Category: Books

Caste awry

Adam Shatz talks with Hazel Carby, January 12th 2021

This podcast is an accompanying conversation to Hazel Carby’s essay in the current London Review of Books (Vol. 43 No. 2 · 21 January 2021) on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; published to acclaim last year. Carby’s argument, like all those that go against the grain, is provocative. Interesting, is that the critique comes from a wider, global perspective of race and the historical complexities of the greater Black diaspora; and ironic, in that it is precisely with this broader brush that Wilkerson claims to make her case in her comparisons with the Indian caste system and Nazi Germany. But, Carby argues, Wilkerson is in fact bound by, and limited by, national constraints (be they inherited or learned), and constructs her “origin” story accordingly; one that depends on a (United States of) American exceptionalism.
Carby does make at least one very persuasive argument; in that I am persuaded to add Wilkerson’s book to my reading list! Beyond that, only a reading will tell.
(I often wonder about the considerations that lead to a book title change; why and to what end – aesthetic, linguistic, marketing. In the LRB review above, “Caste: …” is (mistakenly?) subtitled as in the US, but in the UK it seems to actually have been published as Caste: The Lies that Divide Us.)

January 17 2021: As I intimated above, prior to hearing this podcast, only positive takes on Wilkerson’s book had come my way, but a newsletter that I receive regularly from Jamelle Bouie (which always has something interesting to read, think about – and sometimes to eat!) has just suggested this review by Charisse Burden-Stelly in the Boston Review, in which, similarly to Hazel Carby, she considers “caste” to be an inadequate, even misleading, terminology under which to talk about race in the United States. Their critiques may differ in emphasis, but both reviewers dismiss this (imported) system as too rigid in structure and too dependent upon popular acceptance to lend itself to the complex interplay of politics, class and resistance in a volatile, changing social construct such as that which has evolved – continues to evolve – in the U.S.

When words matter

We are witnessing the beginning of the end of a fantastically failed presidency; the state of the society that facilitated it, and which is to be left in its wake, is yet to unfold and reveal itself, let alone to be told.

Here, in this space, I have been very disciplined in my restraint, and (mostly) suffered and seethed in silence; words are not all that matter, but sometimes really are there to be said…

As things would have it, the events of the last weeks, culminating in yesterday’s mayhem, have coincided with my immersion in Barack Obama’s memoir covering his first years in office. And as my reading, too, approaches its end, it does so leaving me much informed, much reminded of things worth remembering, sometimes irritated, and very often touched by beautifully rendered human moments – full of warmth, humour, regret.

Obama makes the intricacies of finance and health reform and the complications of composing and passing of legislation eminently readable. (Though, and especially in terms of finance reform, I was sometimes overwhelmed with initialisms and acronyms – for legislation, programs, committees, etc.) International relations and foreign and defence policy concerns are usually presented with a brief historical discourse that places the matter at hand in context – for instance, I particularly liked his preludes to discussions on Saudi Arabia (on his visit there) or to Iran (when the nuclear capabilities issue came to the fore). What I liked somewhat less was Obama’s tendency to see fit to describe the physical attributes of others. I mean, we know what Vladimir Putin (“…a wrestler’s build…”) and Benjamin Netanyahu (“…built like a line backer…”) look like. And, perhaps the “high-fiving”, “firing-ups”, “freaking outs” and the like, irritate a little the non-American ear. On the other hand, I “know” Barack Obama well enough to recognise such colloquialisms as genuinely being an aspect of his way of expression, and authenticity in voice is surely what one wants from a testimony such as this.

When did I last think of this. The catastrophe of Deepwater Horizon seems such a long time ago, and affecting a coastal region I once passed through even longer ago, but deserves not to be easily forgot: as an event in and of itself, but beyond that, what it has to say about the world’s insatiable consumption of fossil fuel. And, Obama tells us that little Sasha came into the bathroom one morning whilst he was shaving and enquired: “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”; a tone Obama sets throughout – of seriousness and reflection blended with glimpses into the intimate family life that was being lived, parallel to, and sometimes intersecting with, the job at hand. There are any number of snippets of repartee with Mrs. Obama and their daughters and interactions with his staff and others, of observations and afterthoughts, which reflect a wonderful mix of wit and intelligence, and a basic goodness that is rarer than we would like to imagine.

