The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

I’m increasingly deliberate about the physical books I buy to add to my library these days. My bookstore browsing always involves me checking what’s available at the library before making a final purchase. And I make a final purchase more often than not! Just less impulsively. Bookstores function as an important randomizing factor in a world with algorithm-based recommendations. The human element is key.

A recent trip to The English Book Shop in Stockholm—which also reminded me that I had put Sister Outsider on my TBR—brought Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine back to my attention. I’d seen it countless times in friends’ libraries, and Klein as a journalist was already familiar to me, but for whatever reason this was the moment where I decided to actually read one of her books. And as luck would have it, it was available in English from the Stockholm library.

The Shock Doctrine is a comprehensive look at the spread of Milton Friedman’s free market philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. I could list all of the case studies Klein takes up, but it would get long, fast. Suffice it to say that she draws on examples from all over the world. Her main thrust, however, is showing its most recent (at the time) application in the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq.

The distinctive element of Klein’s approach (compared to, say, The Jakarta Method) is her use of metaphor to frame her research: in this case, the gruesome techniques used by Donald Ewen Cameron in the Montreal experiments. The connection Klein repeatedly makes is that massive disaster (either man-made or natural) visited on an entire population is, if not the only, then the easiest or most direct way to traumatize a country enough to sneak in wildly unpopular changes—the ones she happened to focus on here with economic ones rooted in the Chicago school. Much like Cameron used electroshock therapy and other techniques in an attempt to turn his patients into blank slates upon which he thought he could rebuild them into healthy people, Klein argues, the US used the shock of these disasters to turn entire countries into blank slates upon which to build new highly privatized ultrafree market economies specifically to benefit the ultra wealthy (usually but not always located in the US). In other words, “disaster capitalism.”

She’s received criticism for this choice of metaphorical framing device, which isn’t entirely unwarranted I suppose, but personally I think the metaphor is an apt one. It allows Klein to highlight the common factors of a large number of disparate tragedies and make sense of the bigger picture and it’s also not entirely unrelated, considering how those electroshock techniques were often applied in the campaigns of violence Klein describes throughout the book. Fractal violence.

My only lingering thought, since this was published in 2007, is whether or not Klein’s attempt at optimism in the final chapter ended up being warranted. In what I assume was a deliberate choice in order to leave readers with a sense of hope for the future, she closes with developments in South America she feels will help create “shock-proof” countries and economies and lead to more just and equitable outcomes. This was a chapter written before Bolsonaro or Milei rose to power, obviously. Since there doesn’t appear to be an updated edition, for the moment I’ll just have to hunt down subsequent interviews and op-eds.

Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde is a name that’s been familiar to me for years, for better or for worse through people quoting her in well-designed little social media banners about poetry, the master’s tools dismantling the master’s house, or self care. There is something kind of sad and deflating in that: to generate a substantial body of artistic work as well as intellectual and theoretical thought, only to be reduced to the 21st century equivalent of a soundbite, lost in the stream of other reductionist soundbites.

The Sister Outsider essay collection came up in a podcast I was listening to—contextualizing Lorde a bit more beyond a neatly designed and typeset swipe-able image—and anyway, here we are now!

I actually finished the collection a few weeks ago; I just couldn’t find the time or brain to write about it until now. The short review that Sister Outsider doesn’t need is that it’s a fantastic collection. Lorde is a deep thinker and an engaging writer. I just wanted some of them to be longer, because there were lots of ideas and assertions that Lorde presents without cracking them open because they were always in service of some other, larger thesis, particularly in “Uses of the Erotic: the erotic as power.” Lorde uses a very nuanced and all-encompassing concept of “the erotic” that I was hoping she would examine more deeply and that I get the feeling she perhaps hashed out in other pieces not included in the book—like, I don’t immediately see the eroticism of constructing a bookshelf?

