Feb 12 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known by Fritz Stern

Fritz Stern was born in what was then Breslau, Germany, grandson of Jews who converted to Christianity, son and grandson of physicians and researchers, at a time when medicine was truly becoming a science and Germany was leading the way. His godfather and namesake was Fritz Haber, who discovered how to fix atmospheric nitrogen, won a Nobel, led research into poinson gas as a weapon, and died shortly after his forced emigration from Germany.

Stern emigrated with his family to the United States in late 1938, in the proverbial nick of time. He rejected Einstein’s advice to stay in the family business of medicine and became a distinguished historian of Germany and Europe. Along the way, he also became an active participant in transatlantic relations, always retaining his liberal perspective.

The book begins with background on Breslau, the emancipation of Jews in the 19th century, industrialization, science and what all of these meant for his immediate ancestors. The five Germanys he has known are Weimar, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic, the GDR and the post-unification Federal Republic. He tells his stories vividly, mixing a historian’s detachment with a memoirist’s recollection and commitment.

My academic background is in political science and German history, so this is a bit of intellectual homecoming. I know the territoriy well, and the charm is in the details and the composition of the portraits. Stern is, in fact, something like an academic great-uncle. I’ve never met him, but the closer he got to the present, the more names he mentioned that I either knew, or knew at one remove.

The sixth Germany — the one his parents and grandparents lived in — is the one that I learned the most about. The turn to modernity is fascinating, and seeing how it happened in one family is a great way to understand the changes and disruptions involved. (The early essays from Czeslaw Milosz’s To Begin Where I Am strike me the same way.)

The five Germanys in 500 pages are as good an overview of the period as any, and a good deal livelier than a survey without the memoir. Plus Stern is a delightful, lively writer, and his life has been full of unexpected connections. Allen Ginsberg was a good friend from his first day of college, for example.

Some snippets:

“There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness — those forces are miracle, mystery and authority.” Dostoevsky and Nietzsche taught me to better understand the complexitites and fragility of democracy — and the place of the irrational in politics. pp. 190-91

I lived in a cheap rooming house [in Munich in 1950] and spent most of my time in the university library, but despite my work and these friends, I felt lonely and displaced. Was I a hostile alien in what had been my native country? The city was still full of rubble and half-destroyed buildings, and American troops were omnipresent. … Casual conversations with strangers, who were full of self-pity and often volubly anti-American, didn’t help. p. 200

All three [of his subjects of The Politics of Cultural Despair], writing under different historic conditions, fastened on one root of evil: liberalism. They attacked it because it seemed to them the premise of modern society from which everything they dreaded sprang: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, Parliament and political parties, the lack of political leadership. Moreover, they thought liberalism was the source of their inner suffering. “Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together.” … My three critics, whom great and gentle Germans praised because of their “idealist” attacks on modernity, fostered the mood of discontent that foreshadowed the National Socialist synthesis: its attack on the “rottenness” of modern German culture and the exultant promise of a great völkisch future. p. 227

To me American policy [in Vietnam] seemed a nightmare of mindless escalation: it recalled, on a lesser scale, the slaughter in World War I, when soldiers were sent to their deaths because “one more push” would prove decisive. And the war’s human and political cost was dividing us at home and estranging us from our allies abroad. It was not a time for passivity or private lament; I thought “moderates” needed to act. p. 246 [Stern is obliquely scathing about George W. Bush in numerous places.]

All of this [reasoning about the causes of the sudden outburst of virulent anti-Semitism in the 1870s] is hard to document and easy to exaggerate, but the paranoid underworld of politics in an age of affluence and cultural unease cannot be overlooked. p. 278

In March 1979, shortly before I went to Jerusalem for the Einstein symposium, Raymond Aron and I walked to an exhibition in West Berlin commemorating the centenary of the births of Einstein, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. We passed bombed-out squares and half-decrepit mansions in the once-proud capital, talking of that earlier profusion of genius. Aron suddenly stopped at a crossing, turned to me, and said, “It could have been Germany’s century.” p. 303

“Our often pious generalities about human rights need at the core a specific statement of the minimal conditions that we think should be universally binding — such as the abolition of torture,” I wrote [in 1977]. Grim reading today. p. 356

