nonfiction – Koba English

Livet måste ha mening

I won’t be spending too much time* on Viktor Frankl’s Livet måste ha mening (translated from German and English by Margareta Edgardh), and that will more be focused on how the book is discussed in a broader context than the content of the book itself. Bluntly put, I’m not diplomatic enough to feel confident leveraging criticism against a Holocaust memoir. It feels more appropriate to discuss the context around it.

I usually hear this book described as Frankl’s account of “psychological discoveries” that he made while in a concentration camp, usually given as Auschwitz, and the best historical evidence seems to suggest this was not the case. It’s more likely that he had already refined his idea about meaning and logotherapy as a civilian, and that it was a pre-established framework for dealing with the horrors rather than an inspired response to them.

While Frankl refers to Auschwitz several times, he was only held in depot there a few days before being sent to Dachau (he also spent time at Thereseinstadt). The bulk of the testimony he provides, therefore, comes from those two camps and not Auschwitz. It feels petty to name this, because it’s not like any of the concentration camps were luxury resorts, but neither Dachau nor Thereseinstadt were built to be the kind of murder factory that Auschwitz was designed to be. This isn’t to say that people didn’t die there, because they absolutely did—but Auschwitz was next level. Indeed, one of the few (perhaps only) times Frankl brings up Dachau, he specifically describes the relief of himself and his fellow prisoners at being sent there because they know their chances for survival will be much greater than at Auschwitz.

If you go into the book knowing this facet of Frankl’s biography (which I did), you can’t help but be struck by his presentation of things. He’s certainly honest about being sent away from Auschwitz, like I mentioned, but the timeline is quite muddied and Dachau itself can’t be mentioned by name more than once or twice; in a couple of other places he only makes oblique reference to “the camp where I was freed.” Auschwitz, on the other hand, comes up over and over again. A dozen, two dozen times at least.

(Timothy Pytell goes into this in detail on his blog as well as his biography of Frankl, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning.)

Given that, I think the takeaway people have from this book is that the horrors of Auschwitz led Frankl to develop his theory. That’s the context I was referring to earlier, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of what the book is. I also think this misunderstanding is a driving factor behind Livet måste ha mening‘s perennial, perpetual success. A therapist recommended it to me, for crying out loud.

I also don’t think Frankl’s idea of logotherapy, with meaning as the underlying driver, is as universally applicable as he presents it. First of all, his biography seems to flatly contradict his main thesis. Frankl periodically comes back to his drive to recover his lost psychology treatise as the “meaning-maker” (my word, not his) that fueled his will to live, that allowed him to survive the camps. But in just as many places he mentions how the favor of the barracks capo had saved him from certain doom, or how sheer dumb luck kept him from ending up in the wrong shipment, wrong train car, wrong work detail, etc. Neither of those had anything to do with his meaning, or even anything under his control.

The tension between meaning and luck aside, meaning according to logotherapy rests on three pillars, or rather is derived from at least one of the following options: accomplishing a great feat, experiencing something sublime (it seems to be love for another person, but sometimes the language Frankl uses, at least in translation, makes it sound like “an experience” could count), or suffering. The first two seem harmless enough (though I wonder, does a stalker in the throes of obsession have a sound, morally acceptable meaning to their life, when the object of their focus might well be living in terror? hm), but telling my loved ones with chronic pain to find some vague, muddy “meaning” to their suffering would land somewhere between insulting, condescending, infuriating and ignorant. I would never dream of it. It doesn’t help, either, that Frankl is very vague on what “meaning” is. Fair enough that we all have to find it for ourselves, but it would be nice to have a definition or examples or guiding prompts or something.

He throws us a couple bones, at least, when it comes to suffering. One example is a young man who becomes paralyzed after a diving accident at 17 and decides to study psychology as a result, obtaining a degree and son. According to Frankl, the young man assured him that he would have never pursued psychology otherwise, and that he found his life so much more rewarding and enriching than it was before. To my mind, that doesn’t seem like meaning in suffering, but meaning from a great feat. The great feat just happened to be preceded (and perhaps caused?) by great suffering. The other example is a grieving rabbi who survived the Holocaust, while his wife and children did not. According to Frankl, the rabbi came to therapy distraught at the idea that he would be unable to be reunited with his loved ones in the afterlife because they died a martyr’s death, elevating them above whatever death he can hope to achieve.* Frankl then suggests that surely the suffering the rabbi is experiencing now on Earth is something that will purify him and make him worthy of seeing his loved ones again. The rabbi thanks him and leaves Frankl’s office with a new framework for his grief (so we are told). While I think this is a much better example of meaning in suffering, it’s still meaning predicated on particular religious ideas, including about the afterlife. It was the right answer to suffering for a religious Jewish man, and Frankl was wise to make that connection, but there’s no way pointing to the afterlife or God can be the right answer for everyone. Obviously it doesn’t work for atheists; it also doesn’t work for belief systems where memories and consciousness don’t survive death.

