En man som heter Ove

I deeply resent that En man som heter Ove made me cry.

I’m inherently distrustful of media that makes me cry and my first instinct is always to take a step back and pick apart the story to see if it used any gimmicks or cheap tricks to manipulate me. (See, for example, Ali Smith’s Summer.) And while Fredrik Backman did a great job with strategically revealing the significant pieces of Ove’s backstory so that each moment hits with maximum impact, that’s good storytelling, not a cheap trick. Likewise certain story elements could have landed as overly melodramatic if the rest of the book wasn’t more or less farcical.

No, En man… hadn’t cheated to get those tears out of me. So why the resentment?

The book follows a man called Ove (quel surpris) in the weeks after being nudged into early retirement/laid off from his job. A chance accident with a car trailer and his mailbox gets him drawn into the lives of his new neighbors, and then gradually some of his older ones. In the process we flash back to the important episodes of Ove’s life up until that point, none of which I’ll go into detail here because they count as spoilers in my view. It’s not a spoiler, however, to note that the climactic point of conflict in the story is a faceoff between agents of the municipal social service authority on one side and Ove and his neighbors on the other. That’s when I had the thought: I wonder how Backman votes.

By that point in the book, it’s become clear that one of the consistent themes in the challenges Ove has faced in his life is “men in white shirts,” which function very clearly as a stand-in for the state. Which is fine and good; I’ve had my own very personal struggles with Swedish authorities and how they have either failed (from my perspective) to carry out their function or how they have enabled (again, from my perspective) individual bad actors to gatekeep access to resources that are essential for a decent quality of life.

However!

I’ve also had experiences where they (from my perspective) carried out their function, and in doing so furthered the best interests of myself or my loved ones. It has been, on the whole, a mixed bag of personal experiences.

The bag in En man… is not mixed; it’s uniformly pretty bad. Sometimes it’s a kind of bad that seems (sadly) pretty likely or reasonable, but other times it’s a kind of bad that made me raise a metaphorical eyebrow. Was it drawing from a lived experience, or was it drawing uncritically from the rumor mill about state overreach?

The biggest conflict out of all the “men in white shirts” conflicts is where a man in his 60s with pretty profound Alzheimer’s will spend the rest of his days: at home with his wife or institutionalized? For maximum drama, during this scene the Bad State Dude is present with three other assistants to (implicitly) physically overpower the elderly wife who wants to take care of her husband in their home herself. The state has a monopoly on violence, yes, yadda yadda yadda, but the intimidation here is so blatant that I had to wonder: in a real life version of this situation, is this how things would go?

(Contrast this scene with a recent story from Hem och hyra about how elderly individuals currently residing in regular apartments who apply for a spot in senior living facilities are often denied one, including people with severe dementia, Alzheimer’s, or depression. The state isn’t coming to kidnap people out of their homes but is rather refusing to let them move into one that they feel would be much more suitable.)

Backman also includes scenes with the inverse dynamics, so to speak: problems that could potentially be solved through the intervention of a state or municipal authority are instead addressed by individuals. The municipality refuses to build a wheelchair ramp at a school for one of the teachers, or to provide wheelchair adaptations for her kitchen, so Ove builds all of that himself. An abusive husband gets beaten up by Ove and another neighbor, after which the abuser just disappears out of his victim’s life forever, never to return*. After trying and failing to get problem tenants evicted, the same neighbor plants some narcotics on the property and then calls the cops. (I guess you can split that last one either way, since at the end of the day involving the police is a way of involving the state.)

*Rarely how it works out in real life situations of domestic violence!

It’s a bit like re-watching Ghostbusters with an adult’s political understanding and sensibilities: all those scenes with the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency have a tone that’s more than just comedy. Subtext and all of that.

That said, Sweden is not the US. A plot point (or recurring theme) in a novel about the uselessness, incompetence, or even malice, of municipal authorities maybe is less toxic or remarkable here because you don’t have the same years and years of toxic discourse in the culture. I’m not sure how all that works.

Therein lies the resentment, I suppose: the vague feeling that I got judo’d into agreeing with an implicit argument I wouldn’t have agreed with if it were presented more explicitly in something like an essay or opinion piece. That I had maybe fallen for a form of propaganda. The fact that I really liked the book despite myself.

