The Far Side of the World – Patrick O’Brian

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The serialization of the Aubrey-Maturin series continues, picking up where Treason’s Harbour leaves off. Aubrey had successfully dismantled the French operation in Malta, but the real traitor remains, unknown to him, at large. At the same time, Aubrey is given a lesson in how to report successes through careful revision before being dispatched immediately to the far side of the world in pursuit of an American ship hunting British whaling vessels.

Already in this installment there is a sense of time bleeding together, part of a series of novels where O’Brian had to fudge time to make the chronology line up. In fact, The Far Side of the World effectively puts the world outside the vessel on hold while they sail to the Pacific, and the uncertainty about when the story takes place emerges as a plot point in the struggle between the two vessels. The novel is perfectly fine as an installment because it epitomizes many of the things about the series, but, by the same token, it is particularly unremarkable.

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Next up, I also finished Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear while I was traveling last week. Since then, I am most of the way through Roberto Arlt’s brilliant The Seven Madmen, a feverish Argentinian story in the vein of Dostoevsky.

Treason’s Harbour – Patrick O’Brian

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Treason’s Harbour, the ninth installment of the Aubrey-Maturin series, picks up very nearly where the Ionian Mission leaves off, skipping only the denouement Aubrey’s mission to capture a Balkan harbor. This time both his ships, the H.M.S. Worcester and the H.M.S. Surprise, are stuck in harbor and potentially never to set sail again, so the action shifts to the spymaster Maturin and his duel with French intelligence agents in Malta. The scenes there are interspersed with a brief foray to the Red Sea and several port-ventures where the French activity has preceded the British arrival, with Aubrey narrowly avoiding ambush on more than one instance. Along the way there are more mundane concerns as Captain Aubrey worries about his personal finances (which he is dodging) and the future of the midshipmen under his care.

Even more than the Ionian Mission, Treason’s Harbor is a serial installment, picking up where the last left and leaving off in preparation for the next without much care for an individual story arc. For many series this would frustrate me to no end, not least because I often want to see some further resolution in each story, but here I think it works. For one thing, O’Brian is quite good at creating cliff-hangers. For another, the story and recurring cast of characters brings to life the British Navy in a way that is almost domestic. The fighting scenes are well-written and therefore exhilarating, but the bulk of the books are the mundane interactions of swabbing the decks. What’s more, he can get away with this by building affection for the characters through their competence and general goodness in contrasted with other people in the navy. For instance, Jack Aubrey loves his wife Sophie and cares for his crew, even though he is not a particularly good person in many instances. In fact, he is a rather bad husband and, while he is good at keeping his people alive, he is capable of grating with other people who might be annoying but also have legitimate grudges. Yet, Aubrey’s genial benevolence and distaste for corporal punishment endears him to the reader.

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Next up, I am currently about halfway through Kingsley Amis’ The Russian Girl, a farce about terrible people and worse poetry.

Autumn Quail – Naguib Mahfouz

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Isa ad-Dabbagh is a young bureaucrat in Egypt who is flourishing through a combination of nepotism and corruption, and is about to rise to the top levels of government although he is only in his thirties. Then the revolution of 1952 where the army outlawed the political parties takes place. Isa is an early victim of the purges, set adrift, but not killed. In his own words, banished without being exiled from the country.

Autumn Quail follows Isa through his decline over the course of several years, marching through his relationships with three women. At first Isa is engaged to Salwa, a wealthy cousin whose mother covets his meteoric rise through the state bureaucracy. However, once he loses his position the family cuts off the pending engagement and, impotent, Isa has no choice but to relent. Then, while moping in Alexandria, he solicits the services of a young woman Riri, who forces her way into his life as a mistress and cleaning lady until he discovers that she is pregnant and throws her out with nothing. Finally, Isa forces his way into a marriage with a thrice-married and barren heiress and succumbs to boredom and sloth.

The first relationship he dreams would be happy, but only in that it represents all his success, while he sabotages the second two, becoming enraged at a child he doesn’t want and women he doesn’t love as he clings to the past and they look to the future. Isa suggests that he genuinely loved Salwa and it may be interpreted that his relationship with her would have been strong. However, Mahfouz presents her as an immaculately-credentialed empty vessel that perfectly matches the smooth and selfish corruption embodied by Isa. The relationship might have worked, but together they represent everything wrong with the system.

