Notes from Underground by Roger Scruton (Czech history, Communism, samizdat)

"...attempts at difference had the opposite effect to the one intended. For they emphasized that, in the midst of this randomness, you saw only the one identical expression: eyes staring into the distance, and lips held firmly shut as though against some pervasive infection Our people had collectively solved their shared problem, which was how to keep the mask in place, while showing that it is only a mask. People collaborated in the great deception, so as not to be deceived."

Scruton's book examines Prague life under the unrelenting pressure of communism, and it's desire to create sameness and eradicate personal opinions and choices.  Seen most in the world of literature, where writers were commonly arrested and jailed, sometimes executed, the lack of freedom of expression was so controlled as to prevent personal thoughts.  Just the idea of waving at someone insinuated a further connection, a nefarious plan under way.

The police were calculating and cold in their efforts to cool any uprisings by suppressing everything written, even harmless works of literature. In result, much more harmful (to Communism at least) works were perpetrated in secret in opposition to the force of evil. Dissident authors and writers wrote secretly, as their work (or even having it in possession) could land them into jail.  But they did not quit, and if anything, while its exposure may have been limited to the literary few, it probably saved them mentally.

The novel begins with a woman being arrested who was secretly known for copying dissident works into books. Her son involved, she takes all the blame and is jailed. Lost for what to do, he himself a writer as well, wanders the underground (both literally and figuratively) trying to figure out what to do.  Soon he meets an attractive woman who leads him on a path to produce his literature but with a theory: become famous in the outside world so much that Czech officials can't touch him without political repercussions.

But who is she, and what is her intentions?

"A curious thought entered my mind: that she had quite separate lives. The thought no sooner occurred than it became a knife of jealousy.  The girl who cultivated dissidents, what was exploring the world of the samizdat, who was in some strange way excited by the opportunity to recreate me as a hero and a martyr, was the holiday version of another being entirely."

Filled with beautiful and nuanced sentences, the novel contrasts the barbaric stomping out of words with the subtlety and pleasure of well-written prose. The author contrasts these so clearly that one can't help but feel the tension between the political forces at play and the hearts behind the written word.  It's not idealistic, some of the samizdat writers were jerks too, not to be trusted and often arrogant.  But their opposition, in whole, to the entire movement to destroy them only makes them more fascinating.

Scruton's writing is unusual.  A narrator who thinks wisely and yet makes naive assumptions, who loves and yet distrusts; a complicated man in every sense.

Advance review copy provided by Amazon.

My Next Purchase: Salon's Laura Miller recommends "How Not to Be Wrong: What the Literary World Can Learn From Math"

So there's this:

Laura Miller at Salon has pointed out two inspiring new books that have jumped the line to the top of my wishlist of summer books.  I'm sure I'll get to The Goldfinch sometime...

First, How Not to Be Wrong: What the Literary World Can Learn From Math, by Jordan Ellenberg is discussed at length, and at one point Miller quotes Ellenberg's observation that a simple word choice can make all the difference and how it matters mathematically (not just as a variation of lexicon).

"Ellenberg pauses, for example, to fantasize about going back in time to “the dawn of statistical nomenclature” so he could persuade statisticians to use the term “statistically noticeable” instead of “statistically significant.” “Mathematics has a funny relationship to the English language,” he writes, and here’s a prime example. In statistics “significant” does not indicate that a result is “important” or “meaningful,” only that it is at least a little bit off what we would expect from pure chance. Such a finding should be viewed as no more than “a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy.” Only when well-designed experiments consistently deliver the same finding can we start to treat it as a fact."

Probability and statistics and how numbers are manipulated makes for some tantalizing reading, and tying it into literature, as Ellenberg does in the book, is a brilliant angle.  Word choice is everything these days, from logic classes to what an advertiser is allowed to claim on a label.  Even more so, word choice is what allows the media to make vague accusations and still stay in business.

(Just for kicks, there's a related article from the University of Texas by Dr. James Pennebaker about what word choice says about us, our status and our honesty, entitled "Word Choice Detects Everything from Love to Lies to Leadership" at  http://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/08/01/pennebaker_word_choice/)

Also mentioned in Miller's article is a similar book, The Improbability Principle (by David J. Hand) that is "simpler and sometimes clearer" and equally likely to be on my wishlist of new titles to read through the summer.  

These sound appealing in the sense that the Malcolm Gladwell books explained things so uniquely and accessibly and "scientific-y" (although those often left me with more questions than answers, and sometimes a feeling of nausea).  

Yes, I am a nerd.