The diary accounts of visiting the Soviet Union and Grenada also stick out as personal favorites, maybe because those are more self-contained accounts of real-world events rather than out-of-context selections from longer, fuzzier academic conversations?

I’m also keenly aware that this is the rare piece of nonfiction by a Black author I’ve managed to read as an adult. Out of that nonfiction, almost all of them are either autobiographical or a treatment of race relations in the US. (I expect all of them are, but I’m hedging my bets here in case I’m wrong.) Obviously race relations, or whatever the best term is anymore, is important and one worth learning about. But I feel like surely Black journalists and academics are experts in a wide variety of fields, so why should the default expertise readily available to me be so limited? Offhand I can think of astronomy: Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has at least a couple of popular science books out by now, as does Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Of course limiting this to English, to books published in the US or the UK, is another factor. Etc. I guess my point is, this is something I try to reflect on in my nonfiction choices: whose expertise do I have access to? Whose is marginalized? How can I broaden the knowledge pool available to me?

An Unnecessary Woman

After years of an uncertain future on my TBR—always tempted to admit defeat and remove it, yet never quite gave in—my WhatsApp book club decided the issue for me and made Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman our read for March.

My reluctance about getting around to An Unnecessary Woman was entirely because I thought it would be a very serious, morose book. I think I added it to my TBR at about the same time as Bel Canto, and then after I read Bel Canto last year assumed An Unnecessary Woman would be more of the same.

This was not the case at all!

An Unnecessary Woman unfolds over the space of two days in the life of the narrator Aaliya, a childless divorcée living alone in Beirut who has just accidentally dyed her hair blue. After working for years in a bookstore, she is now retired (or unemployed? her source of income was unclear to me) and spends her days translating her favorite books into Arabic. In the space of these two days, the isolated and solitary Aaliya reflects on her life in Beirut, her rare friendships and strained familial relationships, her love of music and literature. Aaliya and Renée from L’Élégance du hérisson would get on like a house on fire.

I go through periods in my life where I get very grumpy and frustrated with fiction. There are so many books, so many novels, what’s the point of trying to wade through the tidal wave of stories out there? Maris Kreizman over on LitHub expressed it well, though less from a reader or existentialist perspective and more from a publishing perspective. An Unnecessary Woman was just the book I needed to read in that sort of mood.

Avlägsen stjärna

The same bookish friend with opinions about Aslı Erdoğan and  Tezer Özlü  was so enchanted with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that she picked his much shorter Distant Star for the online book club she started this year. I opted for the Swedish translation by Lena E. Heyman because if I’m reading a translation anyway, why not boost my Swedish numbers for the year?

This is a short novel that retreads (and is maybe even literally the same text?) as Bolaño’s earlier Nazi Literature in the Americas. An unnamed narrator, who is understood to be Arturo Bolaño from Nazi Literature working together with a metafictional Roberto Bolaño, relates the story of skywriting poet and serial killer Carlos Wieder, alias Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. After making an initial splash in the years of Pinochet’s rule, Wieder vanishes into thin air.

Or so it seems.

Decades later, the unnamed narrator (now residing in Europe) is contacted by a Chilean detective on the hunt for Wieder. Hired by a very wealthy client who believes that Wieder is still alive, the detective in turn wants to hire the narrator to comb through a bizarre international collection of genre fiction magazines. The detective is convinced that Wieder has submitted work to at least some of them, but needs the narrator’s poetic and aesthetic sensibilities to more specifically hunt him down. The story ends with the narrator positively identifying Wieder in person at a café, after which point the detective pays a visit to Wieder at home to (it is understood) murder him.

Distant Star met mixed reviews in our book club. Despite being only novella in length, it’s full of long asides that are completely irrelevant to the primary story: German vocabulary, Paralympics mascots, Soviet generals, fictional (?) Chilean revolutionaries and literary movements. The ending is inconclusive; we never find out who this wealthy client is or why they want Wieder dead.