After I finished at the [Institute for the Study of the U.S. and Canada, in Moscow, in 1979], I went to a playground opposite our hotel where I dictated notes into a tape recorder. I knew we were being watched. Once, a lightbulb in our hotel room gave out and pleas to the woman-spy who watched over our floor proved ineffective — but Peggy’s and my complaining loudly to each other in the room brought instant results. There are advantages to being bugged. p. 377

The German American groups were but one part of a rapidly growing international network, composed of well-known internationalists and new, younger people, too. Perhaps there was an excess of high talk and high living — I often mused that some of the world’s great hotels lived off world crises, real or assumed. But I note now that in the new century the decline of these public-minded efforts has perhaps added to international estrangement, while the corporate world has taken up the slack in the luxurious conference métier, serving narrower interests at higher costs. pp. 405-06

The dinner [in 1983] had a comic aftermath: thereafter, the White House, regardless of incumbent, sent me an official Christmas card, a minor privilege I shared with about a hundred thousand other people. Then, during George W. Bush’s first term, a million cards were sent out, and I was dropped off the list. Who, I wondered, edited the lists — and at whose expense? The removal was more flattering than the inclusion. p. 421

“I agree with every word of your statement, and I won’t give you a penny,” [said Richardson Dilworth, a distinguished investment banker and philanthropist]. Why not? “Because it won’t do any good. What this country [the US] needs is a great catastrophe.” My instant response: “Mr. Dilworth, I come from a country that had a great catastrophe. That’s why I think it’s better to act beforehand.” p. 453

Mrs. Thatcher received us graciously, and at lunch I sat next to her husband, Denis Thatcher, whom it was difficult to converse with. p. 468

Little could I have known [in 1990] that in a dozen years [Richard] Cheney would be determining policies relying solely on the ruthless and often incompetent use of power. p. 471

The [German newspaper whose web site really could be better organized] reprinted my entire speech the next day, omitting only this one sentence about the editor of a rival paper! Marion [Dönhoff] was angry at this, rebuked them, and mentioned it in a brief essay about me. So much for my hope for a more liberal culture of conflict! pp. 513-14

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/12/five-germanys-i-have-known-by-fritz-stern/

Feb 11 2007

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a quarter?

That’s the question posed by Robbie Vann-Adibe, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company, a question that launches Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, on his exploration of more consequences of the digital age for business.

Anderson writes,

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We’ve been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto’s principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books – 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Most people are wrong. The answer is 98 percent.

As my mom is wont to say, “It takes all kinds.” And indeed it does. Somebody, somewhere will want almost anything. (Even a blog about European issues.) When the marginal cost of adding, selling and delivering drops to practially zero, the true demand curve starts to emerge. And while hits still make a lot of money, their share of the total market drops because the total market is so much bigger than it was when it was confined to the shelves of the nearest retailer.

One of Anderson’s first anecdotes is the story of a book called Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. The book, by Anderson’s account, is a harrowing story of near death in the Peruvian Andes, and was published in 1988. It got good reviews, sold a reasonable number of copies, and was on its way to being out of print when a funny thing happened. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer became a publishing sensation. Amazon’s recommendation algorithms brought Touching the Void to people’s attention, and they bought. Random House brought out a revised edition, which in time landed on the bestseller lists. More than a decade after the book had been written.

This is something new about the new economy. Before Amazon, few people would have made the connection, and these would have had to scour used book stores for a copy of the out-of-print book. (The used book business has also been transformed by linking inventories online, and Anderson tells part of that story as well.)

Anderson’s key thesis is that the area under the demand curve out past what traditional retailers have carried is at least as large as what they do carry. In other words, there is a market for books that practically no store carries, and that market is as large as the entire bookselling market in stores. He doesn’t quite prove the case, but then again, the jury is still out, and he may well be right.

Much of the book was outlined in the original article of the same title in Wired. In fact, this was yet another case (“The End of History,” “The Clash of Civilizations”) where reading the article is probably better than reading the book. The book fleshes out the argument, adds more cases, more details and so forth, but did not, for me, break additional ground. (There is also a Long Tail blog, which has interesting discussion.)

