Books – Page 10 – My Own RE:public

Four more for thought

Feuer der Freiheit. Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten (1933 – 1943) by Wolfram Eilenberger

… may be translated into English as something like: Fire of Freedom (liberty) or Flames of Liberty – The Saving of Philosophy in Dark (gloomy, sinister) Times …

Recently published in Germany, this new book from Wolfram Eilenberger is conceptually very similar to Time of the Magicians that I wrote about a short time ago. When Feuer der Freiheit will be published in English I don’t know, that it will, given the international success of the aforesaid, I am very confident.

Briefly I will say, that this time Eilenberger invites us to follow the paths of four women, and in the ten years from 1933-43. Until I read the book, I can only divulge who the subjects are: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil and Ayn Rand. Hannah Arendt, of course, arose in Time of the Magicians in terms of her relationship with Heidegger, and does so again in our own gloomy present – though far removed from the very sinister 30’s – where her star has risen on both sides of the Atlantic. Madame de Beauvoir has survived her contradictions and the ruthlessness of competing feminist movements to retain icon status (and on her own!). Simone Weil; one can but wonder, for she died so young, but I can’t help but think of the unstable genius of Wittgenstein or Benjamin. And, just as for Cass Sunstein in this review for a recent biography of Ayn Rand (limited access at The New York Review of Books), I too as a young thing had an inexplicable attraction to The Fountainhead, and in extension to its author.

I very much look forward to seeing how Eilenberger interweaves the lives of this extraordinary group in a very extraordinary time. For anyone who can read German more than a bit, I suggest this review by Jens Bisky in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and, if you can really read German, don’t wait for the translation, be like me and put the book on your reading list now. Popular it may well be, and personality driven, but I would warrant place enough is given to an exposition of the philosophical ideas driving his subjects.

Obama again, and then enough…

…until I read this tome that arrived on my doorstep the day after publication – courtesy the enormous first printing that demanded a “Printed in Germany on acid-free paper” component!

My copy of “A Promised Land” , Crown Publishers, 2020.

Liked very much this interview given to David Olusoga on BBC Radio 4 – to be followed (from December 14th for two weeks) with an abridged reading of A Promised Land by Barack Obama himself.

David Olusoga has written an accompaniment of a sort for The Guardian, which is an interesting extension to his interview experience and his not terribly optimistic personal observations of the United States post-4 Years Trump.

And a musical accompaniment there must be!

And the winner is…

…all the books listed and fiction and lovers of the same one could say, but (with the exception of last year!) there can only be one winner of The 2020 Booker Prize, and that is Shuggie Bain, written by Douglas Stuart.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

On the BBC Radio 4 “Front Row” page there is (for the moment at least) a video of last night’s event hosted by John Wilson, in that hybrid digital mix – in person, far away, on tape – that we have become more use to than we would like this year – nominees keeping their distance, and others likewise, and Wilson, Margaret Busby and Bernadine Evaristo at the “Round House” in Camden. But I must say all were stoical, and found a very fine tone.

Margaret Busby, reminds me that her work as a publisher over decades has been instrumental in the diversification of talent, especially Black talent, in the UK – it may be only now that she sees, we see, the fruits of her labour. Evaristo, as representative of this. And Ishiguro and Atwood, that a Booker is nice but a body of work is better. President Obama – he, presumably responsible for the rescheduling – prompts me to remember at least of one of the reasons I forgive him his shortcomings: his love of books, and belief in the power of fiction. The Duchess of Cornwall; that royal patronage is not without its virtues, and you can love horses and Charles and also words.

Forget the gripe about the transatlantic bias, what a “great looking” group it was zooming in from afar, what choice readings we heard; more than enough reasons to read their work. Given the difficulties of this year, the Booker has done a very good job, and their jury to be congratulated.

A short story, a loving tribute & a long review

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Another one, most favoured by many, and by me; so elegant her prose, so singular her voice. And, here is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie now, with three quite different pieces of writing, but all seeped with ideas about belonging – to family, to nation; about losing – those we love, freedoms taken for granted; and about fickle power – as a tool to control or to set one free. All are recent, very recent, very contemporaneous in style and subject and intent.

Firstly, Zikora. As modest a work as it is in terms of length, so wide its sociological and psychological scope; and all displayed in the compact first person narrative of a successful professional Nigerian woman, Zikora, about to give birth surrounded by the cool accoutrements of western medicine. At her side, the mother who she does not know how to please, and in the conspicuous absence of a partner, Kwame, deemed “perfect” and then to do “a runner”, and from whom she struggles to let go, and all the while reflecting upon her complicated Nigerian family and their complicated relationships, the awkwardness of her place as an African woman in the United States where her Blackness is always writ large. And, in the end, wondering herself why she persisted in forgiving the men who did her wrong – Kwame was not the first, and then there is the father who had deserted her mother (and her) and started another family, but whose attention she still craved. And when it is over, a new life brought into the world, a realisation is in the dawning that just as her thoughts flew to Lagos and her impossible family, it is alone her mother who has flown to her; her difficult, impossible to please mother who never left her and was with her now.