I probably liked it the best out of everyone, but that was maybe because I’m so busy with other things right now I didn’t have the focus or mental processing power left over to even try to make sense of anything. Something about the narrator’s journey through the zines and his attempt to hunt down Wieder by way of his publications also reminded me of Foucault’s Pendulum, a book that will always inspire warm and fuzzy feelings in me.

I also finished Avlägsen stjärna a week ago at the time of writing (this entry is backdated because I’m fussy). That kind of delay is not ideal for writing a more thoughtful review, but such is life.

The Idiot

The Idiot made me feel like an idiot: there’s my pithy one-sentence review.

Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite pieces of required reading in high school (and one of my favorite books, full stop), so I went on a bit of a Dostoyevsky collecting spree in my early twenties. The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From the Underground, The House of the Dead and, of course, The Idiot got piled on my TBR with abandon, but I only ever finished Brothers.

Well, now that I’m making a more concerted effort to clear out my TBR, it was time to finish that project!

I made an attempt at The Idiot in Swedish a few years ago, but I quickly gave up—I was swamped with work and didn’t have the focus left for Dostoyevsky in Swedish (even if I was curious about translations besides Constance Garnett’s). Browsing the shelves at the freshly renovated library at Medborgarplatsen back in January, I came across the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (pictured here) and decided why not! So here we are.

The translation is great and I would like to sing the praises of the abundance of explanatory end notes. Very interesting, very informative, very essential. Well done, Pevear and Volokhonsky! I might have cleared one book out of the TBR queue by finishing this, but I also just added two more because now I’m deeply curious about their treatment of the Dostoyevsky I’ve already read.

But man oh man, as far as a story goes this was a confounding bummer for me, which is why it made me feel like an idiot. I am bad at subtext even in the best of times; with novels of a certain age it’s all but impossible. I would never have guessed at Totsky’s sexual exploitation of Nastasya Filippovna if I weren’t reading summaries of the book as I finished each part.

And while I appreciate the larger point, or the thought, or motivation, or whatever behind the book—what happens when you take an Actually Good person and throw them into real society?—the society in question felt populated by flat characters who were either extreme melodramatic stereotypes or bland interchangeable nobodies, making their response to pure angelic precious baby Myshkin not particularly interesting. In a lot of ways The Idiot was the complete opposite of what I remember from Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, with complicated characters presented with nuance and depth, but I read them so long ago that maybe I’m just making that up.

Characters aside, the structure is also a bit loosey-goosey. There are whole pivotal sections that just happen off-screen, off the page, that people only refer to in weird info dumps, like Nastasya Filippovna ping-ponging back and forth between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin. There’s no urgent organizing crisis or imminent threat, no murder to solve (or get away with), just a Jane Austen problem of who gets to marry whom. The one saving grace is that it ends in murder, which is more than you can say for a Jane Austen novel.

Speaking of: it would be great if someone could Wide Sargasso Sea the novel from Nastasya Flippovna’s perspective, and maybe someday someone will. I’d be the first to sign up to read it.

Trois femmes puissantes

After I fell in love with Marie NDiaye through La Vengeance m’appartient, I was thrilled to find out that the Stockholm library also had Trois femmes puissantes. In French, Swedish, and English to boot!

I racked up a late fee in excess of SEK 200 in order to really suck the marrow out of this one, though there were long periods where I just didn’t have the time or the mental capacity to engage with French. My insistence on reading sections in French, then Swedish (Ragna Essén, translator), then English (John Fletcher, translator), then French again means that the 230-odd pages ballooned into nearly 1,000 pages. I forgive myself! Even if this very nearly tanked my French reading goals for 2024!

Trois femmes puissantes is a collection of character sketches of three women whose lives are (possibly?) loosely intertwined. First we have Norah, a successful lawyer who has returned to her father in Senegal on an urgent matter—mounting the legal defense of her beloved brother, who stands accused of killing his stepmother with whom he’d been having an affair. Then we have Fanta, though her story is told through the perspective of Rudi, her French husband. We meet the couple destitute in France, several years after being forced to leave Senegal. Finally we have Khady Demba, a young Senegalese widow who finds herself forced to emigrate to Europe.

