JFDI BOOK NO. 13: ORYX AND CRAKE -Margaret Atwood

 

 

DYSTOPIA.  ARE WE ALREADY THERE?

 

Chosen by James

REVIEW: CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY Thomas Picketty

TOM'S REVIEW

Capital in the 21^st Century (2014):

I don’t read much non-fiction because:

·         It is usually not as well written as quality fiction

·         It is usually less truthful than quality fiction

·         It says everything it has to say in the first 50 pages

If ever there was a book that affirmed my bias, this is it. 

For whatever reasons that only media types know, this book was all the rage in the financial press the first half of 2014.  The buzz was that it was the DAS KAPITAL of the 21^st C.  I haven’t read DAS KAPITAL and so I cannot say whether this book is its equivalent.  But then, as I have since discovered, neither can the financial press reviewers of this book, who have likely never read Karl Marx and have even more likely not read much of this book.  I admit that I say this based on a limited sample of reviews and one very telling statistic—and this book if nothing else is all about statistics—from a survey of Kindle readers, which reports that this is the most unread big seller of all time.  Only 2% of readers have made it to the end.  I may not be among the 1%ers on which this book turns its innumerable charts and graphs, but by God I am one of the 2%ers who finished this bastard.   

CAPITAL makes a noble effort at exploring the timely issue of wealth and income inequality and its implications for current and future social order.  The 21^st C French economist with the oddly 19^th C English name of Thomas Picketty analyses the extreme wealth and income inequality of France and England from the time of the French Revolution to the end of the First World War, the relative wealth and income equality of the 20^th C through 1980, and the increased polarisation between the haves and have-nots in the wake of the 1980s economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher. While the book is not overtly political, it also does not attempt to mask its leanings. 

Give Picketty credit for trying to garner a wide audience with an intrinsically dry subject.  There are innumerable graphs for the economists, sociologists and academics.  There is a sop to humanities majors with repeated references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac. Picketty goes full-on populist by citing the social hierarchy in Titanic.  And he even offers a solution to the problem of wealth and income equality for all the dreamers and idealists.

The solution is of course unworkable in the minds of anyone but the most doctrinaire European Parliamentarian.  It calls for an annual tax of up to 1% on assets over a certain threshold—say $5 or $10 million—to be administered globally. Proceeds from the tax would be used to provide decent food, shelter, education and medicine to those who cannot afford them.  Picketty does not bother with questions of corruption and misappropriation of funds but chooses only to accentuate the positive--that a global asset tax would eliminate tax havens, increase transparency, improve data accuracy and address poverty.   You have to love his optimism.  Wish I could say the same for his book. 

Two stars

EDITOR'S NOTE

Tom deserves great accolades for this review for many reasons, not the least of which he was the ONLY person to read the entire tome.  Thus no one else has the right to say anything about this book in this forum, but generally the reception was the same, as people voted with their sloth:  Q.E.D.

PS: The boo birds were out for Joe, who chose the book, but had a forgetful moment and had another engagement such that he could not attend. 

Par contre, the pork pies were of their usual high quality.

REVIEW: THE SISTERS BROTHERS AND HARVEST

TOM'S REVIEW 

For the first time in JFDI’s short but stimulating history the assignment called for two books: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt; and Harvest by Jim Crice.  It did not mark the first time for a dual assignment, as the previous one had called for Season One of the TV series “Breaking Bad” and as many essays by Bertrand Russell as a man could stomach.  But ask any schoolboy which is weightier: two books: or a TV show plus an optionally-sized collection. We all know the answer to that one.

Like schoolboys, some of us finished the assignment, some of us came close to finishing it and some of us went online to see if we could find the videos.  I admit to the advantage of having read the books before I picked them.  I loved one and admired the other and thought I could finesse a comparative lit assignment even when my initial reaction was they had little in common. 

But they do:

--Both were short-listed for Booker Prizes. 

--Both are about days of yore that are core to the images we contemporary folk have about the respective countries in which the novels are set: America during the California Gold Rush; and England before the arrival of the dark, satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. 

--Both are filled with the kind of violent cruelty that seems acceptable for the setting and abhorrent to us when we read it in the news. 

 On first reading, The Sisters Brothers was the more enjoyable, not only for me but also for 80% of JFDI. The story is about two bounty hunters, Charlie and Eli Sisters, whom their boss the Commodore has sent to kill a former employee the Commodore has accused of stealing.  Charlie is very lean and very mean, especially when he’s drunk a bottle of brandy, which he does often.  Eli, relative to most people in his profession, is burdened with a surfeit of weight, conscience and self-awareness.  He is the narrator.