Interesting, in another respect, is that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has chosen to publish this through Amazon. I dare say this will not impress some, but it does actually make sense for a “small” work at a small price that she would have wanted to make available to as many people as possible.

This links to Amazon.de in Germany (because that’s where I am) but it is of course at every other Amazon out there in the big wide world.

Magical mystery tour de force

*“Time of the Magicians”, by Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. Shaun Whiteside*

Whilst in the midst of reading Wolfram Eilenberger’s book Zeit der Zauberer (2018) in German, I was interested to see that now a couple of years later an English translation has been published by Penguin Press. Not that many German non-fiction works get that far. And not that many as well reviewed – a very good review indeed by Jennifer Szalai at the NYT that hopefully encourages some good sales and thoughtful reading on that side of the Atlantic.

Certainly, I enjoyed the book immensely, and Eilenberger’s interwoven portrait of four extraordinary men – Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein – formulating their ideas into interconnecting but individual philosophies amidst the ruins, so to speak, of the First World War and the disintegrating Weimar Republic, is told in a very winning and readable way; some German critics found it to be too so. (Enough of the Feuilletonisten here have a tendency I think to want to keep “high” culture just that!) Believe me, an awful lot of German writers struggle with what one may call ‘accessibility’ – that is, not just informing and hoping for the best, but presenting difficult subject matter such that it reads as a narrative thereby capturing the attentive reader. This, then, foremost is an immensely readable book.

Cover “Zeit der Zauberer” by Wolfram Eilenberger

There is no denying that some of the stuff is indeed difficult, or as difficult as one wants to make it; one could go barmy trying to extricate the precise and nuanced meaning, especially in terms of the references to primary sources, and the stringency of formulation and terminology is a hurdle for those without a pertinent academic background (like, guess who!). My reading, then, concentrated on the living in the time, and I conquered my irritations at just how many ways these guys came up with of saying approximately the same thing and all in the interest of justifying their (to be fair, ‘our’) existence. When I was really irritated I would mumble something along the lines of: What hocus-pocus! But they were, after all, magicians of a special sort; all occupied with their own very special brand of magical thinking!

NYT Book Review: Sylvia again!

Not Sylvia again? What more is to be said? Daphne Merkin rhetorically asks of herself. And in her review of Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is more than pleasantly surprised; in fact, inspired to think again, delve even more into this light that burned so brightly on the literary horizon, only to be extinguished too early and to pass into the dubious category of legend.

RED COMET The Short Life and Blazing Art of SYLVIA PLATH by HEATHER CLARK, Pub. Knopf

As one, from the generation after, who fell captive to that legend others built around Sylvia Plath’s life and death, and equally so fell for the legend that she, herself, created in her only novel The Bell Jar; a work of autofiction (and written before that term existed) some would contend, and that Plath would not live to either affirm or deny. It was because of The Bell Jar and Plath’s life (and her death) that I first read her poetry – at the time I was of the age at which she was when she was writing, and remember wondering at the intellectual and emotional depth, and to this day I gladly read her again. Perhaps some would consider her work too removed from contemporary concerns, too beholden stylistically to the old, now dead, white men who dominated twentieth century poetry, but in her last works she was shedding that influence, and I ask: was the beating heart and yearning soul of a young woman in the 1950s really so different to now?

Merkin’s review convinces me that there is more to know – of Plath’s life; of Aurelia and Otto, and always there the complications of Ted (after more recent revelations and denials, I didn’t think I wanted to go there again either!), and her art and her legacy.

Yes, Sylvia again! Or, still. Another, for my must read.

When the next time is now

“The Fire This Time” ed. by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.

A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.

Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?

But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)

Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.

Sympathy for … “Jack”

Did I not say I wasn’t going to read any more reviews on Jack? But, when it is from Hermione Lee in the New York Review of Books and is titled: “Sympathy for the Devil”, what can I say? Must be read. Lee, wonderfully I think, fixes this new novel in the midst of the greater oeuvre of Marilynne Robinson’s work, foremostly the other “Gilead” books (which she revisits) but not only, and encapsulates, what for me is the essence of Robinson’s writing: her singular way of grasping the ephemeral in the every day, loading them with grace and kindness, then giving them permanence in the greater human narrative.

Elaine Showalter’s review in The New York Times (as pleaded for, I did get another, a better, review from NYT!) is not as extensive nor does it assiduously reference Robinson’s past works or comments, but obviously she read the same book as Hermione Lee; right down to Prince of Darkness metaphors.

Finally, a couple of general points: Lee and Showalter do seem to agree that this new novel would be difficult to appreciate outside of the context of the previous three in the series, and both remain unconvinced as to why Della is prepared to forsake so much for Jack’s sake. In respect to the latter, Showalter makes a plea for the another instalment – and for it to be called “Della”!