Filosofins tröst

Somehow I earned a BA in philosophy without ever reading Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Now I am ignorant no more!

A free copy of the English translation by H. R. James is available through Project Gutenberg, but I opted for a newer Swedish translation by Bertil Cavallin (1987) that was available from the Stockholm University library. To start I kept the Gutenberg copy open on my phone while reading the Swedish, just as a handy reference if something was unclear, but quickly gave up on that. Scrolling through my phone screen is never an easy or intuitive process, and the James translation is over 200 years old: not a combination that makes for easy cross-checking.

As far as philosophical classics go, Filosofins tröst is a short and accessible one. Maybe staring down your execution—in one of the most literal cases of a “deadline” known to history—makes you forgo the piddling little details of endlessly classifying objects, refining a logic system, or pondering the constituent elements of the world and instead keeps your focus on the big questions: how can evil exist? why are the wicked so often successful and the good so often punished? is there free will?

The answers Boethius poses through the mouth of Philosophy, here personified by a woman clad in heavily symbolic garb, aren’t the most convincing if you’re not already sympathetic to Christian apologetics. For me the interest was more in tracing philosophical and theological influences in the chain of thinkers before and after Boethius. Plato’s forms and what seems a very Stoic approach to Fortune are very apparent throughout; meanwhile the entirety of Book V puts forward an argument for free will that John Milton seems to echo in Book III of Paradise Lost: “if I foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault…”

This Swedish edition from Bokförlaget Faethon comes with commentary and a foreword by the translator as well as a new afterword from Johan Sehlberg. Much of that content was helpful for situating Boethius in a larger context, with notes from Cavallin ranging from clarifying historical contexts and references or elucidating metrical forms to drawing comparisons with later thinkers (mostly my homeboy Kant). If that Swedish commentary is inaccessible to you, I also found The History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps) podcast to be a big help as well. Episode 118 discusses Boethius generally, while episode 119 is an interview with John Marenbon to dig further into some of the arguments in The Consolation.

Three Apples Fell From the Sky

My original objective when I was at the library to pick up Save Me the Waltz was Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky. It was on my TBR because a (long) past issue of Karavan featured a favorable review, and it was the first book from my TBR that was available at a nearby library while I was in between appointments.

The story centers on the Armenian village of Maran, ravaged by war and natural disaster. The youngest resident is the 58-year-old Anatolia, whose deathbed preparations are the opening action of the book. Naturally, of course, she doesn’t die. Instead she is at the center of a series of events that have the potential to revitalize Maran; our entrance point into a multifaceted history of the village.

Abgaryan is an accomplished novelist with several works out by now, but Three Apples is the one with the most accolades: the English PEN Translates award, the Yasnaya Polyana Award in Russia. Reviews call it “a balm for the soul,” “an enchanting fable,” “an absolute joy,” or “a tender and quirky tale.” Lord knows I could have used a bit of feel-good reading when I picked it up!

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Maybe I’m too cynical for “quirky,” I don’t know, but it’s hard to feel rejuvenated or inspired by anything in the magical realism genre. The last I checked, I don’t have a totemic white peacock shielding me from harm. Being unimpressed with this book feels a bit like kicking puppies—though unlike Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, I didn’t actively dislike Three Apples. I just wasn’t especially charmed by it.

I should note, however, that the book did have one high point for me: food. The book doesn’t skimp on details about various regional foods and desserts, and everything sounds amazing. Perhaps some of this is an artifact of translation (and credit to translator Lisa C. Hayden, the language is beautiful), but given this is a novel about the Armenian countryside written in Russian for a largely not-Armenian audience, I’d be willing to bet that most of the flavor descriptions and explanations were in the original as well. Time to see if there are any Armenian restaurants in Stockholm!

Save Me the Waltz

A series of random events that began with my dad catching COVID on a cruise last year led to me standing in the English section of the library at Medborgarplatsen (can’t get used to calling it the Tranströmer library yet) on a Monday afternoon and noticing Zelda Fitzgerald’s name on one of the spines. Of course I knew who she was, but I didn’t really have any awareness of her as a writer—plus I happen to find her husband’s work more or less insufferable.