The two most intriguing additions: First, practically any point on the demand curve is itself the head of a long tail. For example, a blog on European issues may be well down the curve in the scheme of Web sites that the general public visits. But that blog is potentially near the top of a curve of other blogs about European issues. Somewhere down that curve is a blog about Istrian items. And that Istrian blog itself is probably at the top of a curve of other Istrian blogs, subdividing into interests. There’s most likely a bottom somewhere, well before a Feynman point, where people are not blogging about Istria but going to an Istrian beach instead, but the idea stands: it’s a fractal curve.

Second, he asks how many categories have long tails. Is it just music, movies and books? Andserson says no and sketches five alternatives, each involving adding a digital component to a business that had been analog. This is a really interesting question, and I wish he had not waited until his penultimate chapter before addressing it.

I also wish, in general, that this was not a business book knocked out in about a year of his non-Wired-editing time. I wish it were a really hefty, weighty tome full of heavy-duty research. Maybe that book is out there in the long tail, or will be as soon as someone writes it…

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/11/the-long-tail-by-chris-anderson/

Feb 11 2007

The Orientalist by Tom Reiss

Ali and Nino, the closest thing that modern Azerbaijan has to a national novel, was first published in German in 1937, sold in various translations, hit US bestseller lists in the early 1970s and bears the name Kurban Said as its author.

But the question of the author’s identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot.

The answer, which Reiss gets to quickly, is essentially, “All of the above.” And therein, of course, lies a tale. Or twelve.

Kurban Said was the pen name of a young man who also went by Essad Bey, though he had been born Lev Nussimbaum. He was born on a train, his father was an oil millionaire in the same boom that made the Nobels, his mother was an early Bolshevik, he was largely raised by a German (probably Baltic German) governess, and he did die at an early age in Italy after failing to get out of fascist Europe in time.

Not only did he write Ali and Nino, he was a bestselling figure in Weimar Germany, with a biography of Stalin, an analysis of oil in the Caucasus, a book on the Bolsheviks and much more crammed into a short span of astonishingly productive years. He escaped the Russian revolution by heading across the Caspian into the un-Bolshevized khanates, then down into a Persia that was stil nearly medieval, and wound up back in Baku for a time before heading into the mountains disguised as a Bolshevik himself, reuniting with his father under truly improbable circumstances, enjoying a brief exile in Georgia, converting to Islam for the first time in Constantinople (he wasn’t taken seriously enough), and eventually settling into the comparative stability of Weimar-era Berlin. This all well before his 20th birthday.

Reiss has a terrific story to tell, and he does not fail his subject matter. The mystery of Kurban Said not only opens up Lev Nussimbaum’s unlikely life — he also married and divorced an American heiress — it also illustrates how thoroughly jumbled Europe was in the recent past, and how much of that past lives on into the present.

Thus:

Invited to dinner one night by our neighbor, a raven-haired, blue-eyed Turkish English New Yorker name April, my wife and I were introduced to her cousin by marriage — an older man impeccably but modestly dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit of uncertain vintage. Thus, I found myself shaking hands with Mr Ertugrul Osman, the rightful heir to the Ottoman Empire. He was the eldest male member of the ancient house that had ruled the Muslim world for six centuries, and had things gone differently, he would now be the sultan of Turkey.
Mr Osman had the unmistakable sleepy-lidded eyes and pointed eyebrows that I knew from the portraits of Suleyman the Magnificent and the other sultans, though he was thinner and wore a black knit tie rather than a silk turban. … The current Mr Osman’s gestures seemed youthful for an octogenarian; I felt I was speaking with Suleyman the Magnificent as an old-fashioned Harvard man.

Or thus:

In 1916, Georgian monarchists had been allowed to establish a kind of government in exile in Berlin, the German-Georgian Society, under the guidance of the aging Prince Matchabelli. Then, for a time, the Germans backed the independent Menshevik Republic of Georgia against the Bolsheviks.

To which a footnote adds:

Prince Matchabelli himself soon gave up the struggle for the Georgian monarchy and moved to New York, where he amassed a fortune by putting his name and family crest on a line of perfumes.

Who knew?