Soon after I read Sisters, I sent a short critique to friends saying, “It’s the novel Quentin Tarrantino would write.” But it isn’t. It’s the novel the Cohn Brothers would write. Eli’s narration is filled with unintended humour and irony that is the trademark of Cohn characters.  Example: Eli tells Charlie he’s through with killing after this latest assignment; Charlie reminds him that after they finish with this assignment, they will have to kill the Commodore; and then they will have to kill the Commodore’s men who will want revenge; to which Eli says, “I mean I’m through with this era of killing.”

That is not to say that Sisters is only an exercise in offbeat humour like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski.  In the final chapters, it turns serious about themes like greed, fair play and the siren’s song of the outlaw’s life. That’s when the story deflates for me.  Whoever makes the movie version is going to have to juggle a Lebowski beginning with a No Country for Old Men ending.  Good luck with that one.

   

Harvest has no such juggling act. It starts somber and it ends somberer.  The initial JFDI sentiment was 4 to 1 in favour of Sisters. Only Alistair—The Quiet Beatle—stumped for Harvest.  The three Americans—Eric, Joe and I—thought Alistair’s POV said something about the difference between blind Yankee optimism and English resignation to the obviously inescapable outcome.  James, though, sided with the Yanks.  So then we had to tweak the theory by saying that Alistair is preternaturally British because he has Scottish roots and grew up in Cornwall while James works for Bank of America.

But the whole dynamic did say something about the 80-20 rule, which says that 80% of your customers are non-nutritive bulk while 20% are your quality, mate.  As Alistair stated his case for Harvest, the rest of us were sucked into an earnest discussion of the book’s core theme about the fragility of the social contract and how quickly it can unravel—in the case of Harvest, in less than a week, and that in an era we contemporary types like to think took its own sweet time. 

The basic plot of Harvest is that three outsiders come to a tight-knit village dependent on the largesse of a manor house which has been vandalized.  The three—an old man, a young man and a bewitching woman—are blamed for the vandalism and the two men are placed in stocks for seven days.  Being pilloried strikes us modern men as almost quaint, a source of fun at Ye Olde Renaissance Faires. Harvest shows that weeklong starvation in shackles is nothing less than the advanced form of interrogation of its day.  If we as a global community still need a lesson in how destructive torture can be to our collective soul, Harvest provides it.

The upshot is that Harvest spawned a much livelier discussion than The Sisters Brothers.  For the majority, it was less enjoyable but more thought-provoking--like 12 Years a Slave versus Argo.  And it also made the perfect transition to our next book, Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the 21^st Century, a non-fiction heads-up about the fragile social contract.  As some bright JFDI spark pointed out: “The three outsiders come to the village after being driven out of one transitioning from crop to sheep farming. The village they come to is about to experience the same.  Without knowing it, the villagers are looking at their own future.”

Just to keep things real, the meeting ended with the JFDI list of preferred stars of the female version of “The Expendables.” The main criterion was “former stars desperate for a paycheck.” Once again, Alistair nailed it: Sarah Ferguson.

It’s always the quiet ones.  

Four stars for both      

ERIC'S REVIEW

In life broadly speaking you have two options: you can go looking for trouble, or you can wait to have trouble come looking for you. The end of the voyage of discovery might mean going home; the consequence of staying put might mean your home going. Travelling, or unravelling. Your choice. In the old days the choice might mean you took work off the land you found; the alternative might be that the land you found yourself in worked you. Progress, either generated by exploring new worlds or transported into your own world by alien bearers of technology and greed might increase production or bring wealth but could bring destruction as well.

Two books, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, and Harvest, by Jim Crace, come at these questions from very different angles. The former is a story of two hired guns (the narrator Eli and his brother Charlie, last name Sisters thus the title) whose peripatetic life in search of their target (a killing ordered by the invisible Commodore) cuts a murderous swathe through the Wild West. The latter recounts a calamitous seven days in the life of a small bucolic village in England whose world is upended by visitors. The narrator, Walter Thirsk, is the only one it seems with a thirsk (sic) for life in a village paralysed by tradition. At the end of both, like the homecoming signalling the end of a journey or the harvest signalling the end of nature's circle of life, you are left with distant memories and empty fields. And not a lot else.