Plenty of interesting women have insufferable husbands, however, so I figured it would be only fair to give Zelda her due outside of Scott’s reputation. Unfortunately, even the relatively recent Vintage Classics edition from 2001 still puts Save Me the Waltz squarely under the shadow of Scott:

One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.

Is it even possible to talk about Save Me the Waltz without centering F. Scott Fitzgerald? Impossible to say.

Save Me the Waltz is deemed a largely autobiographical novel about Zelda Sayre’s childhood, marriage, and crushed ballerina aspirations. In that sense the book is pretty easy to summarize: the impulsive, carefree Alabama grows up, courts several different men but marries David, has a daughter, moves to Paris, takes up dance and moves to Naples, then loses first her dance career and then her father within a few months of each other.

Anyone who knows anything about the novel (and more than I did going into it) knows that it was a flop, critically and commercially. As someone who didn’t hate the book, and even liked it better than The Great Gatsby, it’s hard to know what to make of this response. It’s hard for me, nearly a hundred years later, to see what’s wrong with Save Me the Waltz that isn’t wrong with something like The Great Gatsby. Alabama isn’t a “likeable” protagonist (absentee mother numero uno), but that was hardly the same concern for novels in the 30s as it is now; besides, I’d argue that Gatsby is full of psychopaths. The entire second half captures in a taut, subtle way the frustrations that come when you have a wildly famous and successful artist for a spouse, and the obsession to prove yourself independently of their notoriety. The prose is flowery sometimes, but never so much that it’s not fun as well. I think the last sentence is an absolute banger, for example:

They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living-room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.

Thus the temptation to lean hard in the other direction and hail it as an overlooked and unfairly dismissed classic; to name Zelda an artistic genius who never got a fair shake. Is that so? The truth is I can’t tell and that’s deeply unsettling. It’s the inverse reaction, in a way, to Tropic of Cancer or Ulysses: instead of the fear that I would be unable to recognize greatness in a manuscript, the fear that I would be unable to recognize mediocrity.

Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

I don’t remember how I came across Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, but I remember that it took me the better part of a year to read it. This was largely a problem of format, since my copy was an ebook gifted to me by a friend. If an ebook isn’t a library loan or a book club read, then it is doomed to take forever because I’ll treat it as a backup book to pull out in desperate times rather than an active project with a looming deadline.

Burnout was published in early 2024, so Proctor is addressing very recent political events; she began writing it during the COVID lockdowns in response to the electoral defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The book obviously went to press before Trump’s re-election, however, and I wonder how different the book would (or wouldn’t) be if she had started writing in 2024 rather than 2020.

To quote directly from the back-of-the-book summary from publisher Verso:

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.

…

Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward – neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organise at once, and to do both without compromise.

Perhaps it’s my own inattentive, piecemeal reading that’s to blame here, but having finished the book I’m not sure I can articulate “how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.” Nor can I really describe the different way forward that Proctor is offering, beyond “quashing the individual for the sake of the movement doesn’t work.” Maybe my brain is simply too melted from easily digestible pop science and self-help books with punchy, pithy bulleted lists to grasp the more complicated or ambiguous solutions she raises.

Even if my brain is fully melted, the historical scope of Burnout still made it a rewarding read for me. Proctor covers a broad swathe of leftist organizing history through eight discrete concepts: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. Each concept is illustrated by specific historical movements or moments, such as exiled Communards as a framework for looking at nostalgia. Reading it felt like catching up on years and years of history that I should have already known about. Now that I have the history in place, I can give it a more careful re-read and come away with a better understanding of the lessons Proctor believes we can learn.

Döden och pingvinen

Nothing like book clubs for finding new books and keeping you on track for reading goals!

Andrey Kurkov’s Döden och pingvinen (Death and the Penguin) was the pick for my WhatsApp book club, a motley international crew put together by an American online acquaintance currently residing in Türkiye. She also happens to have a background in Russian literature, so between her own history and the diversity of geographies in the group, the selection ends up being pretty eclectic.

Döden och pingvinen is a satire and a farce, and was generally a fun relief from other books I had on the go at the same time (e.g. a revisit of Rien où poser sa tête, which deserves to be required reading in the face of ongoing ICE raids in the US). Viktor is a struggling writer in post Soviet Kyiv who suddenly finds himself with a new job: writing obituaries for still-living people of note. He also happens to own an emperor penguin named Misha. These two factors bring a whirlwind of new people into his life, but of course things quickly spiral out of control and Viktor eventually finds himself in the crosshairs.