Amid this series of excruciating romantic misadventures is the emptiness within Isa once his purpose in life, politics, has been stripped of him and given to rivals. The emptiness threatens to consume him and there is a lingering question of whether the revolution will bring about meaningful progress. Yet, other than a war with Israel that takes place overhead and is a topic of conversation with Isa’s formerly-political friends, the broad ramifications of the Revolution are not actually felt. The questions of hope and progress are played out, but only in Isa’s head, not in the streets or prisons of Egypt.

Ultimately, I found Palace Walk to be a more powerful story than Autumn Quail, but where the former is a domestic epic, the latter is a small story of quiet desperation.

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I am nearly caught up with things I’ve meant to post here, but still have a review of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads to come in the next day or two. Next up, I am currently reading Patrick O’Brian’s Treason’s Harbour, the ninth installment of the Aubrey-Maturin series.

Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Robert Heinlein’s 1959 science fiction novel Starship Troopers won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, but nonetheless elicits controversy and it is easy to see why. On some levels there is very little to this slim book–few rounded characters, almost no plot—and can be seen as a jingoistic pro-military piece of ideologically-infused drivel. On another, there are sentiments about the world and how bootcamp changes a person.

Juan (Johnnie) Rico comes from a wealthy family and his father has determined his life: Harvard business school and then join his company. They don’t get to vote, of course, because that can only happen through military service, but they have money and that is what matters. Then, right after high school, Juan joins the military while trying to show off for a girl. She has the aptitude and intelligence to be a pilot and another friend has the chops to be an engineer. Johnnie is only cut out for the Mobile Infantry—-a grunt in a highly-advanced suit who drops from space sows destruction.

Most of the novel follows Juan’s travails through first bootcamp and early missions, and then officer training school. The narrative unfolds from his point of view, and between grueling exercises the characters touch upon issues of punishment, discipline, responsibility, and violence, but is not uniformly positive or negative on any one position except perhaps on the necessity of citizenship being a right that needs to be earned. It represents issues as genuine problems and for war as an opportunity to make people into the best versions of themselves. And yet Juan is a shining example of this phenomenon, many other characters standing in stark contrast.

I don’t have too many specific observations about this book, in part because I finished it more than a week ago, but while I did appreciate reading it, it did not live up to some of the more well-rounded science fiction I have recently read. Starship Troopers just came across as flatter and more like a philosophical dialogue than a story. However, I cannot help but wonder if some of the controversy about the militarism Heinlein infused in the story comes not from the context of its initial publication, but from the experience of Vietnam in the next decade. In particular, one of the plot hooks later in the story comes from a sudden, forced mobilization of the human race to fight off aliens and how Juan’s father comes to be proud of his son rather than becoming resentful.

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I fell a bit behind on reviews, so I’ll soon be posting discussions of Naguib Mahfouz’s Autumn Quail, a story about the downward spiral of a fired politician told through three relationships, and Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, a new global history that was quite good. This afternoon I started reading Patrick O’Brian’s Treason’s Harbor, the ninth Aubrey-Maturin novel.

The Ionian Mission – Patrick O’Brian

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Also known as Volume 8 of the Continuing Adventures of Aubrey and Maturin.

Captain Aubrey must once again fly from home life in order to escape creditors and therefore accepts the first commission available, on a ship he does not like, to a task he finds dull, and under a senior officer with a grudge. Circumstances  during the dull blockade force a transfer, followed by a mission to the Ottoman Empire that will call for both diplomatic and naval skill.

Reviewing installments in this long-running series is difficult. I like our core characters–bold and capable Jack Aubrey and the circumspect and intelligent Stephen Maturin–and particularly appreciate O’Brian’s attention to detail. This attention was all the more necessary in this book because there is so little action to drive the story. But this is the point, not a flaw. Blockade is boring.

Several features of O’Brian’s style stood out in The Ionian Mission . First, and probably in an accurate representation of the historical context, Aubrey’s successful promotion puts him in a position to be away from fighting. Commanding a large ship is about bureaucratic maneuvers, while the smaller vessels had the liberty to seek or stumble into action. It is no surprise then that O’Brian creates a transition back to Aubrey’s beloved HMS Surprise for  the eponymous Ionian Mission. Second, there are a few set pieces in each book, including the battle scene, the gunnery training montage, and the creditors on land. No two are exactly alike, but while the plots do differ, one of the tricks O’Brian uses to vary the books almost as much is to change the starting and concluding points. In this case there is technically no resolution, but cuts away immediately after the climax. The result is that the book is a genuinely serialized product.