Just as someone said that America and England are two worlds separated by a common language, these books epitomise the different ethos and thoughts of the New World versus the Old. (One assumes they take place at more or less the same time). The two brothers are emblematic of manifest destiny (read aimless wandering) where society was mobile and one's place in it determined by aggression and the barrel of a gun. Wide open spaces. Murderous intentions. The rush after a glittering metal hiding stubbornly in the ground. Harvest's rural English village was ruled by feudal laws and the Lord of the Manor and was organised along strict lines of birth, law, and tradition. No one thought of leaving. To go where? To do what? England is after all an island, and a small one at that. They stayed until their choice was forced upon them by unwelcome visitors who exposed all of the prejudices and suppressed furies of a small village as they were quickly swallowed up by progress.

Without ruining either story, suffice it to say that the endings are somewhat anti-climactic and certainly  bleak. Like life at that time, one supposes. In both cases fire both literally and figuratively swallows up life's work.

The writing in the two books is markedly different; the easy flowing quickfire narrative of DeWitt and the dense and florid description of Crace where action happens at a glacial pace. Both are effective. There are glimpses of really fine writing in both, to wit: The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.(De Witt). Or: Their best riches are ignorance of wealth. Or: The man's a fool, but not the kind of fool to spit in his own hat. (Crace).

De Witt's language is easily accessible and spare. Crace's book has more unknown words than a small thesaurus, and thus one learns perhaps a bit more about flora and fauna.

They were both shortlisted for the Booker. Neither won.

But that doesn't mean they weren't worth something, whether your psyche is one that likes to travel or stay at home.

3 stars for the lot of them.    

JFDI BOOK 12: CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY: THOMAS PICKETTY

The new Marx, says The Economist. What happens when capitalism goes nuts and disparity widens. He is French (faites attention) but a professor at MIT.

AMAZON- It ain't cheap by the way.

 

 

Chosen by our resident Marxist: Herr Igoe

JFDI BOOK NOS. 10 & 11:SISTERS BROTHERS AND HARVEST

Chosen by Tom Wells



1. The Sisters Brothers  
     by Patrick deWitt. 

 

A bit of a palate cleanser.  It's the novel Quentin Tarantino would write.  And therefore it's right up Conor's dusty trail.  Conor?  Yes, this is peer pressure.  

2. Harvest by Jim Crace. 


A Booker finalist this year. It's as English as The Sister Brothers is American.  Even if TSB was written by a guy born in Canada.

Read them both and compare/contrast. 

The next meeting will be in March 2014, so there is plenty of time.

REVIEW: BOOK(?) No. 8 BREAKING BAD (SEASON 1) AND 9.BERTRAND RUSSELL

TOM WELLS

Always happy to let others slice themselves on the leading edge of culture, I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad as this month’s JFDI selection. Yep, that’s us—a book club that watches TV.  We now expect an avalanche of applications to join. Well, we would if we didn’t confess that we also had to read a minimum of three essays from the collected works Bertrand Russell as a BB companion piece.  The best of the many good things I can say about Breaking Bad is that it manages to make it cool to be a smart, sick, bitter old man. Bertrand Russell is the opposite.    

The book club assignment called for us to watch the first BB season, which contained just seven episodes.  You could watch additional episodes and even whole seasons for whatever is the scientific name for the neutralised state of extra credit.  I stuck to the basic assignment.  By the time I'd finished watching the final episode of Season 1, I did not want to go on to Season 2, but only because I thought there is no way it could be as good.  I’m assured that it is.  Many say, even better.  I can’t imagine.

I got the feeling from the story arc that the writers thought BB would be one season and out.  As a result, Episode 6 represents the true climax, with Episode 7 poised as the segue to either a new season or a blaze of glory.  And as the climactic episode of a supremely well-written series, Episode 6 may be the best single instalment of television I’ve ever seen.  It is certainly the best I can remember. 

I don’t need to rehash the premise or the many interconnected plots.  Let’s just say that high-school chemistry teacher Walter White is MacGyver’s seriously desperate twin, desperate in ways that echo loudly in a world of growing polarization between haves and have-nots, between those who play by the rules and those for whom the rules are there to be gamed.

Bertrand Russell was one of the haves—he was born Lord Russell—who happened to also play by the rules: the rules of logic-- cold, precise logic.  He appears never to have been conflicted.  He appears always to have been insufferable.  Just ask his four wives.