And not just Europe.

By the spring of 1934, when [an American admirer of Hitler] gave a speech at Madison Square Garden to more than twenty thousand “friends of the New Germany,” the hall was hung with American flag shields, swastikas, and pictures of Washington and Hitler.

Said’s life and times take the reader back to any number of lost worlds, from cosmopolitan Baku to interwar Berlin to the shadowy existence of his last years, when, as a Jew (at least in the view of the authorities), he had to use fronts to earn anything from his books, and where he kept one step ahead of persecution until a rare disease put an end to his odyssey. Reiss tells the tales of Nussimbaum’s life with care, with brio, and with understanding of the cross-currents.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/11/the-orientalist-by-tom-reiss/

Feb 09 2007

The Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells

Technically this book is science fiction, but in reality it is a brilliant social allegory, much in the same vein as *Gulliver’s Travels*. The Food of the Gods is a newly discovered chemical compound that makes animals and humans grow to huge proportions. But the subject of this book is not really bigness and big things. The theme is actually littleness, the universal littleness that the author sees in the world around him and that can only be brought to light by a stark contrast with bigness. The Food of the Gods is not just a stimulant to growth, but also a liberator from small ways of thinking. I get the sense from reading this work that Wells was truly brilliant, and also, perhaps, slightly mad. This is his most profound work.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/09/the-food-of-the-gods-by-h-g-wells/

Feb 07 2007

Premature Evaluation: Albion’s Seed

Why is America the way that it is?

Wrong question, the author of Albion’s Seed would say. America isn’t any one way, and hasn’t been since the very beginning of European, particularly English, colonization. David Hackett Fischer puts the core of his argument straight into his subtitle: Four British Folkways in America. He identifies four distinct migrations from Britain, and to a much lesser extent Ireland, that shaped American culture and regions down to the present day. These migrations were fairly coherent in origin, destination and religion. Understanding these origins will help understand cleavages in the contemporary United States, and it will help understand America as a whole.

The four migrations that he identifies are Puritans, distressed cavaliers and indentured servants, Quakers, and borderers. The Puritans came from East Anglia and settled New England. The cavaliers and their servants came from the south of England and settled tidewater Virginia. The Quakers came from the north Midlands and settled the Delaware Valley. The borderers came from the border between England and Scotland, sometimes by way of Ireland, and settled the thirteen colonies’ backcountry. Each had a distinct religious tradition: Puritans and Quakers most obviously; cavaliers had Anglicanism; and I haven’t read about border religion yet, this is a premature evaluation after all.

It’s a fascinating argument and a fascinating book. It’s filled with snippets and stories, and for an 800-page tome it zips along nicely. That’s due in part to Fischer’s non-ponderous historical prose, but also in part to the book’s organization. Each group gets roughly 200 pages, and in that space he covers a set list of 15 topics, so that the four are analyzed in parallel. He looks at naming patterns, marriage patterns, views on aging, on death, on hierarchy, and so forth. He argues strongly for religion as the key motivation for many colonists, and for religion’s importance in shaping the folkways that he describes. It’s a thorough discussion.

Though not without its flaws. Most obviously, America’s largest city in colonial times is not mentioned: New York. While religion’s role may have been discounted in 1989, when the book was published, it is more prominent today. Influence on contemporary America is more often asserted than demonstrated. And the book was supposed to be the first volume of five or more that would form a social history of the United States. Subsequent volumes have not appeared, making references to them in the main text or footnotes irritating.

Two related questions follow from Fischer’s argument. First, if the religions and regions of the original migrations are so important for the fabric of America, are they equally so for the contemporary United Kingdom? Why or why not? The topic is obviously beyond the remit of Albion’s Seed, but thinking about it illuminates the claims about influence down to the present. Second, what about later migrations? I think he addresses this a little at the end, but it was probably a question for the subsequent volumes that never appeared.

I think the basic premise is useful, and the details are fascinating. (Last night I learned that Philadelphia cream cheese isn’t actually a cheese, but more like semi-dehydrated sour cream. Who knew?) Some of the patterns do hold, and it is a usable framework for thinking about competing currents in American culture and politics.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/07/premature-evaluation-albions-seed/

Feb 06 2007

Taking Stock of 2006: Books

Best books I read in 2006?