A lot of the satire probably missed me since I’m not intimately familiar with the post-Soviet politics of Ukraine in the mid-90s. That knowledge might have provided some structure to the story; as it was, most of the time the story revolves around things just happening to Viktor. This works fine as satire—when absurd things happen to a straight-laced protagonist, there’s still narrative satisfaction to be had—but in the last act of the story, the satire takes a backseat to actual pathos. People have died (or are at least presumed dead), Viktor’s life is in danger, and an aura of menace hangs over his newly-found loved ones. In that kind of situation, the protagonist’s lack of action becomes more frustrating. There are also events in the first part of the book that have a foreshadowing aura, where you expect they will be part of a coming plot twist or complication, but nothing ever comes of them. When Döden och pingvinen is straight comedy, it’s fantastic, but when it starts to dip into spy thriller territory it gets slightly confused and deflating. The ending, too, is much more of a downer than the first several chapters would suggest. Black humor is definitely a thing, absolutely, but for me it wasn’t quite the same. I don’t want to get too into the weeds with that, though, because I consider it a spoiler.

It’s also not worth noting except in passing my deep, world-weary sigh at Viktor’s love interest. Another man approaching 40 who gets a “barely legal” ingenue dumped in his lap, as was the style at the time.

Most of us were in agreement that the book started off strong but that by the end we were the most concerned about what would happen with Misha the penguin. Good news for us, Kurkov wrote a sequel!

Tordyveln flyger i skymningen

I once heard someone describe the experience of relocating to another country as “having a childhood that is now totally irrelevant.” The flip side of that coin is that you’re constantly playing catch-up with the childhood that most of the people around you share. Maria Gripe was part of that cultural catch-up for me. I’d never heard of her before I moved here, but weirdly enough no one mentioned her either. I only added her to my TBR list after a profile of her in a past issue of Historiskan, and when I brought home Tordyveln flyger i skymningen (“The Dor Beetle Flies at Dusk”) my partner was pleasantly surprised.

“I loved that one as a kid!”

Not enough to mention it to me, I guess?

Other books by Maria Gripe have come out in English but, as far as I can tell, this one hasn’t. Neither has the radio drama, and the new miniseries from SVT only has Swedish subtitles. Once again, I’m writing a book report in English about a book that’s not available to English readers.

One summer, three children in a fictional Småland village—siblings Annika and Jonas, and their friend David—discover a hidden cache of letters at the abandoned Selanderska house. With that a two-hundred-year-old history is uncovered that includes ancient Egyptian statues, curses, Carl Linneaus, unhappy love affairs, and psychic plants. There are discoveries and disappointments along the way, but in the end they come to a quiet but satisfying conclusion.

All of that would have been my jam as a tween, so it was a fantastic bit of escapism for me, a throwback to favorites like The Dark is Rising and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The only hiccup for me was the writing style: Gripe favors short, slightly choppy sentences with a profusion of exclamation marks, to the point where Child Me might have felt a bit condescended to. I felt the same way about books for children that didn’t use contractions, for example.

On a more positive note, much of the story is advanced through conversations and dialogue, and while that can get tiresome when poorly handled, in this instance it works. Tordyveln was originally conceived as a radio drama, after all, so that structure makes perfect sense. As an adult, and reading in a foreign language, I was also particularly interested in seeing how Swedish has changed over time. This wasn’t limited to specific words or slang, which of course cropped up—norms of etiquette were also different. Our protagonists soon enlist the help of the village priest*, and they always refer to him in the third person when speaking directly to him (“Vill farbror ha….?”). I don’t think that would be the case today, and I was a bit surprised to see it in something as recent as this.

And even if the language sometimes felt a bit oversimplified to me, an adult reading this middle grade fantasy novel, Gripe (and her co-creator, Kay Pollak) didn’t shy away from asking their readers to reflect on some pretty heady material. The book opens right away with a meditation on coincidences and chance and destiny; then, as more about Emilie and Andreas’s love story unfolds, Annika and David dig into surprisingly nuanced thoughts about feminism and gender roles in the 1700s. In a summary like this, I realize that sounds like it would come off as a bit precocious and moralizing, but in the story their commentary sounds like any conversation I could have had with a friend when I was sixteen. These are not the insufferable teenagers of a John Green novel.