So in addition to being uncomfortable with the popular misunderstanding of Livet måste ha mening‘s factual origins, I also have to admit to being uncomfortable with the advice and life philosophy Frankl advocates for, since it seems to me they can easily be irrelevant, or even do as much harm as good. Indeed, a member of my philosophy study group found a study suggesting that meaning, even as Frankl describes it, might in some cases be a net negative:

The findings have demonstrated that search for meaning appears to be uniformly harmful with relation to overall burnout and its composite dimensions.

I’m glad I read it, I guess, because now I can say that I have. Now I know what one of the twentieth century’s most popular self-help books contains, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it reminded me that we read Elie Wiesel’s Night in ninth grade, and that I don’t remember much about it except that I didn’t like it. I wonder if I might feel differently about it now.

*The final wordcount of this blog post determined that this statement was a lie.

**This is my memory of Frankl’s description. I’m not read up enough on Jewish theology to know exactly what I’m talking about or to know if Frankl’s getting it right, either.

Filterworld

If I find myself somewhere bored and bereft of a book, I like to dig back through my TBR and find something I can get as an ebook from one of my libraries. This is how I came to be sitting in my favorite neighborhood haunt, drinking a beer and reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld. In brief, Filterworld is a snappy history of how recommender algorithms have come to shape our Internet, and our broader cultural, experience. It covers a lot of the same territory as Chokepoint Capitalism, though with less pissed-off creator-side rage in favor of a more anxious user-side perspective. “Do I actually like the things I like?” is Chayka’s recurring question.

Chayka’s proposed solution to The Algorithms, to the extent it is a workable solution (and to the extent he even calls it a solution), is to slow down our focus:

If there is a simple answer to breaking down Filterworld, then it might be something like a version of the slow food movement, as it was popularized in the 1990s, but for culture…We need to bring that same understanding of sustainability and specificity to the way that we consume and support culture online, too. Resistance to algorithmic frictionless requires an act of willpower, a choice to move through the world in a different way. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic one.

He then gives the example of visiting a local cafe that he’s always passed but never visited because he didn’t find it appealing; in his own words, it wasn’t “Instagrammable”:

I felt both bemused and sad that this was a rare experience, something like visiting a museum. Our phones and feeds absorb so much of our attention and dominate so many of our preferences that stepping out of their conveniently predetermined paths and choosing an experience not immediately engaging feels somewhat radical. This applies to fashion choices as well as food, which television shows we watch, which books we read, which furniture we buy, where we travel. If we shift our priorities away from the space of algorithmic digital platforms and once more to the physical world, in which everything is not instantly evaluated in terms of engagement, we might find ourselves building not only better culture but better communities, relationships, and politics as well.

I’m cutting to the chase partly because that’s what struck me most about the book. Chayka is describing an experience that I know a lot of people have, and yet that I don’t (not entirely). I only begrudgingly acquired a Twitter as a means of freelance self-promotion, but never became hooked on the platform and stopped Tweeting as soon as I no longer needed to promote myself. I’ve never used Spotify as my primary music library or my means of discovering new music. My partner periodically subscribes to Netflix, and we’ve been known to occasionally bingewatch particular series or short docuseries, but the last one was An American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders back in 2024. I never rely on Yelp or similar to find cafes, or online travel agencies to plan my international vacations. I post to Instagram but am not really invested in comments or hearts or followers. Only posts, no reels, maybe the occasional story. Admittedly, I can get sucked into watching a comedy reel about Philly if the feed finds me in a moment of weakness, but I have no desire to follow those accounts. I do not, and will never, have TikTok. The only thing I will cop to is a YouTube history that is probably wildly schizophrenic, since I use it for background music while I’m working and my tastes run from symphonic to techno to “this song popped into my head when I woke up and now I need to listen to it on repeat all morning or I won’t get any work done.”* And while I never sign into my Google account on either of my work computers, I’m sure that nonetheless the algos have managed to connect my legal person to those dozens, possibly hundred or so plays of “Takin’ Care of Business” that one day last February.

Every time Chayka observed his algorithmic behavior or reactions in a state of what I’d call “vaguely befuddled despair,” I couldn’t help but think, “But you could just…not.” So in the end, when his solution is to, indeed, “just…not,” I didn’t find it much of a revelation.

Chayka has an art history background, so it’s no surprise that what I found most compelling (and what he spends the most time on) is how once again the medium has shaped the message: “BookTok” and the proliferation of autofiction in literary bestsellers, the lack of key changes in pop music, art exhibits so specifically designed for Instagram selfies that they become meaningless otherwise. Chokepoint Capitalism outlines the structural inequities of such recommender systems, but Filterworld also reminds us that they’re also having direct influence on the culture itself—one that exists for all of us, regardless of whether any given one of us subscribes to Spotify, Netflix, etc.

It with immense satisfaction, then, that I can wrap up this post by pointing out that the algorithms weren’t the ones to bring me to this book. A guest on a podcast recommended it; that podcast in turn had been recommended to me by a friend. It was human connections all the way through, made specifically and deliberately by people to make a point. The podcast guest was on to talk about social media generally, and felt it relevant to mention; my friend recommended the podcast because the show often touches on things that he knew we both were interested in. I think Chayka would be happy to hear that.