The Ionian Mission is a solid installment in an enjoyable historical fiction series, but I would certainly recommend starting a the beginning.

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Next up, I just finished Margaret Atwood’s deeply disconcerting dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, and will probably dive into Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers later this weekend.

The Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsyth

Posted on by Josh Nudell

On a whim a few weeks ago I picked up some spy novels. In short, I decided that I needed a change of pace from my usually run of heavy literature and wanted something that could be both exhilarating and also read at a different rate from my usual. At the same time I didn’t want to read just any junk, so I used the internet to find some lists of excellent spy thrillers, which is where I found Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal. I was not disappointed.

The year is 1963 and there is a secret war being waged on the government of France by disaffected groups of citizens and soldiers calling themselves the Secret Army Organization (OAS) who believe that Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, has betrayed the country by agreeing to withdraw from Algeria. Opposing them is the Action Service, a violent secret police organization that has thwarted the OAS and neutered its operations, including kidnapping one of the leaders from another country. Out of desperation, the remaining leaders of the OAS have decided to hire an assassin, codename Jackal. Catching just the hint of the plot, the French ministers have appointed an unassuming detective named Claude Lebel to catch the Jackal—-a professional killer whose identity, let alone plan, is a mystery to them.

In his author’s note, Forsyth calls himself a storyteller and that much is clear from the narrative. The Day of the Jackal is divided into three sections: “Anatomy of a Plot,” “Anatomy of a Manhunt,” and “Anatomy of a Kill,” with each ratcheting up the tension. The first section works methodically through the plots to kill de Gaulle, first the earlier OAS plots, then the hiring of an assassin, and finally the Jackal’s plot. The second continues to followed the Jackal, while also following Lebel’s process of uncovering the assassin and his plan, and the third shoots up toward the explosive finish. The pacing is excellent and I particularly enjoyed how Forsyth offers just enough detail to trace the story through the lives of people who exist outside the book. For instance, the reader never gets to meet Lebel’s wife, but, other than his job, that is his primary concern in life. What this quickly explain motivations for all of the people involved. The only exception to this rule is the Jackal himself, who remains a mystery as he adopts identity after identity. At least his motivation is clear. He wants to get paid and retire.

As is true of most good spy fiction, The Day of the Jackal is a very limited story that follows one clear arc that takes place parallel to the real world and sinking back into oblivion by the end. The stakes are important, but not global. What stood out about this one in particular was the particular limited information available to the detectives. There were no microchips or internet or computer programs, so when they decide to check all recent passports they must do so by hand. This is, of course, a feature of hindsight, but the specifics of this sort of story must change with the times.

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Next up, I just finished Patrick O’Brian’s The Ionian Mission and intend to read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale next. I am also working my way through Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, a new global history.

July 2015 Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I read a lot again in July, quickly falling back into old habits of spending muggy evenings just reading and, for most of the month, felt pretty well-balanced as a result. Part of the reason I was able to read so much was that, for the first time in a while, I read a significant amount of science fiction and fantasy and fewer literary fiction novels. In many ways the situation gave me flashbacks to years gone by.

Literary Fiction
Romance of the Three Kingdoms v.1, Luo Guanzhong
Reading this, the first of two volumes of the medieval Chinese epic that retold the dissolution of the Han Dynasty around 200 CE. The translation I used is quite dated and the romance is particularly stilted at times, with action usually being said to happen rather than narrated. Nevertheless, the story itself is engaging, as the it narrates the intrigues between the decadent house of Wu in the south, the wily and ruthless Cao Cao of Wei, and the noble and righteous Liu Bei of Shu. I had fond memories of the video game Dynasty Warriors as I was reading, but this is not a book I would necessarily recommend for anyone who is not already invested in the endeavor.

The Fortune of War, Patrick O’Brian
The continuing adventures of Aubrey and Maturin take them to Boston at the outset of The War of 1812 and includes the naval duel between the H.M.S. Shannon and U.S.S. Chesapeake. The bulk of this story takes place with the two men scheming to escape captivity after their capture. The writing of this book is on the upper end of O’Brian’s novels thus far, but it still tends to bog down when he is not writing about sailing. I didn’t find this arc nearly as tedious as the ones involving life back home in England, but it was still not my favorite. Still, I appreciate O’Brian’s dedication to particular types of historical accuracy.