So, it is then, that every other day, I have been reading the former President’s account, and every other day waking up to, or retiring of an evening with, the reality of this perversely “other” presidency, or the closing act of absurd theatre – or both. And, wondering where the line is to be drawn, if in fact a line can be drawn, between performance and all its component parts. Is Trump playing a role? Or is he the role? And for all those who enabled – who set the scene, supported from the wings, propped up – does the show go on with a new cast? And, when Trump exits the stage (or be dragged from it!) in a few days time, what will be his legacy, or more precisely, what extent the wreckage he leaves behind? Surely, there will neither be the traditional memoir nor Presidential library – a historian’s nightmare in years to come; explaining this era without the defining subject’s testimony.

Words matter. What is said and written matters. Words inspire and words incite. The 44th and 45th Presidents of the United States have proved that; each casting long shadows that could not be more different. And the 46th? Mediocrity incarnate one could reasonably suggest, uninspired. Perhaps. But, a Biden presidency will at least offer some respite, and with good will (and some luck) allow in its warmer shadow a new generation of political leadership to form.

Some Literary Reminder(s) for the New Year

The Guardian, 2021 in books, 3 January, 2021

I bookmark this page at The Guardian every year, and always find it a worthwhile guide to what is coming up, and when. And not just books, also the dates of literary events and anniversaries. The following is a list of some of the new works that interest me for one reason or another.

  • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (Bloomsbury)
  • Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America by Eddie S Glaude Jr (Chatto & Windus).
  • The Mysterious Correspondent by Marcel Proust, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Oneworld)
  • Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bodley Head)
  • Everybody by Olivia Laing (Picador)
  • Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus)
  • The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
  • Home in the World by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane)
  • The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
  • Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)
  • Greek Myths by Charlotte Higgins (Jonathan Cape)
  • HG Wells by Claire Tomalin (Viking)
  • Silent Catastrophes: Essays on Literature by WG Sebald (Hamish Hamilton)

There is no need to say that the Books section of The New York Times always has plenty to offer – by week, month and year, and just about everything else – but this international selection (mostly in translation) for the year to come is worth perusing. Here, for various reasons, and by those known and not, the following (just some amongst many) particularly interest me:

  • An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector, trans. from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler (New Directions)
  • Aristophanes: Four Plays trans. by Aaron Poochigian (Liveright)
  • The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, trans. from the French by Frank Wynne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  • Cleopatra by Alberto Angela, trans. from the French by Katherine Gregor (HarperVia)
  • The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tov Ditlevsen, trans. from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
  • First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, trans. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Knopf)
  • The Impudent Ones by Marguerite Duras, trans. from the French by Kelsey L. Haskett (The New Press)
  • In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo (Other Press)
  • Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, trans. from the French by Jessica Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

At year’s end, and in retrospect, I don’t ever seem to get as far as time and circumstance should allow for, but …!

Anyway, while in retrospect mode, here is The New York Times “10 Best of 2020”; of which, I have read only Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and, still bringing to an end, Barack Obama’s presidential memoir. I appreciate being reminded of, on the fictional front, Homeland Elegies and The Vanishing Half, and non-fiction works pertaining to war, Shakespeare and schizophrenia that I had totally missed. (Though, Margaret MacMillan’s “War” may well be related to her 2018 Reith Lecture series.) One could, of course, go a step further (which I haven’t!) and be tormented further by their “100 Notable of 2020”.

Introducing Mmes. Woolf & Dalloway

Today at The New York Times: an essay, excerpted from the introduction by Michael Cunningham (famously, a Woolf disciple) to a new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, to be published by Vintage in the US in January…

“Mrs. Dalloway” (new ed. 2021, Vintage)

And, to my mind anyway, a most finely wrought tribute to this exquisite gem. Mrs. Dalloway is modest in length and deceptively so in ambition, yet Michael Cunningham identifies its epic character and its grandeur that I too have for so long admired; how within a rigorous time frame of just one day and through the eyes of one woman, Woolf’s novel expands out into time and space and allows memory to work its magic; to magnify and enhance, and to expose the true largesse of life, right there all the time in the apparently ordinary – just waiting to be discovered.