Another contributing factor to the resentment for me is probably also the portrayal of Ove’s fat neighbor, Jimmy. While Ove’s fixation on the size of Jimmy’s body and constant narrative comment on it can be attributed to coming from a perspective character with certain beliefs about the world, it’s the author who chooses to portray Jimmy as constantly either eating or about to eat (and always too much, is the implication). This is presented as incidental comic relief, but it’s not particularly clever or original. None of the other secondary characters—the neighbors Ove ultimately comes to befriend—are reduced to such a flat trope, so Jimmy’s treatment feels out of place.

None of this is to be read like I think Backman has some kind of agenda with En man…, either. I emphatically do not. If he did, then the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good as it is because agendas ruin (most) books. But stories arise out of our beliefs about the world, from the grand to the banal, and there are enough recurring themes in this story that it makes me wonder if I can see the beliefs behind them. There’s even an extent to which I think I would probably agree with him in some of those beliefs. Way before I was ever wondering about Backman’s politics, I had the thought: is this the collective Swedish cultural fantasy? “This” being: wanting a friendly stranger to just land on your doorstep with nearly aggressive kindness and to forcibly include you in a social group.

It’s not at all surprising that En man… struck such a nerve with Swedes. Zakrisson mentions the book by name in Grannskapsrevolutionen and the research that she presents there supports the general background feeling in the novel: that the average person (Swede? Stockholmer?) feels isolated and lonely and disconnected from the people around them. And unlike some of the conflicts with the “white shirts” Ove has throughout the novel, the solution to that problem is maybe only possible at a grassroots, individual level. There’s no municipal authority that can come and declare by fiat that this or that collection of buildings is a community. Individual actors have to decide to say hello, or help change a bike tire, or whatever else. The happy ending of En man… no doubt reflects the world a lot of its readers wished they lived in, where they felt like part of a meaningful social network.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TEDtalk about a  goofy comedy novel that clearly didn’t deserve THIS much critical analysis.

Doktor Glas Daily

One of the few books I have left of my personal library at my parents’ house in the US is a Swedish paperback copy of Doktor Glas. It’s an early testament to my Swedish studies, with penciled notes covering the first page (after which point I gave up taking notes). I flipped through it while I was home, without anything else in Swedish except Min är hämnden—which was of course dependent on how quickly I could get through the French first. As my eyes fell over the opening paragraph, I remembered the email newsletter that I’d heard so much about: Dracula Daily. In case you missed it, web designer Matt Kirkland got the idea to set up a Substack that sends subscribers bite-sized (har har) chunks of Dracula to people via email. Dracula is an epistolary novel, so the episodic format of an email newsletter pretty neatly aligns with the original structure of the novel. On the dates of the letters (or newspaper articles, etc.), the newsletter sends out the corresponding chapter by email. It’s become quite popular. There are memes.

Then I noticed that the date of the first entry in Doktor Glas, June 12, wasn’t too far behind the actual calendar date.

Wouldn’t it be fun to do a version of Dracula Daily with this?

Thus I read Doktor Glas for the third or fourth time, this time in brief extracts, letting the story unfold for me in real time at the same pace as it unfolds for Tyko Glas.

I’d previously done a short walking tour of Stockholm based on the book as well. It was a fantastic idea, but presented through a bloated app that was a bit too gimmicky for the source material and that just about drained all the battery life out of my phone in little over an hour. Maybe one year I’ll combine the two and attempt to be in the right places on the right dates to get my reading done.

I mention all of this because October 7 is the date of the final chapter in Doktor Glas. This year’s reading is now over, and I can say that reading a book in this kind of controlled release format had a surprising effect on the entire experience.

Normally when you read a novel you’re compressing days, months, years of time into a few hours of a reading experience, or quite possibly extending a day or even just one or two hours of events into a reading experience that’s much longer than twenty-four hours. (I defy anyone, for example, to get through all of Ulysses in a single day.) But when you move through the story at the same speed as the character does, it becomes embodied in a very specific way. You have to move through the same stretches of time as them, waiting just as long as they do for something to happen. With the specific combination of Doktor Glas and living in Stockholm, the setting around you cycles through the same seasons that Glas describes. (Climate change reading of Doktor Glas: how do his descriptions of weather in Stockholm from June to September compare to what the equivalent period is like here now?)

