June 2023 – Koba English

What Money Can’t Buy

What Money Can’t Buy was probably one of the first books I read after I moved to Sweden, and it’s been in my library ever since. Every time my eye passed over the title when looking for something new to read, I tried to remember what the book was about and couldn’t; mostly I just remembered being underwhelmed. I thought about it even more often after I finished Debt: The First 5,000 Years back in January this year and decided this time I would be more diligent about putting down my impressions.

Michael J. Sandel hit the popular philosophy market with the book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? based on a long-running course he had been teaching at Harvard. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets is a follow-up that focuses on how moral judgments and free market practices are entangled, based on an article he wrote for The Atlantic on the same topic.

I think what I found frustrating in 2013 was the way Sandel shrugs and seems to just give up on a providing an answer or at least a clear-cut condemnation. (Except in the case of baseball. That’s a topic where Sandel finds the courage of his convictions.) Most of What Money Can’t Buy consists of lists of things that can be purchased, sorted into five rough categories: queue jumping, incentives (which he often compares to bribes, “the cost of doing business,” or indulgences), relationships, advertising (which he calls “naming rights”) and corporate-originated life insurance and the “life settlement” market. The question for each category is then whether or not these things should be available for purchase. Which instance of queue jumping or advertising is permissible? Which isn’t? What’s the difference between them? Most of the time Sandel doesn’t present a particularly strong opinion either way and just reminds the reader that the two main objections to purchasing certain kinds of things are either based in “unfairness” or “corruption.”

What I found frustrating in 2023 was the lack of context and historical consideration for some of the problems he raises, taking certain problems to just be natural facts of life rather than something that can be addressed or prevented, or that have a specific material history behind them. When highlighting Project Prevention, for example, Sandel glosses over the (very fair) criticism of the project as a form of eugenics and instead credulously rehashes the 1980s moral panic of “crack babies,” even though by the time he was writing in the Atlantic in 2012 the entire phenomenon had been called into question.

Or when discussing carbon offsets and credits, Sandel argues that emitting carbon dioxide is “in itself” a morally neutral act. After all, we all do that every time we breathe! Such an assertion is such a patently facile rhetorical trick that you almost wonder if he’s being facetious. But no, Sandel is seriously attempting to equate the human need to breathe with the act of burning fossil fuels to ship consumer goods from “low-cost” countries to rich nations because you don’t want to pay workers a decent wage or the carbon cost of maintaining the US military apparatus. And even when he goes on to admit that yes, carbon dioxide emissions en masse constitute a serious problem for everyone on this planet, he sidesteps the fact that almost none of the countries and communities that are already bearing the brunt of climate change are the ones actually causing the carbon dioxide emissions in the first place.

Milquetoast moments like these deflate everything Sandel is trying to say, which already feels like an article-length thought padded out to meet the minimum page count for a standalone book. The thesis that market thinking can “crowd out” morals and social norms is a compelling and defensible one, but What Money Can’t Buy ends up being a feeble “could we have a civil discussion about this, guys?” rather than any kind of clarion call to action or bold moral assertion.

Except when it comes to baseball. Sandel’s not afraid to make moral assertions there: Billy Beane definitely ruined baseball.

Becoming Beauvoir

This was actually my second read-through of Becoming Beauvoir. I alluded to it, briefly, in a summary on my vacation reading in Falun from 2021 but it deserves a bit more than a one-sentence summary.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote voluminously about her own life and had already been profiled in several biographies by the time Kate Kirkpatrick sat down to work on Becoming Beauvoir. Is there anything else one more biography could add?

Actually, yes. Kirkpatrick was able to draw on a great deal of previously unpublished or untranslated documentation and correspondence to shed light on relationships and ideas that for whatever reason Beauvoir herself had been less than forthcoming about in her own writing. Kirkpatrick’s stated thesis at the beginning is to rebut what she considers to be ad feminem attacks against Beauvoir: criticisms that boil down to “you’re just an unhappy woman” and “you’re just Sartre’s lapdog.” Thus the focus is on leveraging Beauvoir’s early student diaries and correspondence to show that she was puzzling over the same philosophical issues as Sartre before they ever met, or how she influenced him in these matters. Kirkpatrick also uses later correspondence (some of which not available until 2018) to highlight Beauvoir’s philosophical and ideological criticisms of Sartre and, despite the closeness of their relationship, her erotic and intellectual independence from him.