The Emperor’s Tomb, Joseph Roth
This novel continues the story of the Trotta family in Austria that was begun by The Radetsky March, though the protagonists of the two share little beyond their name. This story uses World War One as a fulcrum and tells of the the declining fortune of the Trottas after the war as all their ventures fail. However, the story suffers from many of the moralistic problems of the the former novel without the charm. In particular, Roth goes out of his way to emphasize the averageness of the the Trotta family in the first, showing them to be swept along by forces entirely beyond their control even while they make decisions. In this one there are many of the issues, but without the same setup. The result is that within this particular narrative the characters, none of whom are particularly nice or endearing, simply try ineffectually and fail. Perhaps this particular feature of the Trotta family is meant to carry over from one story to the next, but one would expect there to be some reminder if that was the case. The result is a dreary, dull read and not a particularly good story, though the crushing weight of the environmental factors remain constant in both.

Fantasy and Science Fiction
Fool Moon, Jim Butcher
The second book of the Dresden Files novels continues the adventures of the Wizard/Private Eye Harry Dresden. As one may guess by the campy title, this on involves were-wolves. I’m not yet sure how I feel about the series. The novels are pulpy and campy, but addictive. The first two also have the feel of an author playing around, honing a craft, and not yet with a larger story arc in mind. I will read at least one more, but, after that, who knows.

The Rebirths of Tao, Wesley Chu
Speaking of addictive, this The Rebirths of Tao concludes this trilogy that began with the Lives of Tao. True to form, each installment adds layers, both to the narrative and the global conflict that threatens the existence of the human race. Chu’s writing remains snappy, clever, fast-paced, and, above all, fun, but just wasn’t as tight as in the previous two novels. Nevertheless, Rebirths is a fitting conclusion to the series.

Foundation, Isaac Asimov
I am somewhat ashamed how long it took me to read Foundation, a classic text in the genre. This is the story of the decline and fall of a galactic empire, which has stood for millennia. A scholar named Hari Seldon has perfected “Psychological History,” which is the history of the future as dictated by economic and sociological principles. Despite the imperial court being convinced of its invincibility, Seldon has become convinced of that the empire will collapse and be followed by thirty thousand years of barbarism–but the time can be reduced to one thousand, if he is allowed to create a galactic encyclopedia on a distant world. The encyclopedia itself is a feint, but Seldon has predicted that the world will restore civilization, so long as they do not come to rely on individual heroism. There is a general lack of strong narrative arc or dynamic characters, but the ideas in this book are provocative and worth thinking about, even though the specific technology (nuclear) is a product of its own age.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
Another book that I meant to have read some time ago, started once, and just never got back to. Adams had some wonderful backs and forths and observations, but his style of witty, clever nonsense that sometimes defies any sort of narrative sense just isn’t really my thing, at least not anymore. I may read the second book in the series for completion’s sake, but I didn’t like DGHDA as much as a lot of more recent books or Hitchhiker’s Guide. The preoccupation with antiquated computers also seemed stilted.

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu
Reviewed here, Liu’s first novel in his epic fantasy trilogy is a soaring epic modeled on Chinese epic rather than western quest stories. I loved this book and it was pretty easily my favorite read of the month.

Nonfiction
Palmyra and its Empire Richard Stoneman
A somewhat dated book that I suspect I read once many years ago, I picked this one up again because of the disappointing news coming out of Palmyra. As a BMCR reviewer put it, this book combines relatively popular history narratives about Zenobia with much denser narrative and argumentation about Palmyra and its role in the Roman frontier. The feeling that I had read the book before took some of the wind out of my sails and I don’t find myself quite as intrigued by Roman history as I once did, but this is still a worthwhile read.

The Bagel Maria Balinska
Reviewed here, Balinska traces the history of the bagel from the fork that divided the bread from its Christian counterpart in medieval Poland, through its immigration to America as a ethnic Jewish food, its role in the labor movement around the turn of the century, and finally through its conquest of America as a ubiquitous breakfast food. There is a larger story than the narrow one Balinska tells in the second half of the book, but the simplistic story works well enough and should I ever find myself teaching US History for my supper, this is a book that I will use in my teaching.