The thematic elements of parent-child relationships and the ripple effects of toxic masculinity connect all three stories, though there are hints or more explicit material links as well. We actually first meet Khady in Norah’s story, as a domestic worker in her father’s house. Norah’s father acquired and then lost a substantial amount of wealth through the ownership of a tourist village in Dakar—one that Rudi’s father may or may not have been engaged in constructing. (NDiaye doesn’t make it clear either way; I decided to read it that way because it gives a nice symmetry and mutuality to all the relationships among the women.) And finally, we learn that Fanta is a distant relation of Khady, and it’s the prospect of Fanta’s imagined wealth in France that sets Khady on the road to Europe.

Like in La Vengeance m’appartient, NDiaye leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Norah’s and Fanta’s stories end fairly inconclusively: we don’t know the outcome of Norah’s trial, we don’t know whether Rudi’s epiphany will materially change the quality of Fanta’s life. Only Khady’s story ends with a clear, decisive outcome. All three stories were fantastic; Norah’s was my favorite, because I found Norah’s ambiguous relationship with her father so compelling, but the way NDiaye builds tension and suspense in the other two is just superb.

However, once again I have to note that I was annoyed by the English translation. At this point, maybe I just have to admit defeat when it comes to French. I didn’t like the English translation of La Vengeance m’appartient, either, but that was a different translator (Jordan Stump). If two different translators both produce fairly similar translations of the same author, then I’m willing to admit that the problem is me. I’m by no means fluent in French; I don’t have an inner ear attuned enough to judge French prose for being clunky, or old-fashioned, or exceptionally beautiful. It’s back to the Pevear and Volokhonsky debate all over again: sometimes the original is just plain awkward.

That said, while Fletcher doesn’t seem to have much of his own commentary out in the world, the little I read in this article by Lily Meyer over on Public Books didn’t necessarily endear him to me. I didn’t care for Stump’s writing style in interviews, either, but he at least didn’t come across as ambiguous or even hostile to NDiaye’s writing as Fletcher does here. And I’ll keep throwing myself at the brick walls of NDiaye’s writing because whatever my level of competence in French may be, there is something in her writing that I find magnetic and spooky.

Reading Goals for 2025

Meet the new year, same as the old year. My reading goals for 2025 are basically the same as for 2024:

At least 48 books, of which:
at least 4 are in French, and
at least 25% are in Swedish
at least 12 are non-fiction
at least 10 have been in my library for over a year*
at least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2025)
at least half are by women or enby authors
at least 10% are by Black authors
at least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2025)

For my own reference, the last book I added to my TBR before January 1, 2025 was Où on va, papa ?

*I revised this one after I didn’t quite meet it last year. Shifting goalposts so I don’t have to own up to failure? Yup!

My thinking behind these goals hasn’t really changed since I posted about them last year, so I’ll just link to the blog post instead of repeating myself.

Ormens väg på hälleberget

This was another move in my last-ditch effort to reach my yearly “books I’ve owned for over a year” goal. I doubt I’ll reach twelve (two more by the end of the year? unlikely), but reaching ten is good enough for me. That’s a nice round number.

Ormens väg på hälleberget has a whole cultural cachet that I was unaware of when my mother-in-law gave me a copy. I had no idea about the movie, about Torgny Lindgren, about anything. I put off reading it for years because I knew it would probably be bleak and unrelenting. Not only judging by the blurb on the back of the book but by the fact that my mother-in-law has a taste for the bleak and unrelenting. I think the same mechanism that allows David Lynch to be a relatively normal—even pleasant and cheerful—person while making incredibly disturbing movies is at play in her personality, too.

