May Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The Skin, Curzio Malaparte
Reviewed here, The Skin is a grotesquely surreal retelling of the American liberation of Italy in 1943. It is horrifying and nightmarishly entrancing.

I The Supreme, Augusto Roa Bastos
Reviewed here, this is a sprawling portrait of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco, a nineteenth century dictator of Paraguay who was, simultaneously, a brutal and progressive ruler.

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian
Horatio Nelson fan fiction, I scoffed, but self-consciously so. This is the first novel in O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, twenty acclaimed volumes of the adventures of Lucky Jack Aubrey, officer in the British Navy, and his physician/spy Stephen Maturin. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, O’Brian’s books are v. well-researched historical fiction about the British navy and he fills the pages with naval esoterica and a colorful cast of characters of diverse origin. I like and appreciate his dedication to accuracy of a certain shade and it seems that early in the series O’Brian is doing a lot of groundwork toward establishing that he knows what is talking about in this time and place, but he also tends to be long-winded and willing to allow his characters to wallow in a place because that, too, was part of life in the British navy during the period, which doesn’t make for the most enthralling story. I’m currently reading the second book in the series, Post Captain, and was recently told that the books pick up the pace from there.

My favorite of these three was I The Supreme.

Non-fiction! One of my summer goals is to, on weekends, read non-fiction that is not directly related to my research or teaching. The next two books are the result of this.

Patriot of Persia, Christopher de Bellaigue
What if Ghandi was a life-long bureaucrat and politician who was overthrown by a CIA organized coup? In many ways, that is how de Bellaigue presents the “tragic” fall of Mohammed Mossadegh, prime minister of Iran. Mossadegh was the scion of the Iranian Qajar dynasty, a lawyer and an accountant who had a long but intermittent career in Iranian politics, even after the Qajar dynasty was overthrown by Reza Pahlavi in 1925. The core arc that de Bellaigue follows is the role of the British, in the form of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in Iranian politics, building toward Mossadegh’s nationalization of the oil industry and the subsequent coup. He suggests that Mossadegh’s upright and honest morality led to remarkable successes in his early career, but also that it led to his tendency to judge people from the sidelines. This combination allowed Mossadegh to become a potent demagogue, but his tolerance for people who espoused ideas that differed from his own sowed the seeds for his demise when international oil embargoes threatened to bankrupt the state, a concerted Anglo-American misinformation campaign undermined (but did not destroy) popular support, and a coup restored the Shah to power.

de Bellaigue was prone to purple prose at times and had some unfortunate word choices, some that said things he did not mean (such as referring to the AIOC as “great,” rather than large), others that were problematic double entendres. He also hinted at things, both regional conflicts and domestic situations, that do not appear in the core narrative, but it came across as a well-researched and largely balanced account of Mossadegh’s life. My main complaint was that the book could have used maps, both of Tehran and Iran, particularly because he frequently refers to places throughout both.

The Prehistory of the Silk Road, E.E. Kuzmina
Kuzmina, a Russian archeologist, argues that the links of people, technologies, and commodities between east and west the defined the Silk Road from the Roman period through the Middle Ages did not begin then, but existed as far back as the Neolithic Period.

I The Supreme, Augusto Roa Bastos

Posted on by Josh Nudell

letters couldn’t care less whether what is written with them is true or false.

[The Supreme]

Why is it you don’t write these true things down among all the lies that your hand borrows from other lies, believing that they’re your truths?

[The ghost of the Supreme’s dog, Sultan.]

Pupil Liberta Patricia Nuñez, age 12: “The Supreme Dictator is a thousand years old like God and has shoes with gold buckles edged and trimmed with leather. The Supreme decides when we should be born and that all those who die should go to heaven, so that there are far too many people there and the Lord God doesn’t have enough maize or manioc to feed all the beggars of his Divine Beatitude.”

Pupil Juan de Mena y Mompox, age 11: “The Supreme Dictator is the one who gave us the Revolution. He’s in command now, because he wants to be, forever and ever.

Don’t you think that I could be made into a fabulous story?