On a spookier note, at times the practice took on a spiritual dimension, not dissimilar to what Zoltan describes in “Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text.” There were even moments when it felt like outright bibliomancy. On a day when I felt absolutely terrible, for example, because I felt like I had made a fool out of myself in matters of friendship, Glas addresses the jilted Fru Gregorious: “Du måste komma över det. Du skall se att livet ännu har mycket för dig. Du skall vara stark.” Coincidence or not, there was something comforting about stumbling across those exact words in that precise moment.

The Dracula Daily format is also a fun exercise in patience and delayed gratification in a world where the default habit is to consume an entire book, show, series, whatever as quickly as possible. On the one hand it can make a big important classic less intimidating, but for something as relatively short as Doktor Glas it has the opposite effect, slowing you down and preventing you from reading the whole thing in just a few days. You pay closer attention. If all I have to read today is this paragraph, then I might as well look up this or that word that I can kind of guess at but don’t know for certain. I might as well read the whole section two or three times. Several weeks go by without any entries, building anticipation; other times the next chapter is no longer the inevitable forward momentum of a story but a pleasant surprise that you had nearly forgotten about.

This was a rewarding exercise and I’m grateful to Matt Kirkland for inadvertently giving me the idea. I look forward to applying it to other books.

Karavan: Alla dessa trådar

The theme for issue 2/2024 of Karavan was “text och textil,” which led to an interesting mix of fiction focused on textiles as well as how textiles have functioned as vehicles of meaning and narrative.

This issue’s author interview was with Nicaragua’s Sergio Ramírez, and as a result two more books ended up on my TBR (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea and The Sky Weeps for Me). You don’t usually see commercial genre fiction like mystery thrillers get a lot of discussion space in fancy literature circles (unless they’re Raymond Chandler) so I’m especially curious to see what The Sky Weeps for Me is like. Maybe an exception was made because Ramírez was very clear in the interview that the genre was the best tool he had for conveying political upheaval as he wanted to. Who knows! The other big author feature was a memorial piece on Maryse Condé, who passed away earlier this year. Luckily for me, several of her books are available at the Stockholm library, including a few in the original French.

This issue’s Diary of a Translator feature was from Anna Gustafsson Chen, who is at work on a Swedish translation of Liu Qing’s History Through Words. History is a sprawling novel of political upheaval in 1920s and 1930s Manchuria, so Chen describes her dive into Chinese advertisements, propaganda posters, and the numerous anti-Japanese resistance movements of the time.

The long-form reviews included  a pair of novels from Benjamín Labatut, Shehan Karunatilaka’s extremely hyped and much-lauded The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and a few novels from César Aira. The Labatut review was pretty lukewarm, but I’ve heard a lot about Seven Moons in a lot of different places, so I could be tempted into picking that one up. Aira’s novels were also pretty well reviewed and the one that sounded the most interesting ended up on my TBR. Less a review and more of a news item was a brief piece on the publication of letters between some of the titans of Latin American literature in a collection called Las Cartas del Boom. Interesting to note but currently only available in Spanish, so not much I can do there!

None of the shorter reviews caught my interest, though apparently The Three Body Problem has finally come out in Swedish! (Translated by Anna Gustafsson Chen from the earlier “Diary of a Translator” segment.) The state of science fiction and fantasy published in Swedish, whether originally or in translation, is a bit anemic so it’s encouraging to see huge titles like this get a Swedish release. Less encouraging that it only came out in 2024 (the original was published in 2006; the English translation came out in 2014), but more encouraging again that it’s a translation directly from Mandarin rather than indirectly via the English.

The themed selections took a surprisingly wide and educational tack. The first was a revised and expanded essay from Maria Küchen, originally broadcast on OBS P1, on weaving, stories, and memory: the Andean record-keeping knots known as khipu that we no longer know how to interpret, Malian bógólanfini, the core rope memory that helped send American astronauts to the moon, death shrouds from Windover pond.

The next piece was another author memorial, this time in the form of an interview with author Ericah Gwetai about her late daughter Yvonne Vera, also a writer. Karolina Jeppson visited Gwetai at her home in Zimbabwe to discuss Vera, sewing her own clothing, and the similarities between writing and weaving. Vera’s The Stone Virgins also ended up on my TBR.