No surprise, Ormens väg på hälleberget is indeed bleak and unrelenting! But it was also good that I put off reading it for so long, because the novel is written almost entirely in a nineteenth century dialect that would have been incomprehensible to me when I first received it nine or ten years ago.

The story follows Johan Johansson, or often just Jani, as he bears witness to the exploitation of his mother, his sister, and eventually his wife under the insatiable lust of the local merchant family, first the patriarch Ol Karlsa and then his son Karl Orsa. It would be easy for this kind of story to descend into overwrought melodrama, but Jani is so disassociated from what’s happening around him that the tone stays firmly tragic.

Beyond that I don’t think Lindgren needs a review from me. Ormens väg på halleberget is a modern classic, Lindgren was a member of the Swedish Academy, who am I to have anything interesting to say about his work. But if anyone is in the mood for something bleak and unrelenting, it’s available in English as The Way of the Serpent.

Merry Christmas!

Night Train

One of the great things about my annual “read a book I’ve owned for over a year” goal is that it’s a fantastic way to trick myself into doing something I want to do but have put off because I don’t believe that I deserve nice things or fun or whatever else.

Hell yeah, Puritanical background radiation!

Suddenly this slim collection of Dutch flash fiction by A. L. Snijders went from “lovely gift from a friend that I haven’t yet earned the right to enjoy” to “necessary step in completing this arbitrary goal I set for myself.” Snijders’ zeer korte verhalen (“very short stories,” usually abbreviated to zkv) were also just the thing my melted brain needed. According to the people who count these things, most of the stories in this collection are no longer than 300 words. One paragraph, maybe two; rarely longer than one of the (small) pages of this paperback edition. Their brevity, their focus on nature, the element of the unexpected that permeates so many of them all make for a very ready comparison to haiku and I’m not sure why this doesn’t come up more often in descriptions of his work. Snijders wrote thousands of zkvs over the course of his life; Night Train has collected maybe 90 or so. If you want a taste, the translator John Irons has a few up on his blog. I’ll link to one that I’m pretty sure wasn’t in Night Train: “Barefoot.”

The other half of Night Train is the translator’s foreword? introduction? by the peerless Lydia Davis. It’s a bit like reading her translation diary, if she keeps one: detailing her thought process behind translating this or that word or expression, noting successes as well as failures. It occurs to me now that I would love for her to translate Marie NDiaye, just for comparison’s sake. At the very least, I would love to read her review of it.

The Dragon’s Village

Numbers are hard. I realized sometime in November that I had miscounted my progress in my “ten books I already own” goal and began scouring my shelves for something short that I could knock out.

Enter the dragon. Or technically: YuanTsung Chen’s The Dragon’s Village.

This is yet another stop on the “selections of bookstores” past tour: I picked it up from What The Book? in Seoul in its glory days, at the airy and well-lit second-floor location overlooking Itaewon-ro. Pour one out. Press F to pay respects.

An image of What The Book's old storefront on Itaewon-ro.
From Derek Versus Lonely Planet

In my mind’s eye, I can still see the shelf where I picked it up, and I can remember that my decision to buy it was because I knew nothing about Chinese history generally, recent or otherwise, and that reading about the land reform and the Great Leap Forward seemed like it would be a good self-improvement project.

It just took a while!

The Dragon’s Village languished unread in my library for over a decade. I started a couple times but couldn’t get into it. Now with my arbitrary deadline looming, I got to work and pushed through my initial resistance to finish the book.

The setting is 1949 China. The 17-year-old narrator, Guan Ling-ling, joins a revolutionary theater group and is sent to the remote village of Longxiang in northwest China to help carry out the land reform. The Dragon’s Village follows her trials and tribulations as she works alongside party cadres and sympathetic villagers to establish what they hope will be a better, more just, more equitable world. Chen frankly describes the misery of peasant life and the bleakness of the landscape, setting the context for why—at least in certain regions—the promise of land and wealth redistribution could gain the foothold it did. She also bluntly chronicles the obstacles and setbacks she and the other party cadres face, and equally sets the context for why the redistribution plans didn’t gain even more of a foothold. Through the novel we become witness to a pivotal moment in time, full of potential, when things might still have been otherwise but yet were not. It ends before anything has truly been settled, on a note of optimism and hope that still carries the weight of historical inevitably, as Ling-ling is speaking to an elderly and utterly destitute village woman:

“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It’s time.”