Cute, cozy, but not at all cloying. A nice bit of new nostalgia for me.

Postscript: I pressganged my sambo into watching the new SVT miniseries with me. Later we found a statement from Gripe about how she was worried that a TV adaptation would strip the story of all of its more thoughtful, philosophical elements. Turns out she was right. I’ll close with a quote  from Pastor Lindroth near the end of the book that will sit in my head for a long time:

Och när jag nu tänker närmare på saken här, så tycker jag nog att ingen kan ta på sitt ansvar att döma sin egen tid. Det kallar jag högmod…Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

*Maybe pastor? I’m not sure which is the right title for clergy in the Swedish church.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind Owl, The World of Yesterday, The New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.

It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.

Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.

Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.

Brave New World

This was another book club pick, this time for a group that usually focuses on philosophy. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it, since this is a group I appreciate for filling in the gaps in my philosophy education rather than my literary reading, but Brave New World was also one of those Great Classics that had passed me by, the rare book that I remember giving up on, so I was still game.

Well, at least I finished it this time around. Some ninety years after publication and I struggle with understanding why it persists as a Great Classic. Brave New World suffers from the kind of aged-like-milk retrofuturism that consigns other science fiction to the dustbin of history; I’m feeling a bit punchy today so I’ll make the bold claim that Huxley’s continued commentary and sequels, as well as his overall literary reputation, probably helped Brave New World stick better in the public consciousness than your typical pulp magazine story. The novel starts with a load of technobabble infodumping at the hatchery that would have been right at home in an issue of Amazing Stories or Weird Tales, and my eyes glazed over as quickly as they had on my first attempt some twenty-odd years ago. Most of the satirical bits, such as the all the Ford jokes, have also lost their shine in the intervening years.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were the parts that Huxley didn’t spend that much time on: the psychic, psychological cost of the culture clashes, like between Linda and the Savage Reservation community, or John and the World State. They both suffer miserable fates, but that narrative fate  is the shallowest, laziest commentary Huxley could have possibly provided. Why, for example, is John so unmoored by his attraction to Lenina? Sure, the differences in the sexual norms they’re used to would naturally lead to misunderstandings or incompatibilities—John even articulates that when he rejects her point-blank offer, saying he wants to do or accomplish something to deserve her first. Sure, that’s understandable, even if it’s completely dismissive of what the woman in this situation thinks. But while the violent outburst that follows is a fairly realistic, if extreme, depiction of the mixed and unprocessed emotions a lot of (straight) men have about sex and the women they’re sexually attracted to, Huxley doesn’t really dig any deeper into John’s psychology than that. To a modern reader (or, to this modern reader), John’s reaction to Lenina isn’t anything spontaneous that would arise in nature: it’s one that’s a result of repressive ideas about sex and gender norms. But because Brave New World isn’t supposed to be a critique or a satire of the society John grew up in, it’s hard to argue that Huxley recognizes that. It sure seems like for Huxley the normal state of sexual relations is one where men must constantly strive and impress naturally disinterested, picky women.

The only character who gets any interesting psychological treatment is Bernard. His suffering and marginalization because of his outsider status don’t automatically turn him into a hero, which is too often the case in a lot of stories. Being slightly outside the order of things has given him something a moral standard, and a greater insight into (and cynicism about) the whole World State system, but when it comes to his actions Bernard is just as often a coward or a clout-chaser as he is an upstanding moral person. In a story full of cardboard cutouts, Bernard is the only actual person.

Brave New World is one of the most notorious of banned books, and as someone who ardently believes in not banning books, I feel a bit guilty about not liking it more. Should it be banned? Of course not. But not every banned book is worth reading, either.

The New York Trilogy

Here’s another left field book, a pick for a book club on Meetup. I’d never heard of The New York Trilogy before, or even Paul Auster. There’s a whole slew of literature from the 80s and 90s that were too new to be part of curricula but too old to be topical by the time I was reading Big Serious Grown-Up Book, and The New York Trilogy falls neatly into that category.