The third piece finally delves into literature, with a short story from Karavan favorite Xi Xi, translated into Swedish as “Blusen”: a fantastic monologue from a cotton blouse to its new owner. Karavan features a lot of poetry from Xi Xi that I’ve struggled to enjoy (including this issue), but this little story was a gem and I loved it! Unfortunately, it’s unclear if the collection it was taken from has been translated in its entirety yet, so…that’s all, folks. The final Xi Xi piece in this issue was a collection of teddy bears Xi Xi designed and sewed herself, based on figures out of Chinese history and stories, selected from The Teddy Bear Chronicles.

Back to nonfiction, this time with an essay and artist statement from Marcia Harvey Isaksson. She combines weaving with performance art, and I’m disappointed that I’ve missed some of her most interesting installations.

Some more poetry, this time from Tamer Fathy’s poetry collection Yesterday I Lost A Button. All of the poems are from the perspective of clothing; one of the ones featured in Karavan is available in English: “When Clothes Were Small.”

The next short story was “Mattan,” from Narine Abgarjan, which was so good that I immediately put Abgarjan’s full-length novels on my TBR.

More weaving and multimedia art, this time from Eva Vargö‘s collection of paper weaving. It shouldn’t surprise me that people weave with paper, but there you go. Vargö goes into some detail about the differences in different kinds of paper, and focuses a lot on traditional paper materials from Japan and Korea.

Usually I skip the children’s literature sections, but this time it caught my eye: an interview with Christian Epanya about his latest book, Les rois de la sape, a picture book about sapeurs and La SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes). La sape is a cross between a fashion trend and a social movement originating in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville that has become a part of the larger African diaspora, usually compared to dandyism. It’s even been codefied (somewhat) into, for example, ten commandments of La SAPE.  While I don’t have any particular reason to read the book, the article did send me down a fascinating rabbithole and I learned something new.

The education continued with an article from Tina Ignell on different forms of dying and patterns in textiles, from shibori in Japan and bandhani in West Bengal to grave goods in Peru and neckerchiefs in Mora, Sweden.

The next short story from Irenosen Okojie was a Swedish translation of “Synsepalum” by Birgitta Wallin. I don’t know that I cared for it much, but that might have been a matter of translation, so I’m glad that Minor Literature has the English original up for free for comparison.

The final piece on the textiles theme was an essay by Lars Vargö on costumes in kabuki and noh theater, and how their use reflects the different theatrical styles and traditions.

Solid issue! Too many books! Can’t hug every cat!

Grannskapsrevolution

A vacation is never complete without a book purchase! At my WWOOF host’s recommendation, my roommate and I dropped in to shop at the varuhall in Orsa while he went to pick up the sailboat for winter storage. The artisanal and tourist goods on display included copies of Grannskapsrevolution; if memory serves there was a sign about how it was a book from a local author. The topic matter was also relevant to a lot I’ve been thinking about recently, including my personal projects outside of work, so it seemed like a natural choice for a souvenir.

Author Lina Zakrisson works as a social sustainability consultant focused on helping various stakeholders (residents, property owners, etc.) create stronger, more vibrant local communities. Grannskapsrevolution is thus a combination of manifesto, marketing, and DIY guide on just that topic—she makes an explicit point of highlighting her consulting work, though you still get plenty of tips and information for your money without any scummy “sign up for my course to learn more” sales pitches. But Grannskapsrevolution seems like a condensed version of Melody Warnick’s This is Where You Belong tailored to a Swedish (Stockholm?) target demographic, so reviewing it in English feels a bit pointless. I’ll just wrap up by saying that I expect my copy will be circulating among the board members of my local buy-nothing association and by highlighting what was the most memorable anecdote in the book for me:

One of Zakrisson’s neighbors ran into her while she was out walking her dog and that launched a fair bit of smalltalk, since her neighbor was also a dog owner. As they parted ways, the neighbor invited her over for a fika sometime and Zakrisson agreed enthusiastically. Yes, of course! That would be lovely! Then when she got home, she thought, Wait, it’s a bit weird to just invite a perfect stranger into your home like that. Or what if she’s some kind of psycho? The fika gets put off and delayed for a while because Zakrisson isn’t sure what to make of it. Of course the story ends with her eventually making good on the invitation, and of course she has a lovely time, and in the end that neighbor becomes an actual friend. As an afterthought, Zakrisson adds that once she got to know this neighbor better, she learned that her neighbor was American, and even though she’d lived in Sweden for years by now, she had still had grown up in the US.