Kirkpatrick also takes up Beauvoir’s relationships with Bianca Lamblin, Natalie Sorokin, and Olga Kosakiewicz, perhaps as a means of allowing the deceased Beauvoir to respond to the allegations from all three women, pointing out that Beauvoir’s own correspondence indicates that she felt remorse over her (and Sartre’s) treatment of them. It would also seem a pretty glaring omission, all things considered, to not address them. And here we land in one of Beauvoir’s favorite topics: ambiguity. Kirkpatrick doesn’t give much space to the allegations from Lamblin, Sorokin, and Kosakiewicz. Is it because this is a biography of Beauvoir, and not them? Is it an attempt to gloss over abuse? How should we read that editorial decision in tandem with the total lack of reference to Beauvoir’s connection to the “Affaire de Versailles”? Then, larger questions: How would we read these relationships if Beauvoir were a man? How much moral commentary and judgment should a biographer provide on their subject?

I don’t know. I find Beauvoir’s ideas and writing compelling, and I’ll continue to engage with her ideas and take the best of them with me. In other words:

We Don’t Know Ourselves

After The Best of Myles made me realize how little I knew about Ireland, Fintan O’Toole was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts to discuss his new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves. I put a hold on it at the library while I was still in the middle of Philosophy in the Flesh, expecting it to take a couple weeks for such a doorstopper to be available, but lo and behold it was ready to take home a couple days later.

In other words, May was an intense month of reading for me!

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 takes an approach to a rather broad topic (twentieth century Irish history) that resembles the one Christle uses in The Crying Book. Like Christle uses her grieving process to lead the reader through historical views on crying, grief, and “hysteria,” O’Toole ties his own life to larger events happening in Ireland at the time: a discussion of his parents’ wedding photo transitions into a brief explainer on Irish city planning in the 50s, an early job at a department store segues into Ireland’s economy in the 90s. Unlike Christle, however, O’Toole structures his personal history in discrete, concrete sections: each chapter covers a specific topic and focuses, more or less, on a single year. (The departure point is 1958, the year he was born.) He also returns to the idea of “unknown knowns”: the open secrets in Irish culture, at the local as well as national level, that shaped the arc of many of the events covered in the book. So many things, according to O’Toole, happened in plain sight but nonetheless were never bluntly stated in polite conversation. Hence the title of the book.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is a doorstopper of a book but it’s breezy reading that goes fast. Usually in books with this kind of scope I get lost in all of the names, but recurring figures are contextualized and grounded well enough that I had no problem keeping track of all of the threads. Will I remember everything I read? Of course not. Do I have a better context and bird’s eye view of contemporary Ireland and how it’s situated in European politics? Definitely.

I still wouldn’t count on me to know the answers to any pub quiz questions, though.

Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination

My renewed diligence in reading the physical books I already own has had the unintended consequence of vastly increasing my short story consumption. Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination is the third such anthology I’ve read this year, and might be the last.

This one was a collection that I picked up in my high school thrifting adventures, though I can’t remember if I bought it myself or if my best friend and partner in crime bought it for me on one of our trips out. Regardless, even though I kept putting off reading it, at the same time sentimental value kept me from culling it. (I think it has a companion purchased at the same store, a collection of Russian fiction, but it’s not here. Not sure if I got rid of it, or if it’s still at my parents’ home owing to a delicate physical condition that I wouldn’t trust to international shipping.)

Also, please appreciate that cover art, which has absolutely nothing to do with any of the stories inside.

This anthology was compiled by Philip Van Doren Stern, an academic and Civil War expert remembered today as the author of the short story that went on to become It’s A Wonderful Life. While Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination is maybe around twenty years newer than the other collections I’ve been carting around in my library, in his introduction Van Doren Stern expresses the same uneasy relationship with pulp magazines as Schweikert: those stories are trashy but these stories are high art.

However, since this collection specifically focuses on the fantastic—fantasy, science fiction, horror, and magical realism before the genres had been entirely codefied—Van Doren Stern does have some interesting thoughts about how the fantastic can be used as a means of elevating a story and highlighting the worries and dreams we all have.

Out of the three short story collections I’ve read for this project (the third was another one of my Dede’s but for whatever reason I didn’t note it here?), this one had the best killer/filler ratio. Out of the twenty-one stories in the collection, only three or four were really disappointing. Lord Dunsany‘s “Our Distant Cousins,” already dated by the year of anthologizing (1943), is too old-fashioned to really have any appeal left in the year of Our Lord 2023; Walter de la Mare‘s “All Hallows” is fantastic gothic atmosphere but without much resolution; the same could be said about A. E. Coppard‘s “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” though it’s comic rather than gothic; and the Poe story in the collection (“William Wilson”) doesn’t have the visceral appeal of The Greatest Hits.

In contrast, there were too many really great stories to name them all in a blog post without quickly becoming tedious. Instead, I will limit myself to naming Stella Benson‘s “The Man Who Missed the ‘Bus” as the most unsettling story in the collection and point out that the entire collection is available to borrow at Archive.org.