June 2015 Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I read more fiction this month than in any calendar month in a few years, and so much so that I’m sorting and grouping the books by loose category, first literary fiction, then genre fiction.

Fiction

Men at Arms, Evelyn Waugh

Guy Crouchback is the scion of a vaguely aristocratic, Catholic, British family most of the 1930s at his family’s villa in Italy after his marriage (a stint of which was spent in Kenya) failed. In 1939 he returns to England in order to help combat totalitarianism in Europe. Old for starting much of anything new, Crouchback wheedles his way into an old-fashioned unit, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, and trains as an officer. Much like in Catch 22, hijinks ensue. In this case, though, the actual war remains a distant threat for most of the book. Men at Arms is the first book of Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy about World War 2 and I look forward to reading the next two.

The Siege, Ismail Kadare

The Ottoman war machine marches implacably through a balkan summer and sets up a for a siege of a nameless Albanian fortress. The soldiers are enthusiastic. Their commander is a decorated veteran, their force is large, their architect and engineer sure to quickly breach the wall, allowing them to pour through, slaughter the rebels, and claim for themselves the beautiful and exotic blonde women. The chronicler debates how he is going to appropriately capture the magnificence of the victory. But fissures appear in the expedition, between the commanders of the elite troops and the regular, expendable troops, between the religious men and the men of science. When the defenders resist the first assaults, the fissures grow larger and threaten to defeat the campaign.

Kadare, an Albanian author, captures the campaign and its mundane concerns and its mundane failures, looking at the balance between a literal host of characters who all pursue human pleasures and impulses and suffer human pains, and a literal host of characters who are supposed to be united toward a common goal that will result in thousands of deaths. I didn’t love The Siege, but I appreciated the in/humanity that Kadare showed. In part, I struggled with there being simultaneously too much going on and too little, and the plot largely consists of everything grinding to a halt and slowly falling apart. The impersonality of the entire novel also made particular scenes with the wives of the commander where there either was sex or sex was discussed all the more jarring since the distance remained through the intimacy. Most of this was by design, but, in my opinion, it isn’t a narrative device that is particularly effective or appealing. I would read something else by Kadare, but this was a lukewarm introduction for me.

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Reviewed here, this is the Tartt’s campus novel about a death that shatters a circle of classics undergraduate students even as it has a relatively fleeting impact on the campus as a whole.

Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway

One of Hemingway’s posthumous novels, Islands in the Stream consists of three distinct episodes in the life of painter Thomas Hudson, each with a different tone and style. The first takes place on Bimini, where Hudson has a successful artistic life, which typically includes painting all morning, fishing, and drinking. His kids come to visit and life is grand. In the second, World War 2 has begun and Hudson hunts U-boats, but is awash in emotions because of the losses in his life and being swept off his feet by meeting his ex-wife. In the third, he is on a suicide mission to kill Germans. It is a simple arc that Hemingway stakes out, but there are as many or more emotional notes than in any of his novels.

This is later Hemingway. His prose remains stark, but it is visually remarkable, particularly in one scene that involves the protagonist and his friends getting drunk on a dock and firing flare guns at a dock covered with gasoline and at the commissioner’s house. A man on a boat moored at the dock repeatedly comes out to ask them to be quiet because his girlfriend is trying to sleep…and they mock him by saying that if he knew how to pleasure a woman she would be able to sleep through their drunken fun. The man gets mad and comes out to fight them, at which point one of the characters beats him in a boxing match. The whole scene is crude, but all the more effective for Hemingway’s direct, blustery style. Elsewhere, he effectively conveys the emotions of being a father, being in love, and needing revenge. Islands in the Stream was not as thoroughly pared down as his other posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, but I cannot help but think that something was missing from this novel, not something that made them hold together better since these are all part of the same story, but something that bridged the gaps a little more effectively.