Me, an American: of course she was an American, lol

Also me, an American: so that’s how all of my invitations land with Swedes

Synners

A chapter out of Pat Cadigan’s Synners appeared in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the whole book.

The whole book, it turns out, is a bit of a tome: 496 pages of a tome, to be exact. That’s a full two hundred pages longer than Neuromancer, its cyberpunk partner-in-crime and most apt comparison. Can the center hold?

For me, I’m not so sure. There’s a lot going on in Synners and I’m not even sure what happened.

We have Visual Mark and Gina, two music video creators working for a corporate behemoth called Diversifications, Inc. after their scrappy little independent studio was sucked up in a merger. We have Gabe, an adman also working for Diversifications, Inc., who is addicted to playing hyper-immersive video games (think Star Trek holodeck style) and the company of two AI? imaginary? personalities. We have Sam, Gabe’s estranged and emancipated teenage daughter and wunderkind hacker, returning to LA from a retreat in the Ozarks after receiving a mysterious data dump from her hacker friend Keely. That information, it turns out, is high-level top-secret corporate espionage material from Diversifications, Inc. pertaining to the next product they’re getting ready to launch: sockets that will allow people to connect to the Internet directly from their brains (Neuralink, essentially). The sockets work well enough…at first. Then crisis hits and Gina, Gabe, and Sam have to team up in virtual reality to halt the march of a deadly stroke-inducing virus.

I’m pretty sure that’s what I read, anyway.

In between those important plot points is a lot of stage setting to build the atmosphere of Retrofuturistic Cyberpunk LA, which I’m sure hit a lot different in 1991 than it does now.

This is where I’m of two minds. Cadigan has the imagination as well as the work ethic to really build a fantastic and immersive world that’s fun to spend time in, but the actual plot spends a lot of time stumbling around. The initial pacing of everything had me expecting a story about how our ragtag group of heroes would hack the planet, expose the corporate greed and malfeasance at Diversifications, Inc., and send the bad guys to jail.  But then somewhere around the halfway? two-thirds? mark, Diversifications, Inc. wins their much-needed approval from the Food, Drug, and Software Administration and the sockets become a fait accompli. Okay, well, now what?

If deus ex machina is the name for a pat and unsatisfying solution to a plot problem, what’s the name for a pat and unsatisfying problem introduced into a story to drag it out? The deus ex machina problem here is the virtual reality stroke virus: its connection to everything that happened before is tenuous at best, which makes the final climactic fight? showdown? feel slapped on and irrelevant. This is the stuff that seems most interesting to Cadigan, and she could have started everything right after the introduction of the sockets to slow burn the tension through growing numbers of unexplained deaths until we arrive at the existentialist showdown with the source of it all. So why didn’t she?

Synners was published in 1991. If I’m inferring correctly from Cadigan’s dedication, it was more of a “long time coming” novel than a “frantic and immediate burst of genius” novel, and that tracks with just how much The 80s come through in the story. It’s like a cross between MTV, the Sprawl trilogy, and a romcom, all in a Clockwork Orange-level patois.

Positive reviews from recent years enthusiastically declaim Cadigan’s vision of the future as “spot on” but you really have to squint to get Cadigan’s ideas and our world today to line up. People in Synners are still walking around with offline camcorders and connecting to the Internet through physical landlines; music videos, of all things, have gained primary cultural import; their online world has that distinctly visual/spatial paradigm the 80s futurists assumed things would take, with goggles and sensor suits and the like. It’s all extremely dated.

Of course, if you tilt your head sideways you can reinterpret music videos as the omnipresent video content on places like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and people like Visual Mark and Gina as a kind of influencer, but even then it’s an unsatisfying fit because the ultimate climax of the book comes down to the naïve chestnut of But What Does It Mean To Be Human When You’re A Machine. Mark and Gina’s relationship to their audience, and even to the videos they create, isn’t really a topic of concern or at all relevant to the plot. The condensation of online content ownership and delivery into a small number of huge corporate overlords is the one thing that maps pretty neatly on to today, but it’s not much more than background radiation, the inciting incident that kicks off the actual plot.