Den högsta kasten

This was the second book for the local library’s newly established book circle. (The first being Educated.)

It was also the first time I found myself formulating my responses to a book in Swedish rather than in English, which I think is because Den högsta kasten is such a niche Swedish (and Stockholm) interest. I vented a lot of spleen about it in Swedish but trying to talk about the book in English just leaves me feeling indifferent. Maybe because an English review is the most pointless thing I can imagine. Is there anyone who would simultaneously be interested in Sweden’s culture and arts figures of the mid-90s and unable to read a word of Swedish? Not likely.

Yet onward shall I soldier!

Den högsta kasten is the story of a dissipated year (or less, maybe just a few months) in Carina Rydberg’s life. The book is officially categorized as a novel, as fiction, but all of the people in it are real people and the discussion around Rydberg and the book has always been based on the understanding that it’s not aspiring to be fiction or even a roman à clef, but actually true events. Maybe publishing it as a novel was a way for the publisher to dodge legal liability. Who knows!

My first problem with the book is that its marketing and reputation are entirely misleading. I went in expecting a Dorothy Parker style takedown of rich snobs. Instead, the book pulled a bait-and-switch and made me spend half of the page length with Rydberg in India, which I wouldn’t have minded if she were a gifted travel writer instead of another white European who’s constantly explaining how she’s not like the other tourists, she gets India. When she’s not doing that, she’s locked in a really toxic and unpleasant dynamic with two of her fellow travelers or padding out the lack of content with random childhood memories about beauty and exclusion.

I thought things would improve in the second part, but no. Back in Stockholm and hanging out at PA&Co in Östermalm, Rydberg does not have a particularly keen eye or insightful understanding when it comes to her fellow bar patrons. Instead she latches on to another man, has a few months of some kind of ambiguous connection to him, and then finally declares him a jerk when he refuses to lend her a fair chunk of money. The book ends with Rydberg deciding to turn the whole debacle into a book.

It’s also rich for a book to claim that the “unwanted” would ever be among the regulars at a posh bar in the swank neighborhood of Östermalm alongside all the media movers and shakers, which is exactly how the back text markets itself. It occurs to me that maybe that was an attempt to paint Rydberg as the “unwanted” one, but I highly doubt it.

And finally, the scandal surrounding the book itself seems to have missed the mark when it comes to the content. It seems (based on my cursory reading) that people were clutching their pearls because Rydberg was talking a lot of trash about Important People, how rude, but the only people who really come off as dirtbags here are her lover in India (director Kaizad Gustad) and the lawyer she meets at PA&Co, known only as Rolf or Roffe. Maybe spilling the tea about Rolf’s affair with Harry Byrne’s wife was bad form, but for all I know that was public knowledge before the book came out.

Far more off-putting to me is Rydberg’s complete lack of self-awareness throughout the whole thing. Men treat her like garbage, or at least not like how she wants them to treat her, but she continues to follow after them like a puppy. Are we supposed to understand that there’s a connection between her embarrassments in childhood and her behavior now? Maybe, but in a book that’s otherwise hellbent on interpreting itself for the reader, she refuses to signpost that connection at all. Other times it’s obvious that Rydberg is inferring a whole lot about people’s motivations, mixing it with a heaping helping of wishful thinking and presenting it all as Objective Fact when there’s no way she can know one way or the other. “He was talking so loudly at the bar because he wanted me to hear him, even though we weren’t talking to each other anymore, I just know it.” Rydberg comes off as the most clueless person on earth.

My second problem with Den högsta kasten was that it’s a structurally incoherent book. The two parts have nothing to do with each other. In the second part, Rydberg tries to draw connections between what happened to her in India and the people around her now in Stockholm, but it always feels like either a very naked attempt to foist cohesion on a book that has none or to bully the reader into liking the first part. On more than one occasion she tells us that after hearing about her trip to India, so-and-so tells her, “Wow, what a great story, you should turn it into a novel.”

I wonder how often Rydberg failed to detect the note of sarcasm in someone’s voice.

My third problem is with the content itself. In addition to not living up to its reputation, Den högsta kasten reads to me like a book that could be written by the people in my life who later turned out to be, to put it bluntly, stalkers. Specifically, I’m thinking of two people I knew who, beyond being obsessed with a crush, invented entire relationships out of whole cloth and then villainized the other party for not returning their feelings when faced with undeniable reality. Talking trash about movie directors or broadcasting a couple’s marital troubles for all the world to hear is one thing; ruminating in a thought pattern that could well lead to violence or other drastic consequences is another, and that’s probably what made Den högsta kasten so unappealing for me.