Review: Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

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This is an interesting book, but not quite as good as the jacket quotations. Nothing new in that. It is supposed to count as a “psychological thriller” or a crime novel on the strength of the last forty pages out of 260 but that’s pushing it and, in any case, those pages seem a bit contrived and implausible – there are not just loose ends at the end but awkward jumps and implausible claims. In contrast, what goes before is a sustained effort in character building. Most of the book is devoted to building the character of the first-person narrator, Eileen, who isn’t very likeable, has habits not for the squeamish, and lives an awful life spent between two prisons – home and her place of work. It is only late in the book that a second, contrasting character is introduced – Rebecca, who is imagined by Eileen as her opposite: adventurous, clever, glamorous, the usual suspects. At this point, I was reminded of Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist where the life of the narrator, a police precinct typist, is transformed by the arrival of her Other. Rebecca's arrival turns the novel into Eileen's Coming of Age story.

I did sit up late to finish the book but then the late sitting only began because I could see I  had just thirty pages to go. Before that, the tone of Moshfegh’s narration is very even – the language, the pace – and had my own mood been distracted I think I would have given up on the book long before the end. That said, the imagination deployed in creating Eileen and the serious commitment evinced in doing it over so many pages is impressive. But a lot better than that? Let’s wait until we read about people reading this book for a second or third time.

Review: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, everybody lies

When people answer questions from pollsters, they lie. When they make Google searches, they don’t. They know they can delete their browsing history and that’s enough privacy for the average user. People make an awful lot of searches and Google collects mega-quantities of reliable data which tell us what people are thinking and how they are feeling. This Big Data is now being mined by people like Seth Stephens-Davidowitz [S-D from now on] to answer all kinds of question, many of them at the applied end of the social science spectrum.

This is a well-meaning book but it is terribly naïve – not about people, whose deviant sex lives the author cheerfully catalogues, but about social science or social theory in the broadest sense. I nearly gave up on the book at chapter 2 “Was Freud Right?” which tells us that Freud was a theorist of “phallic symbols in dreams” (page 46) and goes on to prove that he was wrong about them.  S – D has been educated at Stanford and Harvard but has still has not picked up the knowledge that Freud’s reputation-making book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), begins with a very long and comprehensive critique of theories of dream symbolism (“Dream Book” theories) and follows up with an alternative account in which dreams make idiosyncratic, improvised choices of symbols to express the dream thoughts and that what is drawn on to provide the symbols for the dream is largely if not exclusively the experience of the previous day. The italicised words turn Freud’s account into a falsifiable theory whatever Karl Popper may have said (S-D has come across Popper on Freud). So S-D starts out from something worse than a schoolboy howler and as a result chapter 2 is abysmal. If you are inclined to cultural despair, you will delight in the fact that the abysmal is published by Bloomsbury.

Things do get better, sometimes significantly so, but the general problem remains that the Big Data S-D loves is crunched according to often unanalysed background theories and preconceptions. The general approach is to ask someone “What do you want to know?” and if they want to know if violent cinema films cause violent behaviour, then S-D will hit the Big Data until they yield a Yes or No answer. There are a lot of “What do you want to know?” questions which S-D is only too willing to answer. He rarely stops to consider that there might be a problem with the question.

I quite liked the Conclusion which S-D has calculated will be reached by only a minority of readers. But this Blog was created on the promise that I would only review books I had read cover to cover, give or take footnotes. But then I suppose I should acknowledge that one of S-D’s findings (page 259) is that people who make online loan applications in which they promise to repay a debt are more likely to default on a debt than those who don’t promise. The same people also take God’s name in vain. Nothing new there.

Review: Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

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I read this novella - 35 000 words – and thought it was beautifully conceived and crafted, one of the best things I have read this year. So a couple of weeks later, I have read it again to see how it is done. Some of the results are quite surprising. For example, the text runs to 149 pages. Exactly half way through at page 74, Swift baldly announces the death of his second most important character, Paul Sheringham:

She had not known he was already dead.

That one sentence provides new interest for the reader, now waiting to discover how Paul died and what will happen next.