Much as I love the spirit of linguistic playfulness in the slang throughout Synners, it did a lot to get in the way of the book for me. Not only in understanding what was happening, or what characters meant, but also in just enjoying the book. What’s fresh and exhilarating in a single chapter (in, for example, an anthology like Flame Wars) is exhausting to keep up for close to five hundred pages. For all of Cadigan’s focus on music, and groove, and rhythm, the language itself is often choppy and awkward. Even (tragically) in dialogue, where flow and sound is especially important. Or puns or slang that feel like a stretch. “Synner,” for one, short for “synthesizer,” as in people like Gina and Visual Mark: that one is just too cutesy and too much of a reach to really land for me.

All of that said, this is the rare book I can understand reading again. Going into things a second time, with foreknowledge about the shape of things to come, could well be a better experience than the first time around.

Historiskan 1/2024

My airport read ahead of my trip to the US in May. What did this issue cover?

      • An interview about a feminist history podcast, whose name now escapes me
      • A biography of Aphra Behn
      •  Svenska Norgehjälpen, Sweden’s aid project for Norway during Nazi occupation
      • Holomodor, which seems highly relevant these days
      • Tehuanas: Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico who have long enjoyed a relative independence from, and equal standing with, men
      • And, on the flip side of history in the new world: a biography of Inés Suárez, conquistador
      • St. Vitus’ Dance
      • A fascinating biography of Maria Enquist, a notable “beauty expert” (and probable grifter) at the turn of the twentieth century who offered some of the first cosmetic surgery in Sweden (paraffin injections)
      • Queen Christina of Saxony, the reigning queen during the Siege of Tre Kronor
      • Sweden’s first theater, a project put together by two noblewomen but which no longer stands today because it was torn down soon after its construction
      • Brief little bios of women long-distance swimmers
      • And of course the cover story on Amelia Earhart

En rackarunge

My hosts in Dalarna had a fantastic library of children’s literature spanning the interests of three generations. What a curious thing to see the Sweet Valley High paperbacks of my own childhood on the same shelf as authors like Ester Blenda Nordström!

Nordström’s series of children’s books, starting with En rackarunge, is purported to be an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Astrid Lindgren. The rackarunge in question—Ann-Mari—bears a resemblance to Pippi Longstocking in character as well as appearance, and predates the first Pippi book by some years. Admittedly, it’s hard to prove these things either way, so who’s to say for sure.

The Swedish half of the couple saw me paging through the book during my downtime and remarked on the differences between children’s literature now and then.

“I tried reading some of those older books to the kids when they were small, and it’s just a completely different experience. They’re so slow, nothing happens, there’s so much description. Books these days, there’s always something happening. It’s such a different energy.”

Indeed. En rackarunge is also more of a short story collection than a novel. Each chapter is a self-contained little adventure, although there are some recurring characters and situations throughout that (kind of) tie all of the adventures into one loose story. Not to mention it touches on pretty dark stuff for a children’s book of today: one of the red threads throughout the book is Ann-Mari’s friendship with a Josef, young man newly released from prison for murdering his physically and emotionally abusive uncle. He’s only scraping by at the margins of society when Ann-Mari first meets him, a total outcast from his hometown. Nordström’s reportage consistently highlighted the marginalized and the suffering, from her initial breakthrough as an undercover journalist investigating labor conditions for domestic help to her condemnation of the brutality of the bullfights she attended in Spain and her advocacy on behalf of destitute Finns starving near to death in a famine. Josef’s arc in the last third or so of the book is another culmination of Nordström’s concern for the downtrodden, and of course it’s Ann-Mari who decides to help him.

Why did Pippi become such a mainstay, while Ann-Mari vanished into obscurity?

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back

I picked up Chokepoint Capitalism from my host’s bookshelf in London because I was worried about finishing the emergency book in my purse too early and because I guess I love reading about economics now?

Cory Doctorow was a name already familiar to me, as someone who reads science fiction and is terminally online, and I was glad to see him reined in somewhat by Professor Rebecca Giblin. Not that any of his ideas are distasteful or extreme, or that I even fundamentally disagree with him, but Doctorow’s style when it comes to writing about politics or economics can be a bit over-the-top.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a detailed, academic-based look at how Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, ClearChannel/iHeartRadio, Apple, Live Nation and other behemoths have solidified a hold on their respective markets, what the authors term “chokepoints.” I say “academic-based” because it is clearly deeply researched (no doubt Giblin’s contribution), but the presentation and style is still more in the vein of popular science (popular economics?) than dry scholarly reading. Giblin and Doctorow bring the receipts, as the kids no longer say. These companies have actively removed any other mediator between artists and audiences, and as the only gatekeepers can dictate essentially whatever terms they like, in terms of selling but also in terms of buying.