Chen’s style is hard to enjoy for its own sake, and even when I was deep into the story I was reading on despite the prose, not because of it; at best it didn’t get in the way. As far as I can tell, Chen wrote the novel in English, so there’s not a matter of translation at play here (officially, anyway). The phrase I kept thinking of to describe her style was “flat affect,” where the emotional tenor is always subdued almost the point of nonexistence. The other thing that put me off at first, but gets better as the novel progresses (mostly because people just talk less) is the tendency for characters to infodump during dialogue in a way that doesn’t sound like how anyone would actually talk.

Chen is very clear that this is a novel that draws from real life. “The story is fiction, but it is true,” is how she describes it in the foreword: a roman à clef. How real are the peasants we read about? How have their stories been refined, joined together, teased apart to become the people that Ling-ling meets? While the specific character we read about known as “the virgin widow” might not have a one-to-one correspondence with a single person who lived and died on this earth, the circumstances of her life were no doubt real for countless women. As an amalgamation of their biographies, the fictional virgin widow becomes true.

Or, maybe, in this case Chen drew on one very specific person she met in her land reform experience. Who knows!

This kind of blurred line, or overlap, between fiction and true didn’t bother me as much as it did in, say, Ali Smith’s Summer. Actually, it didn’t bother me at all. The Dragon’s Village is a novel but it reads more like a documentary or a diary of historical experiences and events, while Summer is a fictional plot specifically crafted to deliver a rhetorical (dare I say political?) point. “Based on a true story” is a lot easier to swallow if what follows at least gives the appearance of neutral documentation rather than rhetorical posturing.

(The more I reflect on Summer, it seems like the less I like it. Ouch.)

Of course, as an account of one of the major global political events of the twentieth century The Dragon’s Village can’t really be read non-politically. I don’t know the background to the novel’s publication, or the waters Chen had to navigate to get it published, but I have to assume it was tricky. Ling-ling is presented as an idealist who believes in the revolution and who wants to help the people she sees living in abject poverty, but she also clearly distances herself from the extremes of Maoist cult of personality. At one point she is distressed to see that her elderly hostess Da Niang has replaced an image of the kitchen god on the wall with an image of Chairman Mao. Not because Ling-ling has any allegiance to the folk traditions encompassing the kitchen god—she considers them all superstitions—but because she is wary of what the single-minded adulation of Chairman Mao might lead to.

Zao Jun - The Kitchen God
I went and Googled “Chinese kitchen god” so you don’t have to.

The story is fiction, but it is true. Does this moment in the book reflect an exchange or insight Chen had in the moment? Was it a flourish she was encouraged to add to a novel that might otherwise land as not hostile enough to Maoism?

Chen’s other books also seem to be largely autobiographical (The Secret Listener and Return to the Middle Kingdom), and with The Secret Listener (published in 2021!) the criticism leveraged against her seems to be based in this blending of fact and fiction. I want to have something intelligent to say here about who is criticizing her for what and what any given audience expects out of an account of Maoist China but I’m fresh out of brain. An interview with the New York Times only vaguely mentions that it’s men calling her a “fabulist,” but no names or further details are given, and I’m too tired to research. As it stands, for me The Dragon’s Village is a valuable primary-ish source for a very singular moment in history. When I decided to really sit down and finish the book, I assumed I would toss it on the giveaway pile afterwards. But there is something about it that I want to keep in my library. Warning? Reminder? Enigma?

All three?