In fiction, it would have to be most of the second half of the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. I read six in 2006 and the last two in early January 2007, and it’s a terrific body of work. Its acclaim and success need little boost from this blog, but I enjoyed and learned from the whole run. The only competition I’ve read in historical fiction is Dorothy Dunnett, with the Lymond and Niccolo series, plus her take on Macbeth.
Beyond the captain and his doctor, best from last year’s reading: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, the best of his novels and a look at many sides of Islam, modernity and Europe; The Death of Achilles, by Boris Akunin, a witty and subversive detective series set in late Tsarist Russia, far fewer of which have been translated into English than into German, annoyingly enough; An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth, with its insight into the minds of musicians and a virtuoso book by an absurdly talented writer; and Accelerando, by Charles Stross, head-stretching science fiction for the early 21st century.

Over in non-fiction, I would start the list with: At Canaan’s Edge, by Taylor Branch, concludes his epic and riveting account of America in the era of Martin Luther King. Gripping writing, definitive research, passionate commitment, simply a great book. The other favorites from non-fiction also tend toward the long and the historical: The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, a mold-breaking history of Australia’s colonial period; The Prize, by Daniel Yergin, the history of the 20th century with oil as its central theme; A Writer at War, by Vasily Grossman, annotated stories from a Soviet journalist at the front lines of the Great Patriotic War; The Mission, by Dana Priest, on the militarization of American foreign policy; and The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart, a British ex-diplomat’s walk through central Afghanistan in the winter after the Taliban fell.

Complete list (in order read) is below the fold. Links are to previous writing about the book or author on AFOE.

Fiction

The Well of Lost Plots – Jasper Fforde
Snow – Orhan Pamuk
Die Dame mit dem Hündchen – Anton Chekhov
Something Rotten – Jasper Fforde
The Thirteen-Gun Salute – Patrick O’Brian
The Nutmeg of Consolation – Patrick O’Brian
Clarissa Oakes – Patrick O’Brian
Dorf Punks – Rocko Schamoni
An Equal Music – Vikram Seth
Brand New Friend – Mike Gayle
The Grim Grotto – Lemony Snicket
The Penultimate Peril – Lemony Snicket
A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
The Heart of a Dog – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Death of Achilles – Boris Akunin
Looking for Jake – China Mieville
A Clash of Kings – George R.R. Martin
Let’s Put the Future Behind Us – Jack Womack
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
Ringworld – Larry Niven
Singularity Sky – Charles Stross
The Family Trade – Charles Stross
Iron Sunrise – Charles Stross
Pu-239 – Ken Kalfus
Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
Galatea 2.2 – Richard Powers
His N Hers – Mike Gayle
The Canine Kalevala – Mauri Kunnas
Air Babylon – Imogen Edwards-Jones
The Wine-Dark Sea – Patrick O’Brian
The Commodore – Patrick O’Brian
Penguin Lost – Andrey Kurkov
Accelerando – Charles Stross
The End – Lemony Snicket
The Yellow Admiral – Patrick O’Brian

Non-Fiction
On the Brink – Jonathan Fenby
Grace and Power – Sally Bedell Smith
The Pythons: An Autobiography – M. Python
Miles from Nowhere – Dayton Duncan
Two Lives – Vikram Seth
The File – Timothy Garton Ash
The Hungarians – Paul Lendvai
The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes
A Pretext for War – James Bamford
The Mission – Dana Priest
The Prize – Daniel Yergin
A Writer at War – Vasily Grossman
Reindeer People – Piers Vitebsky
At Canaan’s Edge – Taylor Branch
Foreign Babes in Beijing – Rachel Dewoskin
Northern Shores – Alan Palmer
The Places in Between – Rory Stewart
1776 – David McCullough
Khrushchev – William Taubman
Legends of Modernity – Czeslaw Milosz

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/06/taking-stock-of-2006-books/

Nov 28 2006

Stephen Maturin, Drug Fiend

From The Commodore, pp. 187-88

Yet [Maturin] had some faults [as a physician], and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of inquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru.