 

REVIEW: STONER...QUIET DESPERATION

ERIC'S REVIEW

Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to to their grave with their song still within them. Stoner, by John L. Williams, is a book about an unremarkable life.  Due to circumstances and his own nature, the protagonist, a college professor from a hardscrabble farming background, trapped in a loveless marriage, hemmed in by a career which peaked early, and deprived by societal conventions from pursuing his true love, ends up with his song silenced by life and the path he has taken. It is the path of least resistance, and unlike Frost's the road less travelled by, it ultimately leads nowhere.

Stoner is everyman, and his life is what Ortega y Gasset described: mi vida es yo y mi circunstancia. My life is me and my circumstance.  

He goes to college to escape the grim reality of subsistence farming, ostensibly to study agriculture. His attention is diverted to literature, and avoiding the first world war, which claims one of the triumvirate of himself and two friends, continues on in academia. He marries a thin lipped woman (my father once wisely advised me to avoid them). Their marriage is a long running silent attrition, with a wife for whom "anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. " He has a child. A lover half his age. A long running battle which he loses with a spiteful and bitter boss. He publishes one book which sinks without a trace. He loses them all, one way or another, though he bears his fate calmly and bides his time to exact a manner of revenge. He gets cancer. Fin bref, as they say in French, game over. 

The diary of Stoner's life is filled largely with disappointments kept. At one point in mid-life he reaches a nadir where "he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy, and nothing behind him that he cared to remember." The book makes for easy, but not particularly pleasant reading, and though one can identify and sympathize with the monotone playing in the background, the overall result is that of a song left unsung by a man for whom quiet desperation became a way of life. 

3.5 out of five

--------------------------------

TOM'S REVIEW

STONER

Ellmore Leonard famously had ten rules for fictionwriting, a list that started as something of a joke but eventually became legendary—like the singer Tom Jones.  

I have three rules:

1.

Never describe when you can dramatise.

2.

Allow at least 10 pages for every year you chronicle.

3.

Don’t doom your characters.  

Ok, fair enough, I came up with this list after reading Stoner.The components had kicked around the back of my brain for 35 years, but Stoner made me want to write them down.  

Because Stoner is not the novel as sweeping panorama or microscopic dissection or even self-conscious art.  It is the novel as thesis. I get the feeling lifetime academic John Williams wrote Stoner to meet the publish-or-perish clause ofhis tenure application.  The writing is meticulous; the plot,lean; the characters, archetypal.  I can just see the members ofthe PhD review committee nodding their heads in condescending but impressed approval.  

But a storyteller’s job is not to satisfy critics or academics or award boards, just as it’s not to reach the widest possible audience.  It should be to dramatise with plot, character, setting and theme through language which at its best is lyrical. The best novels excel at all five elements.  The job of the thesis writer, on the other hand, is to analyse, describe and explain through language that should be purposely precise.  The chronicle of William Stoner’s 46 years at the University of Missouri is a life precisely described and explained.  It is too rarely dramatised.

What drama there is—fellow-student Masters’ rant in a pub; Stoner’s first meeting with future wife Elizabeth’s parents; his oral-exam grilling of the graduate student Walker—stands out from the mass of a story chronicling in 300 pages a 46-yearlife of quiet resignation.  Stoner makes one difficult decision in his life and it comes at the very beginning of the story when he breaks with his family and fate by abandoning agricultural studies for literature.  After that, it’s a life characterised by acceptance. As Masters tells Stoner early on in the novel,“You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world.  You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong…. You have the lean and hungry look, sure enough. You’re doomed.”

Unlike the original possessor of the lean and hungry look, Cassius in Julius Caesar, William Stoner is virtuallyambitionless once he receives his PhD.  Even as he pursuesElizabeth’s hand and takes a stand against Walker, he resigns himself to the lifetime of joylessness that results from twoevents which in any life—let alone a storied one—would just about merit a diary entry.  Even his brief love affair with the graduate student Katherine Driscoll—his one hope for happiness—is something he slips into before allowing it tofade away.  Buddy Holly, let alone Mick Jagger, he is not.    

All of which in my mind makes him positively un-American. That may explain why Stoner, first published in 1956, is enjoying a revival here in Blighty, where the special relationship is best enjoyed with a dash of schadenfreude.  The American ideal is to refuse to accept fate or die trying, while the traditional British way is to take life on the chin with a stiff upper lip, an ironic aside or a cheeky bittersweet grumble. William Stoner can’t even manage that.    

Two stars.