José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco, the Supreme, ruled Paraguay almost continuously from 1813 until his death in 1840. He managed steered Paraguay through a period of independence, one of moderate economic prosperity, and one of racial toleration. And he did so through creating a brutal police state and largely isolating Paraguay from the world. He never married, but fathered multiple illegitimate children, one of whom reputedly became a prostitute. He forced the Spanish aristocracy to marry natives. He nationalized the catholic church, established mandatory schooling, and waged a war on corruption and excess, himself living a simple ascetic lifestyle. In these ways, The Supreme stands in contrast to the next dynasty of Paraguayan dictators. It is these contradictions that Augusto Roa Bastos explores in I The Supreme.

Despite the titillation wrapped up in The Supreme’s inventive insults (“pharisaical farceur,” “cacogenic latrinographer,” “scribonic plague”), I The Supreme is not a titillating account of an eccentric and over-the-top dictator. The story opens with a decree nailed to the church door, signed by the Supreme, declaring that he wants his ministers to be executed upon his death, their bodies tossed into the field, and his own head put on display and people summoned to witness it. The Supreme orders his secretary to find out who is responsible for this latest slander. What follows is a sprawling retrospective of The Supreme’s rule that creates a continuous narrative by joining the transcription of the discussion between The Supreme and his secretary, the private notebooks, the perpetual circular to be sent to government officials, the notes of the compiler, and passages from contemporary commentators. This retrospective doubles as a diatribe against those writers who would dare to write about The Supreme, let alone critique him.

The narrative is presented as a stream of thought and he is a thoroughly unreliable narrator–but so too are the other authors, grinding their axes for one reason or another. They are convinced that he is a monster, and he is to those people whose lives he upended by stopping their rule and corruption. He is unrepentant about the political prisoners he has sentenced, including one sentenced to row forever against the current, and points out that his so-called reign of terror killed fewer than one hundred people. He is Supreme and refuses to promote governors because he alone is immune to corruption. He accepts the flattery of the students and acknowledges that they need to get better teachers. His dream is an impossibility, his faith is in progress that might exist only in his imagination, and his existence creates his enemies.

I The Supreme is a dense book that slips between speakers, scenes, and dates with little warning. A critique of dictatorship, it is not an out and out condemnation of Dr. Francia, who is presented as the best of a bad lot of options. Roa Bastos accepts that he was an able administrator, stamped out corruption, kept Paraguay free, and yet presents him as an egotistical, fickle and ruthless dictator. However, there is an added layer of critique of Paraguayan dictators: that Francia is the best of the lot in that he kept the country out of debt, kept what would be considered human rights violations to a minimum (though he did commit them), and, rather than precipitating the wholesale slaughter of citizens, kept Paraguay out of wars with its neighbors.

I The Supreme is one of the densest books I have ever read and I found the internet a welcome reading aid, both for primers on Paraguayan history, of which I knew nothing, and as a dictionary reference to puzzle through The Supreme’s wordplay. It is challenging, but it is also an immensely rewarding read.

For a learned take, see this review, though I found Roa Bastos’ portrait of The Supreme somewhat more charitable than the reviewer did.

Next up, I am reading Post Captain, the second in O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series.

The Skin, Curzio Malaparte

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I love the NYRB Classics series of books, both for the eclectic selection of English-language works and translations and for the (usually) reliable introductory essays that accompany the texts. My preference is usually to skip directly to the main text and to return to the introduction afterward so that I can appreciate the introduction as I digest what I just read. Usually this is a leisurely process of gaining new appreciation for the depth of the novel or for the author; sometimes it is a necessary confirmation that I indeed understood the absurd, shocking, grotesque thing that had just unfolded. The latter was my experience with The Skin.