For some time, I have been very much wanting to write something about Mrs. D., but Cunningham’s essay is so good, and says so many of the things I would like to say, and so much better, that … Enough! I refuse to be deterred! Rather, inspired to add my bit to the multitudes.

Just a phone call away

Former NYT star critic, Michiko Kakutani, makes a return to talk with Barack Obama about A Promised Land – the book and all the books that led to it, and the land, and all the promises it makes – sometimes fulfilling them and just as often not. One could say her piece (based on an extended telephone conversation) confirms what one already knows about Obama’s intellectual and literary influences, but it does also reveal a few new things. For instance, about his method of writing – not a disciplined keeper of a diary, rather a collector of fragmentary anecdotes; digitally inclined when it comes to research; very analogue – legal pad and favourite pen – when it comes to the writing.

In her opening paragraph, Kakutani refers to A Promised Land as being, beyond the expected historical record, also “an introspective self-portrait”. Perhaps, not exactly the same thing, but Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, in fact missed “true self-revelation” and bemoaned Obama’s (too) cool detachment. Nor does Kakutani insinuate any discomfort with his handling of race issues, unlike Adichie who is frustrated by what she identifies as his tendency towards misplaced evenhandedness. But, then, Kakutani is not writing a critique. What they both do agree on, though, is the fineness of the prose and the pleasure of the reading experience, and the service done in giving an enthralling account of an extraordinary (too) few years.

Any hesitancy I may initially have had about diving into such a meaty tome – fearing somewhat the insider policy-speak that comes with most political memoirs – was quickly assuaged. Obama talks to us! Every other passage, every turn of phrase, one may well imagine coming from his lips – just without the ums and ahs! The complexities of politics are so well packaged in familiar real world scenarios, and without a preponderance of technical jargon, that they should be understandable to most, and, more importantly perhaps, are embedded in the common warmth of a life being lived.

Asked about what he is reading now, I am absolutely unsurprised that Obama has turned, amongst other things, to Jack for some respite. It would not need me to bring to his attention the significance of his return to Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” opus just now; the first story of which had accompanied him as he traipsed around Iowa in 2007, at the beginning of an odyssey that could have led nowhere, but instead to the highest echelons of power. Did he ever imagine that the (once) “bright radical star” of the Union would play such an important role in his life?

Granted, I must confess, I am only a couple of hundred pages in – chronologically speaking, the first weeks of his presidency – and as one unable to confine myself to just one Lektüre at a time, I do have some reading ahead of me, but I look forward every day to a bit more. And, I will most definitely have more to say.

When one thing leads to another

Listening to BBC Radio 4 this morning, as I mostly do, and with various degrees of attention, I caught up with, for the first time in quite a while, Melvyn Bragg’s long running cultural programme “In Our Time” – the topic: Fernando Pessoa. This, a name, ringing somehow familiar, but hard to place. May I be forgiven my ignorance, for he is a man of many names – just check out this impressive list of heteronyms! Now somewhat enlightened, I will surely dedicate some attention to him (or them!). On the programme website are a number of references, that may offer a good start.

As is often the case with me, one thing often leads to another. In the process of googling Pessoa, a link was returned to a NYT Q & A interview with the academic André Aciman from last year; in which (amongst other things) he names Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet as “the last great book” that he had read.

Skimming through the piece further, I was immediately distracted – irritated would be a better description – by Aciman’s assertion that Mrs. Dalloway is overrated – neither “gripping” nor “interesting”, he states – and badly written! Each to his own, I could say; reading after all is a very subjective activity. That Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t interest him, well so be it; though one is tempted to presume that he doesn’t know terribly much about her person nor her writing life and how they intersected to produce her fiction, for should he do so, Mrs. Dalloway could not help but enthral. But that a literary scholar would fail to recognise the consistent quality of Virginia Woolf’s prose surprises me. I mean to say, Woolf’s hastily scribbled asides to herself (diary) or others (letters) are mostly always druckreif – whether fragmentary gems of observation or gossipy meanderings. And her fiction, absolutely so, even when structurally imperfect or not to her satisfaction.