Post Captain, Patrick O’Brian
H.M.S. Surprise, Patrick O’Brian
The Mauritius Command, Patrick O’Brian
Desolation Island, Patrick O’Brian

Books 2-5 in O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. At this point in the series, each book covers about a year in the wars between Napoleon and Great Britain, and Aubrey makes steady progression up the officer ranks such that by the fourth book he is not constantly the junior officer. He also makes money (at least at sea), marries, and has children–maturing and mellowing somewhat with age. Aubrey tends not to have consistent commands, which was likely the norm, particularly for captains a) who came into the service in a fairly haphazard way b) who made enemies like Aubrey does and c) who climbed the ranks like this. The stories do usually move along a little faster than the first one, but I suspect it is more from the books being shorter and getting used to the style since there remain lengthy passages that fill in the world but aren’t central to the story. I remain of the opinion that O’Brian is strongest when describing ships, battles, and sailing and develops two good characters that have a relationship that keeps things moving, but that he is not particularly good at plotting or storytelling. My favorite of these four was H.M.S Surprise.

Storm Front, Jim Butcher

Urban fantasy meets urban noir. Harry Dresden is a wizard in Chicago, a private eye, and a consultant for the police department. He’s also broke, so he leaps at the opportunity to work private case the same day that the police call about an grisly murder. The cases start out simply enough, and they even help Harry snag a date. Events quickly spiral out of control, though, as the killer starts going after him, the wizard council suspects him of being the murderer, and even the police begin to suspect him. Storm Front is the first book in The Dresden Files. Butcher does a nice job blending character construction, building an introduction to the world, and working through classic noir pacing and tropes. I really enjoyed this book and blew through it in about a day.

This book does include a good amount of slapsticky comedy as things go wrong for Dresden with regularity, yet he describes himself as an excellent, trained wizard. The whole story is told from a first-person “noir” viewpoint, so there is something to Dresden simply being an unreliable narrator overconfident in his own abilities because he is lucky. I see some of that going on here, but more of that is built into magic in Butcher’s world. Magic is powerful and can kill, but is much more limited and rare than often is the case in fantasy and things like potions not only are hard to make, but they degrade quickly. Magic also causes technology to fail. The pair to this is that magic can only do so much to protect what is an inherently weak material body, which leaves the wizard open to being mauled by supernatural beings with stronger bodies. Dresden is lucky (and being lucky is sometimes better than being good) and comedy does ensue when things go wrong, but neither does this necessarily mean that he is lying when he says he is an excellent wizard–as he points out on a few occasions, the other wizards tend not to be prowling the streets fighting crime.

My favorite of these books was The Secret History, but of the authors, I’m most looking forward to reading the next book by Butcher. I believe everyone has their “light” reading, things that other people would consider trashy. My drug of choice is fantasy.

Nonfiction

The Terrorist Prince, Raja Anwar

Benazir Bhutto is a martyr for legitimate government in Pakistan, taking over the mantle from her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed in 1979 by the army Chief of Staff Zia-ul-Haq. This book is less about Benazir and more about her younger brother Mir Murtaza. Where Benazir used legitimate political channels to uphold her family’s legacy, Murtaza formed a terrorist organization among the tribes in rural Pakistan to avenge his father and even managed to hijack an airplane. Raja Anwar was an associate of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and knew the children and generally has a bone to pick with the Bhutto clan. He portrays Murtaza as a marginally sane, largely inept young man with delusions of grandeur who is eventually assassinated in a plot concocted by Benazir’s husband. Anwar is not much kinder to Benazir and condemns them for treating Pakistan like a personal fief, regardless of which side of the law they claimed to be on.

Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen Burn

Conversations is a collection of interviews that David Foster Wallace gave, arranged in chronological order. Some of the answers were clearly questions he heard again and again and there was an almost resigned tone to them. Other answers provoked thoughtful retrospective responses and observations about US culture and art. There was also a clear arc in the interviews, with young DFW giving more thought to other authors, and older DFW giving more thought to his own bibliography and legacy. He noted how, early on, he was more interested in cleverness for its own sake, but how that became stale and he became more interested in emotion and humanism. There is a new essay out about DFW in anticipation of an upcoming biopic, and the author is somewhat critical of the cult of DFW, particularly because he is disdainful of certain aspects of Wallace’s self-conscious posturing that turned him into a sort of depressed Buddha, “slacker saint and liberal sage” for his followers. It is a fair analysis that takes nothing away from Wallace’s writing and is more insightful about them than many would-be acolytes are. The performative aspect of Wallace’s personality was particularly resonant with both the form and content of the interviews.

Phew. The list will almost certainly be shorter next month, as I am currently working my way through the first volume (of two) of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the medieval Chinese epic about the fall of the Han Dynasty. Right now the plan is to take a break after the first one and read the second next month, but we’ll see.

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.