The story is heavily marked by premature deaths, starting in the very first line:

Once upon a time, before the boys were killed…

The short lives of boys killed in the trenches of the first world war then stands in dramatic contrast with the longevity of the main character, Jane Fairchild, who appears first as a twenty-two year old housemaid involved in a passionate, sexual relationship with Paul who at twenty four is the youngest of all the brothers, the only boy from two neighbouring families who was too young to be sentenced to death in the trenches.

The heart of the novel  is a narrative of the last time Jane and Paul are together, Mothering Sunday 1924. This occupies the first half and is exquisitely done. Paul dies at twenty four but Jane lives to ninety-eight (it works out at 1901 – 1999), a long life on which Swift places great emphasis, and she becomes a well-known and much-interviewed novelist but one who never discloses the tale which Swift has told in the first half of his book.

Second time around, I had some doubts about the long recessional which forms the second half of the book. Swift writes about how Jane becomes a novelist, the books she reads and what she says about them when interviewed in later life. ( She reads Kipling, for example, who wrote a Recessional).  It chronicles the titles of the novels she writes. It is as if Swift is seeking some quieter objective correlative for the emotions which sear the first half of the book and the abrupt loss which on Mothering Sunday 1924 brings to an end the love affair of the young maid Jane and the young master Paul. But it also suggests, I suppose, that though we normally think that novelists will always end up writing about what has most touched them in their lives, that may not be a general truth. When her secret life as Paul’s lover ends, Jane has to carry on as the housemaid almost as if nothing has happened. She has to close that book and can only find a future by opening a new one. Art is long, but life is short.

An Intellectual Biography?

Alphabetical Thinking

I have been organising my thoughts alphabetically for many years. Emptying out a cupboard, I found a sheet of foolscap, dated 1991, with a draft list of chapter headings for a book to be written titled Things to Think With: One Hundred Powerful Ideas. I liked Claude Lévi-Strauss’s phrase choses bonnes à penser (things good to think with) the moment I first encountered it and I have made repeated use of the idea. On this 1991 occasion my alphabetical list of chapter headings reads as follows, now properly alphabetised and numbered by a click on Word. The material in square brackets has been added to clarify what I was thinking about:

1.      Alienation [Marx]

2.      Analytic/Synthetic [philosophy of language]

3.      Aufhebung [Hegel]

4.      Background / Foreground

5.      Bad Faith

6.      Believing that “p” is true

7.      Bricolage [Lévi-Strauss]

8.      Catastrophe  Theory

9.      Collective / Distributive Agreement [theories of convention and mutual belief]

10.  Collective Goods [Mancur Olson etc]

11.  Cyclical Majority (Condorcet)  [also Kenneth Arrow]

12.  Deconstruction [Derrida]

13.  Double Bind [Gregory Bateson]

14.  Emic / Etic  [as in phonemic / phonetic]

15.  Equality of Opportunity

16.  Fact / Value Distinction

17.  Falsifiability [Popper]

18.  Family Resemblance [Wittengstein]

19.  Functionalism [ as in sociology]

20.  Games, Theory of

21.  Geisteswissenschaften [ the human sciences in the German tradition ]

22.  Genre

23.  Gestalt [ as in Psychology]

24.  Gödel’s Theorem

25.  Good Enough Mother [Winnicott]

26.  Grammar

27.  Ideology

28.  Indifference Curve Analysis [as in marginalist economics]

29.  Intentional Object [philosophy of mind and language]

30.  Intertextuality [various literary theorists]

31.  Intuition / Introspection [ as in linguistics]

32.  Irreversibility

33.  Language

34.  Making Strange [as in Wordsworth, Shklovsky and Brecht]

35.  Marginal Utility [in economics]

36.  Modularity [ as in modular theories of mind – Chomsky, Fodor etc]

37.  Natural Selection [Darwin]

38.  Necessary and Sufficient [conditions as in philosophy]

39.  Optimality [ as in public goods theories – Olson, Elster etc]

40.  Original Position [John Rawls]

41.  Overdetermination  [Freud, Althusser]

42.  Paradigm / Episteme [ Kuhn, Foucault]

43.  Personal is Political

44.  Possible Worlds [analytical philosophy]

45.  Pragmatics

46.  Prisoner’s Dilemma [theory of games]

47.  Producer Capture [ libertarian political theory]

48.  Public Sphere [Habermas]

49.  Relevance [Grice, Sperber and Wilson]

50.  Repressive Tolerance [Marcuse]

51.  Rigid Designator [Saul Kripke]

52.  Semiotic / Semantic [Julia Kristeva]

53.  Structure

54.  Surplus of Meaning [literary theory]

55.  Synchrony [Saussure]

56.  “The Real” [probably Hegel]