What is interesting, and probably unbeknownst to Aciman, is that some of the names he drops (we won’t count Proust – of whom he is an expert and Woolf a devotee) were likewise people of interest also to Virginia Woolf a long time ago.

Firstly, Dorothy Strachey. Yes, one of the Stracheys! But I couldn’t think which, and then realised that Woolf always referred to her by her married name of Dorothy Bussy.

Sons and daughters of Sir Richard and Lady Strachey. Left to right: Marjorie, Dorothy, Lytton, Joan Pernel, Oliver, Dick, Ralph, Philippa, Elinor, James.

Woolf’s first reference to Dorothy appears to be in a diary entry on Saturday 14 June 1919; made upon visiting with her (and her sister-in-law Ray Strachey) in Hampstead and, as all the Strachey family, she will turn up again over the years in Woolf’s diary and correspondence. Bussy’s only novel, Olivia (1949), cited by Aciman – a lesbian schoolgirl narrative; an experience it is presumed she is not unfamiliar with – was in fact published by Hogarth Press, albeit eight years after Woolf’s death, and was dedicated (or so says Wikipedia) “to the very dear memory of Virginia W.” I should say, Aciman says “nothing happens” in the novel he recommends, but unlike the dull Mrs. Dalloway that seems enough. Further, a new Penguin Classics edition was published in June, in which he writes an introduction, and one wonders whether he approached Penguin or vice versa, and whether a little bit of marketing wasn’t going on here. Just a suggestion. Irrespective, any Strachey interests me, so I certainly intend to read Olivia; now credited to Dorothy Strachey. Thanks for the tip, Mr. Aciman! (My tip: the Vintage UK edition is a bit cheaper, at least on Amazon outside the US.)

And in the same segment, Mr. Aciman announces the virtues of another great “unread” – La Princess de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette – Woolf loved this, though she only wrote about it in passing – in her “On Rereading” essay for instance. In my reading notes of Volume 2 of Woolf’s diary I make reference to her February 18 1922 entry, and include an excerpt which clearly illustrates her enthusiasm for La Princess. Though, I am not that sure, it is is as so “unread” as Aciman suggests – certainly not in France, and I thought it to be also well known in wider feminist literature studies. Fortunately, for the interested, La Princess de Clèves is easily found on the internet.

Finally, Aciman’s favourite book to assign students. Here, he nominates Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, for which Virginia Woolf wrote an introduction for the 1928 Oxford World’s Classics edition (also included in The Common Reader Second Series), and which begins with her observation that maturity grants a writer certain privileges – with language and composition. I make the observation that at the time this essay was written, being just a couple of years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, Woolf was of an age such that she too had granted herself permission to be messy – to write what was in head; messy, as I said. It is a riddle to me how Sterne can be so admired and not Woolf. Maybe it is only Mrs. Dalloway that Aciman dislikes; but why do I think otherwise? He didn’t qualify his verdict, but Woolf certainly possessed some prejudicial traits that are not easy to disregard by everyone.

Pleasure in reading

Start the week with Andrew Marr and a good listen, then read on.

“Derrida, Woolf, and the pleasure of reading”

Read Derrida, should you dare! Lighter work, for sure, to deconstruct the person. The philosopher, Julian Baggini, reviews Peter Salmon’s book An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida here.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader found critical acclaim and a worldwide audience, but had its detractors in Germany – not an apologist work, but, if sought, excuses for a nations fall into barbarism are too easily to be discerned. His 2018 novel Olga, just published in English, received here a fairly tepid reception – a woman’s fate through the panorama of German history from the Kaiserreich through the 20th century; and character just too good to be true? History tells us, there were many more “Hannas” (the illiterate guard of The Reader) than there were “Olgas”.

Enjoyed very much (hardly a surprise!) Alexandra Harris’s perceptive commentary on Virginia Woolf’s reading habits and expectations. In Virginia Woolf’s own words, “How Should One Read a Book” from The Common Reader, Second Series. Woolf may have suggested to Schlink’s young reader (in The Reader), to keep the best of it to himself.

Reading, with all its extended connotations, may well bind them, but strange bedfellows these three. I love Andrew Marr – he can bring together disparate voices to a successful ménage à trois.

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.