See the link for Miller's article, which is featured as part of her regular columns at Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/how_not_to_be_wrong_what_the_literary_world_can_learn_from_math/

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul, translated from the Danish

Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

Okay…there’s the unreliable narrator. Annoying but usually enlightening. But what about a protagonist who is an unlikeable narrator? One that has you, more than once, considering tossing the book across the room? Well, meet Bess. She’s awful. Ghastly. A terrible woman in so many ways I can’t even list them all.

She’s married to Halland, who is murdered immediately as the book begins. It’s a shock, because the brief time he’s mentioned makes him seem like a decent guy. And yet, there’s the sense that we, the reader, may be grieving more than Bess. She’s a cold fish, and the first big question is, is she really just a brat or is this grief overwhelming her? She’s left her child for this man…but she worries about what her search engine may contain. She kisses her neighbor before Halland’s body is cold. She’s appalling, and yet:

"I loved reading and had always thought of it as a refuge. I even read the labels on bottles, if only to keep myself occupied on trains or in restaurants. I read in bed at night. If I lay awake for more than two minutes after switching off the light, I switched it on again to avoid lapsing into thought. To avoid thinking."

Wait. That’s exactly what I do. Can it be that I have more in common with Bess than I’d like to think? As the story unfolds, author Juul makes us ask this question over and over again. Subtly, of course. Because no one wants to admit who they are, deep inside, not even to the character in a novel. That’s what makes Bess so compelling. She’s unlikeable, but then again, so is virtually everyone in her little world. She seems to have no real connection with another human…did she even have one with Halland? While she has lovely flashbacks of him, how tainted are they by grief and how real are they? Was he as messed up as everyone else she deals with? There’s a hint that he was seriously ill…but little to tell us how long she’d been caring for him. Was she at all?

She gets many visitors, all who seem to point her to her own failures. Her ex-husband, her daughter, neighbors…all seem to show up and make her look bad. Who is the mirror and who is the reality? Why are all the reflections so skewed? Why does she say that she “experienced the world with provisos”? What holds her back? And, then again, lest it be forgotten, who killed Halland?

Pia Juul’s writing is never dull…she also throws in quotes from everyone from Eugene Ionesco to Charles Dickens to Hans Christian Anderson. The pithy little quotes fuel a mood for the chapter that they precede, and yet…are they steering the reader in the correct direction? It’s significant that she also has a quote from Agatha Christie, who would have winked at the way nearly every character mentioned could have been the killer. And is that Bess flirting with the detective again?

At one point, Bess craves the simplicity of a television crime, not real life.

"All I needed for happiness was a detective series….Simplicity was a virtue. First a murder, nothing too bestial. Then a police inspector. Insights into his or her personal problems, perhaps. Details about the victim. Puzzles and anomalies. Lines of investigations. Clues. Detours. Breakthrough. Case solved. Nothing like real life.


The puzzle attracted me—the solution left me cold. Nothing like real life."

There it is again…that perplexing bit of humanity (who hasn’t been soothed by a rerun of Law & Order or Inspector Frost??) that makes Bess almost likeable again.

Peirene Press has produced yet another startlingly sharp novel. It’s the first of theirs that I wanted to throw, that had me arguing out loud over a character's bad decisions and pouting at their lack of response, but one that immediately pulled me back in.  Who killed Halland is only one question that will arise....

Special thanks to Meike for the Review Copy.

Update: Eastern European Reading Challenge

We're five months into the Reading Challenge...how are you doing?  Are you anywhere near your goals for tourist, scholar, or ambassador?  Hopefully this post will help inspire you to stay motivated.

First off, check out this link:
http://www.theblacksheepdances.com/2011/01/links-to-your-reviews-of-eastern.html

At that link, you'll find other links to reviews by a number of diehard participants in the challenge.  Damian has reviews for titles from Blatnik, Teodorovicis, Kompanikova, Stiks, Nodas, and Kovalytis.  Linda has links to her reviews for Kadare, Slouka, Kertesz, Nadas, and Dragoman. Chrissie discusses Fraser, and Bernadette has reviews for Akunin and Eastland.  Alister also discusses Akunin.  Colleen reviews Pasulkas title and Jose reviews Miloszewski.  WonderBunny tackles Lukyanenko, as Melwyk tackles Barclay.  Lastly, CaptiveReader reviews Ignatieff and Pick.

I didn't even bother with spell-check on that paragraph!  Check out that link to discover the reviews and also enjoy the blogs of some of the participants.

Next up:  this link gives you a whole bunch of titles suggested by participants.  Daisy really outdid herself with titles to explore:  http://www.theblacksheepdances.com/2011/01/suggest-title-for-eastern-european.html.  Lisa also has a link to her blog where she reviews some of the deepest of the Russian genre.

