer Reading Picks: Changing The Question

It’s the time of year when celebrities of one kind or another are asked to tell us their Summer Reading plans, providing them – if they choose - with opportunities to show themselves in a good light and do favours for their friends. The latter is not always acknowledged – though in today’s Financial Times, I notice Philippe Sands prefacing a book choice with a “My friend …” thus avoiding any risk of a later appearance in Private Eye’s end of year log-rolling awards, for which there are no shortage of candidates among those who review and recommend books.

I had the thought that the Summer Reading formula could be varied a bit. Instead of asking about actual reading plans, I imagined this question:

If you could only take on holiday this year a book which you read sometime last year (2017), what would it be?

The question is a challenge for me because I don’t go on holidays and don’t often read a book a second time unless in connection with something I am writing. But I looked at the books I reviewed here in 2017 and decided that if I had no choice this summer but to re-read, I would pick:

Madeleine Thien Do Not Say We Have Nothing, reviewed here on 12 April 2017, which has an extraordinary layered complexity which deserves a second reading.

And then, since that book would take up a lot of my imaginary holiday, I would settle for a short novel which I have already read twice and would have no trouble reading again:

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday, reviewed here on 8 June 2017

But having re-written the summer reading picks question, it's now back to Freud.

Review: Shaun Greenhalgh, A Forger's Tale

This is a very interesting book, and not just as a work about the craft knowledge of a very successful forger.

First, it is interesting as narrative because the text is written by an unreliable narrator, rather like Clive Driscoll’s In Pursuit of the Truth (reviewed here on 13 September 2015). I say this not because  of the self-justificatory theme which runs through the book, but because some of the stories told provoke (in me) the reaction This is a wind up, a reaction consistent with the author’s own claim that there is personal satisfaction to be got from deceiving a self-satisfied art world. 

That connects to a second level of interest which attaches to the fact that the author is someone who could have become a successful member of the middle-class but rejects that as an aspiration and destination (perhaps only after the death of a much-loved, more highly educated girlfriend) staying close to his roots both literally – he lives with his mum and dad - and metaphorically. Like Clive Driscoll, the prose style is intended to remind you constantly of this rejection. It sits uneasily with the fact that the author was clearly a youthful prodigy with an extraordinary memory and extraordinary practical abilities, focussed around an interest in serious art which has been life-long. The prodigiousness has something in common with that which one associates with autism or what in the past were called idiots savants. With or without such associations, the extraordinary ability is something to be admired.

Then there is the craft knowledge of a forger, spelled out over many pages and showing an extraordinary breadth and depth. In my own line of business as a stamp dealer, we encounter forgeries but nearly all of them are not only bad but often display childish ignorance – an envelope with an 1890 postmark but the address written in biro, and such like. Greenhalgh is in another league, not really replicated in the stamp world since the 19th century days of Fournier and Spiro.

Finally, there is an interest for the philosophy of art, not only in relation to the standard question about the possibility of the perfect forgery. More importantly, the author rightly emphasises that in the visual arts, artists always work with materials and that those materials are of importance and interest in their own right, as are the craft ways in which they are worked. We tend to look for an artist’s overall vision, but it is always expressed through the very knowledgeable working of very specific materials.