It’s unclear to me whether the now-accepted convention of publishing all three novels (novellas, really) as one collection is according to Auster’s own wishes or a publishing company decision, but I have to say I can’t imagine reading any one of these stories in isolation, or what it would have been like to read the first and then have to wait a year to read the next two. Not because the first story ends on a cliffhanger that gets resolved in the sequels, but because it must have felt incomplete. (Or maybe I’m only saying that because I only know it as one chapter in a larger book.)

The New York Trilogy consists of three novellas: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. All three have the same, or nearly the same, noir-adjacent plot point:* the protagonist is induced into tailing a mark for some shadowy purpose. In City of Glass it’s a mystery writer who is mistaken for a private investigator; in Ghosts it’s an actual private detective we only know as “Blue” who is paid to follow “Black” in a world with only colors for names; in The Locked Room a frustrated writer finds himself obligated to track down his missing-presumed-dead friend who has become a posthumous literary success, whose widow he has now married and whose son he is now raising.

*Paul Auster on LitHub: “… it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.” Sorry, Paul.

Mistaken identities, self-referentiality, literary references, meditations on language and madness and identity permeate all three books. At the moment of writing I’m still waiting for my book club to meet to discuss it, but as it currently stands I’m not sure I got the point, or if there even was a point, but I still liked the ride.

Journey to Russia

If I had been a better planner, I would have made an effort to read a Croatian author or two before spending a week and a half in Zagreb. Instead, I hustled from one store to the other in search of English translations of Croatian. That’s one  way to spend a vacation, I suppose!

But in the end I triumphed. One of the books I came away with was Miroslav Krleža‘s essay collection Journey to Russia, translated by Will Firth. I will fully admit that even though I liked it, I might not have given the book the full attention it deserved. For one, I read a goodly portion of this book under the influence of a not insubstantial amount of beer. For another, midway through I became gripped by the fantastic ambition to finish it and mail it to a book friend before my flight home. It’s exactly the kind of thing they would love and it would be less weight for me to schlep around! Everybody wins! The only problem with this brilliant plan was that I no longer had their address saved on my phone, which I didn’t realize until I got to the last chapter. Oops.

Journey to Russia is an account of Krleža’s…journey to Russia…in the mid 1920s. What’s Communism going to be like? What’s the Soviet Union going to be like? Hard to say, but for Krleža it’s the future! His optimism in that matter is both endearing and sad—aged like milk, as the expression goes.  But there’s a lot in the collection that’s still a delight to read today. “Entering Moscow” is a fantastic reflection on the power of memory as well as an evocative depiction of a Moscow from another era. (I guess? Haven’t been to Moscow myself to compare…) Other moments came as a bit of a restorative balm, so to speak, with Krleža critiquing the racism of the capitalist imperialist project a full decade before Saint-Exupèry’s casual French disdain for Bedouins and “the Orient.” Krleža also has an eye for portraying characters with nuance and insight, for example his account of an awkward dinner party hosted by once-great but now dispossessed aristocrats with guests including a dimwitted German businessman, simple laborers, Party cadres, and Krleža himself.

I’m sure for someone more schooled in Soviet history or central European literature than me, Krleža’s commentary on contemporary theater and literature will carry vastly more meaning. It’s hard to appreciate dunking on Chekhov when I’ve never read anything by him. Same with unknown-to-me directors at different Moscow theaters. “Leninism on the Streets of Moscow,” meanwhile, made me question my own reading comprehension: at first blush it read to me like sarcastic criticism of the obsession with Lenin and its manifestation in assorted trinkets and gewgaws, but even at the time of writing Krleža was a fervent Leninist. The last chapter, a polemical on imperialism, is a bit hit and miss. Partially my fault (again: the beers), but pages and pages of calculations designed to support the inherent and inevitable triumph of socialism by the end of the century is a struggle even for sober readers. (Every time I re-read Walden, I skip the introductory “Economy” chapter. Sorry, Henry.) On the other hand, the criticisms of capitalism and the relationship between financial institutions and the state ring just as true today as in the 20s. Plus ça change…!

Firth’s translation is only from 2017 and is the first appearance of the text in English. It comes with an introduction from Dragana Obradović that puts the collection in context for English readers who aren’t necessarily familiar with Krleža (like yours truly).

Journey to Russia probably wasn’t the best introduction to Krleža, but it was what was at hand. I still liked it and I can see how I might better appreciate his fiction.