57.  Theodicy [the problem of evil]

58.  Transference [ Freud]

59.  Transformation [Chomsky]

60.  Transitional Object [Winnicott]

61.  Turing Machine [Alan Turing]

62.  Twin Earth [analytical philosophy; Putnam]

63.  Uncertainty Principle  [Heisenberg]

64.  Unconscious [Freud]

65.  Underdetermination [Kuhn, Quine, Feyerabend]

66.  Uniformitarianism [Lyell’s Geology]

67.  Unintended Consequences [social and economic theory]

68.  Universal Grammar [ Chomsky]

69.  Zero-Sum [Theory of Games]

The idea was to get to 100 ideas but as you see I only got to 69. The book never got written, but many of the ideas are to be found through my writing, past and present. When I look at the list now, I think it can serve as a very short and fairly honest intellectual biography.

Review: China Mieville, October

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I sense that in Russia, the hundredth anniversary of 1917 is a bit of an embarrassment. The current government stresses continuity with the past and so links itself to the double headed eagle and two-faced Russian Orthodoxy. It is out of the question to celebrate the February 1917 downfall of the Romanovs, who now have a cult following among the very stupid. Nor is the regime in any position to celebrate the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 since it exists only as a consequence of the downfall of hated Bolshevik power in 1991.

Outside Russia, it’s not so difficult – the Romanov dynasty deserved its fate, period – but hindsight casts a very long shadow over the October revolution. 

China Miéville has had the excellent idea of writing a would-be popular narrative of 1917, a sort of John Reed story but with the benefit of all the archives which historians have now turned into many books. The narrative starts with great brio but rapidly narrows its focus to a blow-by-blow, day-by-day account of political events in Petrograd. This in turn descends into a chronicle of socialist in-fighting so painful that you can see why the words socialist and sectarian now seem inseparable. Miéville is dispassionate enough to realise that sometimes he is demonstrating the truth that it is not only second time around that history presents itself as farce. As someone who has read quite widely in the history of this period, I still found myself reading about factions and organisations I had never heard of and have no reason to want to read about again.

The author is good on the Provisional Government's multiple weaknesses. It is hard to believe how a government in a position to take fresh stock of the situation could have persisted in a war from which there were so many very good reasons to get out. The legacy of the Romanovs was a country which could not win a major war, still less realise grandiose designs - Nicholas's government reckoned to get Austrian Galicia and Constantinople as war loot in return for their contribution to the Allied war effort.

The focus on Petrograd politics and personalities of the revolution could have been lessened. The author does fairly repeatedly allude to  hunger but doesn’t really present it as a driving force. He has more to say about Peace and Land but less about the Bread which was the first word in the Bolsheviks' revolutionary slogan. Russia had undergone a sort of Industrial Revolution but no corresponding Agricultural Revolution. It’s major cities – Petrograd and Moscow – were far away from fertile agricultural areas. There was always a problem about feeding the cities and  the First World War turned the problem into an impossibility when not only were there armies as well as cities to feed but the fact also that peasants who worked the land were drafted to be killed in the trenches. The Romanovs could not feed Petrograd, nor could the Provisional Government, nor could the Bolsheviks. In the end, the Americans stepped in and created a vast Relief Administration in the early 1920s. People still starved and would continue to do so.

I did not baulk at any of the facts presented (except at a 5 November instead of 7 November on page 3), but I felt the scale of the February revolution – the Revolution in the eyes of contemporaries – is perhaps underplayed and the abrupt cut off on 26 October is too soon –Miéville should have followed John Reed at this point and given us Ten Days That Shook The World, taking us into the first week of November 1917 (Old Style).