An open thread for considering Patrick O’Brian.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/11/28/stephen-maturin-drug-fiend/

Oct 23 2006

Under the Frog

Novermber 1955:

Tired of trying to crack the problem of the informer, Gyuri settled down to think about being a streetsweeper while he gazed out of the window at the countryside that went past quite lazily despite the train’s billing as an express. The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in on long journeys. A streersweeper. Where? A streetsweeper in London. Or New York. Or Cleveland; he wasn’t that fussy. Some modest streetsweeping anywhere. Anywhere in the West. Anywhere outside. Any job. No matter how menial, a windowcleaner, a dustman, a labourer: you could just do it, just carry out your job and you wouldn’t need an examination in Marxism-Leninism, you wouldn’t have to look at pictures of Rakosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately. You wouldn’t have to hear about gambolling production figures, going up by leaps and bounds, higher even than the Plan had predicted because the power of Socialist production had been underestimated. Being a streetsweeper would be quite agreeable, Gyuri reflected. You’d be out in the open, doing healthy work, seeing things. It was the very humility of this fantasy, its frugality that gave the greatest pleasure, since Gyuri hoped this could facilitate its coming to pass. It wasn’t as if he were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States. How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? Just pull me out. Just pull me out. Apart from the prevailing political inclemency and the ubiquitous shittiness of life, the simple absurdity of never having voyaged more than two hundred kilometres from the spot where he had bailed out of the womb rankled.

The train went into a slower kind of slow, signalling that they were arriving in Szeged. This was, he knew from his research, 171 kilometres from Budapest.


Early November 1956:

Gyuri threw away his empty gun. If he needed another gun, he could pick one up off any street-corner, and carrying one didn’t do you any favours. ‘The Red Army won’t forget about its outing in Budapest,’ said Kurucz. ‘It’s been … well, people will write about us.’

Clinging to walls al the way home, Gyuri crashed into the British military attache, recessed in a doorway, observing the proceedings. The way Gyuri greeted him in English made the attache realise they were acquainted, though he obviously couldn’t place Gyuri. ‘Awesome, these new tanks,’ he said gesturing at a herd on the other side of Hosok Square, ‘those new guns, too, formidable rate of fire.’ Gyuri nodded because he was unable to add anything to the conversation. He merely smiled politely in the way one does when one’s country has been invaded by interesting new tanks. The attache was carrying an umbrella, Gyuri observed, as all Englishmen should. …

It was colder than usual for November, and it seemed much blacker at six than it should have been, as if the Russians had imported extra darkness with themselves and dawn had given up. There weren’t many trains running, but the Keleti Station had a train, greatly over-subscribed, getting ready to leave. It wasn’t a train taking people anywhere in Hungary, although nominally it had a Hungarian destination. Although no one said so, everyone knew it was the slow train to Vienna.

The centre of the city had quietened but as the train chugged out of Budapest, passing Csepel Island, explosions could be heard. Csepel, always referred to officially as ‘red’, since it was inhabited exclusively by industrial workers, was the last part of Budapest to hold out. They had a munitions factory. They had anti-aircraft batteries so powerful they could be used to turn most tanks into Swiss cheese. Their own leaders had told them to give up. They had been instructed to go to hell. Huge columns of smoke had hung immobile over the island all day as if pinned there. People who lived in Csepel had a reputation for tenacity, toughness and an implausible level of violence second only to Angyalfold.

Between these stations, it’s a terrific and extraordinarily funny book. Also very good is The Bridge at Andau, by the young James Michener.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/10/23/under-the-frog/

Oct 13 2006

A Pocketful of Pamuk

The definitive(ish) review I’ve been meaning to write for months will obviously have to wait now that Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here are the AFOE talking points on Pamuk:

Snow is the one book to read if you only have time to read one. Ka, the protagonist, is a Turkish poet who has been living in exile in Frankfurt. (His name is the inverse of the abbreviation of Turkey’s ruling party, AK, which is also the Turkish word for white. The Turkish title of the book, Kar, is also just a letter short of the name of the city where the novel takes place, Kars.) He returns to a provincial city to investigate why a number of local girls have committed suicide after being excluded from school for wearing headscarves. As he begins to make sense of the complexities involved, a blizzard strikes and cuts the city off from the rest of the world for several days. In this pocket world, a local coup takes place, Islamist radicals may or may not be agitating for rule, and reality itself gets much more uncertain in the drifts and blankets of snow. Pamuk juggles many different layers of meaning, many different possibilities of what is real, how peoples’ perceptions and convictions slip and slide, and some specifically Turkish elements of theater, politics and mutability. It is a great book, even if the ending only delivers on about 90 percent of the promise of the middle.