Jimmy Wren, of Cleveland, Ohio…was, like the great majority of the officers and men of the American army, a good fellow. When an American is good, there is no better man in the world. It was not Jimmy’s fault if the people of Naples suffered. That spectacle of grief and misery offended neither his eyes nor his heart. Jimmy’s conscience was at rest. Like all Americans, by that contradiction which characterizes all materialistic civilizations, he was an idealist. To evil, misery, hunger and physical suffering he ascribed a moral character. He did not appreciate their remote historical and economic causes, but only the seemingly moral reasons for their existence…

Jimmy had certainly not achieved an understanding of the moral and religious considerations which let him to feel partly responsible for the suffering of others… It was not even to be expected that he should know certain essential facts about modern civilization–for instance, that a capitalist society (if one disregards Christian pity, and weariness of and disgust with Christian pity, which are sentiments peculiar to the modern world) is the most feasible expression of Christianity; that without the existence of evil there can be no Christ; that capitalist society is founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions and his happiness; and that without the alibi of Christianity capitalism would not prevail.

–pp. 62-3

It is 1943. Naples has been liberated. Our narrator, Curzio Malaparte, is a liaison officer in the Free Italian armed forces accompanying American officers and watching the newly-free city rot from the inside. The Skin is composed of vignettes about life in liberated Naples, Capri, and the subsequent campaign northward to Rome, interwoven with observations and imaginations of the narrator. The suffering and depravity were real, but in Malaparte’s hands the situation turns into a nightmarishly surreal comedy.

The Skin is not an easy book to sum up, in large part because the lurid details–whether of the plague, the last virgin in Naples, the triumphant entry into Rome, the eruption of Vesuvius, or the preparation of the marine life from the Naples Aquarium for a banquet– are, to a great extent, the point. In fact, the quote included above is itself misleading. It is an example of Malaparte’s style where he picks up on a point or an observation and teases it out as far as it will go. Malaparte’s Naples is a pre-Christian relict, infused with pagan mysteries, where “your tanks run the risk of being swallowed up in the black slime of antiquity.” Malaparte’s Americans despise the Europeans for having caused their own problems, and “believe that a conquered nation is a nation of criminals, that defeat is a moral stigma, an expression of divine justice.” Malaparte’s Neapolitans are scrapping to save their own skin at any cost, prostituting and abasing themselves. The shining light within this grim vision is Jack Hamilton, an optimistic American officer, an Olympian who speaks French and reads Pindar. Hamilton represents the best America has to offer, one untouched by the blight of the old-world, but appreciative of its deep antiquity.

Curzio Malaparte–the nom de plum of Kurt Eric Suckert, and a name chosen as an inversion of “Bonaparte”–was a correspondent on the eastern front during World War 2 before returning to Italy and assisting the American forces in Italy. He was criticized for his similarly surreal account of the war in the east (published in his book Kaputt), and was a supporter of the Italian fascist movement, but served a stint in prison after publishing a manual under the title The Technique of the Coup d’Etat. As the introduction to The Skin noted, there are parallels to nearly everything Malaparte included in this book, but his presence at every turn, even where he could not have been, blurrs the line between reporting and reimagining. Malaparte is elusive throughout. By turns he despises, pities, and mocks those around him. He is an acute observer, but bitter, frustrated, and convinced of his own superiority. Not his own morality since he seems to locate himself more in the deep antiquity–an heir to Pindar, at times [note: I was reading Pindar in Greek when I started reading this book]–than in the contemporary moment, more with paganism than with Christianity, but in his own superior intelligence and ability. I am not rushing out to do so, but I was intrigued enough by this that I will at some point read Kaputt, but Malaparte also convinced me that I need to also read books that are a little less morbid from time to time.

Since finishing The Skin, I also finished Master and Commander, the first in Patrick O’Brian’s historical fiction series. It was a mostly enjoyable read and I’m going to read at least the first few books, but I wasn’t so smitten that I’ll commit to all twenty just yet. Even well-done Horatio Nelson fan-fic only does so much for me. Now I am in the middle of Augusto Roa Bastos’ I, the Supreme, which stitches together multiple narratives give a portrait of the dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay from when he was elected in 1814 until 1840. At a third of the way through, this is one of the densest books I have yet read. The Supreme coyly asks “Don’t you think that I could be made into a fabulous story?” If you check out the Wikipedia page, the answer is yes, but Bastos takes those features that beg for a titillating historical story and asks much deeper and more meaningful questions. A fuller review will probably follow when I finish reading it.