Review: Matisse in the Studio, edited by Ellen McBreen and Helen Burnham

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Everything we write is marked by the time and place in which we write, sometimes very lisibly so as in this interesting study of Matisse’s relation to the objects which he collected over a life-time, housed in his studio and used in his work. The contributors to this exhibition catalogue have had to read about and hear about Orientalism, the male gaze, cultural appropriation and so on. As a result, they sometimes write as if they are walking on eggshells and you can sense it. 

It shouldn’t be like that. Either you accept a theory and deploy it actively, which in this case might lead to rather more criticism of Matisse than is to be found here, or you ignore it and just get on with what you want to draw our attention to.

That said, the authors are good at drawing our attention to what Matisse thought he was trying to do, as expressed in letters and interviews; how in practical terms, he tried to do it using a studio which he tailored over decades to his purposes; and how that converts into the work he produced. There are some very telling illustrations and juxtapositions of object and work.

Because it is a discourse which is out of fashion, there is really nothing here on how Matisse’s personal life and work intersected so that his separation from his wife in favour of his secretary is not even a blip, and the fate of his daughter Marguerite likewise (page 183). There is also very little on the later cut-outs which interest me partly because they seem to be the way in which an old man turned to good account a bad hand dealt him by health and age.

Review: Tim Marshall, Worth Dying For. The Power and Politics of Flags

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Back on 11 August 2016, I reviewed here Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography which I felt had a lot of zest and a clearly-articulated argument. As a result, his publisher sent me this new book to review.

It also has a lot of zest and a great deal of incidental detail for those interested in Pub Quizzes and such like. But it does not have the analytical sharpness of the previous book and this is probably inevitable given its subject matter, a history of mostly national flags and their symbolism. A few things struck me.

Flags, flagpoles and rules about hoisting flags onto their poles etc are pretty much cultural universals. This is in some ways rather odd, since the whole business is a fairly arbitrary one. True, there are some motivated explanations of how flags came into existence – so that you could see where your own lot were re-grouping during the battle, and so on – but this hardly explains the universality and large measure of conformity we have got to now.

Where we have got to now also leaves many flags unresponsive in their design to the fact that they will (mostly) be flown at the top of large static poles. Just a couple of more modern flags – those of South Africa and, notably, Seychelles have dynamic designs which respond to the possibilities opened up by the fact that they will be attached to a pole at the left side and flutter out from that static point. Most flags are symmetrical, imagined from the standpoint of someone (the designer) looking at them as illustrations on a page. Many are also cluttered with detail which, though visible to designers at work on the page in front of them, will be lost on those casting an upward glance at a pole. Most of the flags of Latin America – Brazil an obvious exception - look to me ripe for a design overhaul. They are without flag-design or artistic merit.

Quite a lot of Tim Marshall’s text is devoted to explanation of the symbolism of individual flags. This is necessary because though flags are usually icons of something or other, what something or other it is has to be pointed out – so “X stands for Y” and then, once we are told, we see it. Technically, this is to say that flags make a great deal of use of translucent icons as opposed to transparent ones. An icon is transparent when pretty much anyone can see what is meant without any supporting verbal explanation – most road warning signs are meant to be like this, so that you can understand them wherever you are coming from. But there are resemblances between sign and object which have to be pointed out and the same sign may mean more than one thing: on one flag, the colour Green may stand for Islam, but on another it may stand for a nation’s forests or fields.

Over fifty years ago, I had a summer job in a lakeside Swedish hotel. One of my duties was to raise and lower the very large Swedish flag each day from its very large pole. I realised early on that I was being watched from guest windows as I performed my tasks, and so I adopted a sort of Boy Scout formality, marching briskly to the pole and so on. Somehow - perhaps because I had indeed been a Boy Scout - I knew that I should fold the flag carefully when taking it down and at no point when it was going up or down allow it to touch the ground. Such indeed are the expectations in Sweden and most other places, but at some point one guest did congratulate me on how I did the job. He also explained to me what the colours of the flag represented: blue for the sky and yellow for silver birch leaves. But I bet that isn’t the only explanation around for Sveriges  farger. No one made an issue of the fact that it was an English schoolboy handling the Swedish flag.