Istanbul: Memories and the City is the other book that’s being widely cited. It, too, is terrific, not least because the publishers have taken advantage of modern techonology and included many pictures from Pamuk’s personal collection in the narrative itself. The book is a memoir of growing up in one of the world’s greatest cities, and it gives you a sense not only of the author’s particularities–a sprawling, occasionally brawling family that’s well-to-do but fading; his interest in painting that becomes a career in writing; a characteristic melancholy; and more, of course–but also of the city’s personalities and how they change over time. People, neighborhoods, periods, moods–Pamuk captures them all.

The Black Book is out in a new translation, which I am led to understand is a big improvement. I was able to put the old one down for several years without much worry before finishing the book, so I think think it likely. In any event, the novel concerns one character’s search for his brother-in-law, a famous Istanbul newspaper columnist, who seems to have disappeared. This story is interspersed with columns, ostensibly written by the brother-in-law, about various peculiar events in Istanbul. As the book progresses, it appears possible that the brother-in-law is a fictional creation of the narrator, who may be a famous newspaper columnist himself; or he may merely have taken on the mantel left by his brother-in-law who actually has disappeared. Things merge into one another in this crossroads city.

I haven’t read My Name is Red or The White Castle, and only learned from the Nobel site that two more novels have been translated into English.

Pamuk insists that he isn’t a political novelist, and in my view he’s absolutely right to. Politics is too narrow to contain what he’s up to, and that’s exactly the sort of thing that unnerves authorities used to defining the limits of acceptable. The Black Book was apparently a break with dominant realist writing in Turkey, an early sign that Pamuk was headed for places that a conformist establishment would be uncomfortable in following. And while in this case it’s the secular Kemalist establishment that’s discomfited, an Islamist establishment would be much more unsettled. In both cases, that’s a good thing. Pamuk writes humane books, tells stories too full of ambiguity and uncertainty to support any dogma, too honest about his home city’s past to help partisan mythologizing, too committed to openness to prescribe one true path, and too aware of costs to be fully comforting to modernizers. But for readers, a feast, a delight, a glimpse into many worlds in and around the Bosporus, and beyond.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/10/13/a-pocketful-of-pamuk/

Sep 26 2006

Ringworld by Larry Niven

I hadn’t read Ringworld in at least a decade, and probably closer to two, when I picked it up again a couple of weeks back.

Originally published in 1970, the book has held up terrifically. Not for Niven, one of those far-future societies that’s a replication of the author’s own era. The use of “men” and “man,” where, today, “humans” and “humanity” would be more likely stuck out as slightly anachronistic. And the invented swear words were odd, too, though they may also be a bit of a joke on Niven’s part. The things that humans swear by and about and with are pretty consistent across time and culture; inventing something in this department may have been the author thumbing his nose at residual prudery in the publishing of his era.

I was also impressed by a couple of science references, particularly neutrinos, but a little Wiki research shows they were first detected in the mid-1950s, so maybe that’s not so unusual. Still, for all that Niven has to engage in hand-waving to get faster-than-light travel, the rest of the science seems respectfully handled.

One structural question, though. Clearly the initial impetus for the book was the idea of the Ringworld itself. It’s not a character-driven novel; at most, it’s driven by the intersection of the characters with the setting. Given the setting, though, why tell the particular story that Niven does? Is it just that the first encounter story is the crucial one? Maybe it does work backward from there: setting, contact, what makes for an interesting encounter, and so forth.

I’ve changed a lot since I first read the book, and I like to think that I’ve gotten more sophisticated in how I read things, so I was all the more pleased at how well Ringworld withstood grown-up scrutiny.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/26/ringworld-by-larry-niven/