Part of the reason I write these dorky little book reports is to help me remember what I read. For novels and fiction, it’s simply a matter of not wanting whole hours of my life to disappear down the memory hole. But for nonfiction it also becomes a matter of actually learning something from what I’ve read, which is to say I’ve started this particular dorky little book report when Chokepoint Capitalism was no longer fresh in my mind and almost all of the details and nuance have already vanished.

Fortunately Giblin and Doctorow gave an interview about the book to explain it so I don’t have to.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

I think The Bright Ages ended up on my TBR because I saw a Swedish copy at my in-laws and thought the topic sounded interesting, especially since my knowledge of Medieval history begins and ends with the interdisciplinary unit we had in middle school. While people crack jokes all the time about the perceived uselessness of fields like Medieval studies, familiarity with the period seems like good starting point for understanding how our current economic system got to be the way it is—and I’m sure I’m not the only person with a growing interest in that particular piece of history. Plus, as authors Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in the introduction, a (historically inaccurate) popular understanding of the Middle Ages informs political ideology even today. Educating the public is therefore part of improving the health of our political dialogue.

They have their work cut out for them, no doubt. How well did they succeed?

This is another case where ebook reading no doubt hampered my comprehension, especially since I read it in bits and pieces over a relatively long period. I started it sometime before my trip to the US in May, and I finished it on a flight to London on July 30. Even though each chapter is more or less standalone, focusing on a particular event or development, such a long time in between reading sessions meant all the previous context had long since vanished into the memory hole.

But more than that, after I finished the book I struggled to articulate how The Bright Ages had shed new light on the topic (if you’ll forgive the pun). Gabriele and Perry do an excellent job of bringing in marginalized figures into the picture, and they also continually emphasize how interconnected the world was at the time: goods and therefore people traveled across incredible distances, like barefoot Christian monks traveling within the Mongol empire. At the same time, it’s hard to argue that an era was more enlightened or humane than we give it credit for when you’re simultaneously describing book burnings and religious violence. Other points it seems like the distinction was one of semantics more than anything else. Whether or not Rome actually “fell,” it still declined in political importance. Of course, it could be that I didn’t even know enough to be dangerous, as the expression goes, and therefore don’t have a deeply ingrained imagined history to be debunked.

Whatever else, the writing is also always engaging and easy to follow. Gabriele and Perry depart from the typically dry style of academic writing and take a warm, conversationalist tone. As a result, The Bright Engages is a fun and engaging read, and the fact that it took me so long to finish the book is not in any way a commentary on its quality. It’s me, I’m the problem.

 La Vengeance m’appartient: Translation

 La Vengeance m’appartient only has three stars (or close to it) on GoodReads and StoryGraph. I wonder: is it because their userbase is uncomfortable with ambiguous, difficult texts? Or is it because their userbase is, more often than not, reading in English?

I ask because there’s something in the English translation that I found clunky and off-putting that was completely absent in the Swedish. Both of their translators are prolific and well recognized: the English translator is a highly lauded figure in English/French translation and even won an award for his translation of another book by NDiaye, as did the Swedish translator. Is my inner ear not attuned enough to know the difference between elegant and clunky French? Or elegant and clunky Swedish, for that matter?

The point that springs to mind is all the various translations of War and Peace, and the fanfare that met the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s substantially different from older translations, and is often accused of being clunky in comparison. Pevear and Volokhonsky, however, insist that a lot of the original Russian is actually clunky, and that previous translations have done a lot—too much—to smooth it over. And in the middle of all this you have Constance Garnett: linguistic wunderkind? prudish censor? How central should her translations be when it comes to Russian literature in English?

It doesn’t help, either, that I find Stump’s style of writing irritating of its own accord. Maybe I was primed to dislike it because I didn’t bother looking him up until I was already annoyed with the English translation, who knows. But he has plenty of interviews to comb through: Words Without Borders, Center for the Art of Translation, Asymptote, Ploughshares, etc.

I suppose I’ll have to follow this post with a part two where I solicit my francophone friends for their opinions.