It's appropriate that we are covering Eastern Europe, as Russia is currently the hot genre in publishing.  The London Book Fair earlier this year focused on Russian novels and poetry.  It's expected that Russian literature is going to dominate the next 18 months as Scandinavian crime did last year.

Here are some brand-new or forthcoming titles that should be mentioned:

Slavenka:  A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism:  Penguin Books.  Animals in fable-like stories act as symbols for the Communist era.

Andrey Kurkov Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost.  Melville House.  Russian based detective/crime with a humorous twist.

Vladimov, Georgi.  Faithful Ruslan.  Melville House.  A guard dog acts as motif.

Ulitskaya, Ludmila.  Daniel Stein, Interpreter.  Overlook.  True story of man who saved many Jews during the Holocaust.

Bronsky.  The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine.  Europa Editions.  Russian emigrants, three generations of women.  (One of the best covers this year)....

Sadulaev.  I Am a Chechen!  Tin House Books.  Short stories.

Akunin.  He Lover of Death.  W&N.

Many more to come....

Lastly, there's a slew of Russian, Czech, and Slavic movies now available on Youtube and Netflix.  One, "Before the Rain" was discussed in detail Slavic Review's Spring Issue...it looks good but I haven't seen it.  It's set during the Bosnian Wars and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. 

Coming up this week on this blog, a review of Molotov's Magic Lantern and a Serbian title called, enticingly, Leeches.

Finally, the winner for the giveaway of Sofi Oksanen's Estonian novel, Purge, is Hamna.  She's got 48 hours to respond.  The next giveaway will be announced soon!

New World of Indigenous Resistance, Noam Chomsky

When is multiculturalism a bad thing? Could the answer have anything to do with literature? The new book, New World of Indigenous Resistance, examines this concept in a way that not only fascinates but educates.

The book focuses on South America’s regions, and has a series of essays discussing issues that face an area largely unknown by those in the U.S. Usually we only hear of earthquakes or small regional clashes that mean nothing to us, but there’s far more to explore. Author and historian Noam Chomsky discusses the essays featured as well as including his own thoughts on the complexities of the region. The South American continent is not simply a mass of Latino culture, but a huge collection of tribes and peoples. What happens there ultimately affects the rest of the world, and outside influences have been hugely detrimental to both the people and the land.

The primary problem faced is one of global corporations and governments arriving to extract resources, reestablish political boundaries, and ultimately combine the people into one more manageable mass. One essay, “Resistance and Cultural Work in Times of War,” by Elsie Rockwell in Mexico discusses the nature of multiculturalism and how it doesn’t benefit the native people at all. For example, international funding promotes a “intercultural” education that lumps all indigenous people into one category, then attempts to teach them in one, streamlined manner. This ignores their personal heritage and virtually eliminates it from the curriculum. Then, in an effort to offer variety under the guise of multiculturalism, they split the students into gifted, ‘special ed’ and ‘migrant’ groups. It is odd that the ‘migrant’ students are actually lifetime residents of the same community where the school is located. Where exactly have they migrated from? Rockwell’s primary assertion against this method is “the current economic order globalizes barbarism: it fabricates poverty, destroys nature, and militarizes other regions.” The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t respect the distinct differences between the indigenous people, and thus their voice in art, music, and literature is also lost.

Another essay, “Beyond Education”, by Gustavo Esteva in Mexico, examines the attitude of tolerance and its hidden agenda. He discusses how the US prides itself on being a melting pot of cultures, but this melting pot mentality actually just attempts to “to dissolve, each one of the multiple immigrant cultures.” He asserts that the term “salad bowl” would be a more accurate and positive term, one that respects the individual heritage and culture behind native people and promotes such diversity. Thus, the literature and poetry of other places can continue to thrive instead of dying out. As the US gets involved in South America for mining and energy projects, they often use their influence and funds to promote a similar mentality. The problem is, this homogenization of culture also makes it far easier to exploit and manipulate the people within, and the authors of the essays are addressing such concerns.

Chomsky discusses this further in his interview, featured at the end of the book, where he explains that “the demeaning of others translates into subordination internal to the community. So war is the extreme case. You demean and demonize the enemy to the point where you want to destroy him, but you also accept that you are totally controlled at home. You subordinate yourself to your own state to try and destroy the enemy state, while they are subordinating themselves to their state.” This attitude gives great power to a few large nations and the smaller die out. He applies this to literature when he states that “the main themes of the great antiwar novels after the First World War was the idiocy of essentially the same people in the trenches on both sides slaughtering each other, each committed to a power system that was oppressing them.” Thus he concludes that rather than embracing oneness, a healthy respect for the individuals of other places, along with their culture and history, is good for everyone and provides a wealth of experience that enriches what we see and read. 

Special thanks to Stacey of City Lights Books for the Review Copy.