* Here I have to say that I’m grateful to Chayka for highlighting the streaming service Idagio as a better alternative than Spotify for classical music. The platform detects and counts plays differently, using calculations more appropriate for longer classical pieces than three-minute pop hits, and recommendations are picked by human experts with care and deliberation rather than statistically driven recommenders. I might go ahead and subscribe once I’m back from vacation, since this post is going live while I’m at a cabin in Kiruna.

Friendaholic

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic was mentioned somewhere in my social media relatively soon after its publication in 2024. Was it LitHub? Was it a podcast? I can’t quite remember. But it came into my life at a time when I was reflecting on my own (dysfunctional) friendships and relationship patterns, and a title like Friendaholic spoke to my preferred method of integrating into Swedish society. It ended up on my TBR, which is how it turned into an impulse purchase at The English Bookshop February last year, which means by the time I read it in May it had been in my library for over a year. In terms of my annual reading goals, it’s a grand slam.

Friendaholic is a squirrely little beast in terms of genre. It’s non-fiction, it’s self-help, it’s memoir. Day takes us through some of her own friendships, both successes and failures, with a dash of some light research and interviews. Whether or not there’s a confessional aspect to it for Day isn’t for me to say, but the main thrust of the book seems to be that by reflecting on her friendship patterns and what research suggests, she can help a reader in a similar situation or with similar hang-ups.

Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure if there was much in Friendaholic that was new to me in any meaningful way. The drawback of Day’s memoir approach is that if you don’t relate to her personal narrative, there’s really nothing of interest. I could have probably just as well skipped the chapter on infertility, for example, because that’s not a factor in my life.

By reader request, Day has shared the questions she used for the interviews sprinkled throughout the book. I don’t know if I have the nerve to sit my friends down and ask them about (our) friendship, but maybe you do?

Philadelphia: Holy Experiment

I rescued this battered old Maxwell Struthers Burt hardback from the collection of books that my dad seemed to have inherited from his own father. I suppose something about moving across an ocean makes you sentimental for the place of your birth, especially since I’m forever explaining to people that I’m from “north of Philly.”

I had a grand time reading it. The footnotes and commentary alone are pure entertainment, if not necessarily the strictest history. Published in 1945, the most important niche that Philadelphia: Holy Experiment fills is as a World War II era time capsule. How were Americans thinking about themselves and their history while they were fighting Nazis abroad? Also, it includes a recipe for Fish House Punch in the endnotes. Amazing.

När Hitler stal den skära kaninen

In the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I asked my Jewish friends which Holocaust novels and movies they would recommend. The topic has a tendency to get mined for sentimentality and melodrama by lazy hacks, after all. One of the books that came up was Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a title that I recognized from elementary school reading lists but that I had never read myself.

A few years later, I noticed a Swedish translation (När Hitler stal den skära kaninen) by Ingegerd Leczinsky on the book swap shelf at the local arts center and decided this was my moment. It took another year or so, and then in my year of reading history I decided I should finally make good on my previous inquiries.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an award-winning classic of children’s literature so any review in 2026 is redundant. Given the state of things in the world—in the US, mainly—it’s probably worth revisiting these classics. It’s also worth understanding the ripple effects of the camps: what it was like for the families who left as refugees, people who would have otherwise never had a reason to leave the only country they’d ever known, people who had to get by with intermittent updates about the friends and family who had stayed behind, people who had to live with the uncertainty of whether it would ever be possible to return or if they would ever want to.

My only gripe is specific to this particular hardback edition from Berghs: Kerr also provided her own illustrations for the book, and her art often (though not always) appears on the covers. But my edition (pictured above) has an extremely grimdark and dramatic oil painting aesthetic that doesn’t at all match Kerr’s simpler, lighter pen-and-ink illustrations inside. Other publishers are also guilty of this choice, though, so it’s hardly controversial. But it’s certainly a choice to feature Anna, Judith’s stand-in, holding the pink rabbit that never left Germany with her.

1913: Århundradets sommar

Sometimes I wonder if specific book friends should get their own tag, for my own ease of reference if nothing else. So much of my reading can be traced back to recommendations and influences from people I like!

1913: Århundradets sommar, originally published in German as 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts and known in English as 1913: The Year Before the Storm, is simply the account of a single year in Europe from the perspective of numerous writers and artists (as well as a couple notable politicians). The same book friend for whose sake I made a third and final attempt to read To the Lighthouse and to whom I had gifted The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, who lives next door to the author of Årsboken and who had also recommended Njals Saga, pressed a slightly beat-up paperback copy of 1913 into my hands back in January or February. I started immediately, stopped when I realized I simply had too much else going on at the time (trying to get through Svälten and Kusinerna for assorted book clubs on top of Peak Work Season), and picked it up again on a long weekend in London.

An aside about the weekend jaunt to London: I scheduled a dinner at a Korean restaurant in London, the irresistibly named Koba, as a reward for surviving the first part of Kammarkollegiet’s authorization test for translators. (I passed that part, by the way!) I also have a friend in London who lets me stay at his place when I turn up there, the same friend who recommended Miljosvennar and who gifted me a few of his science fiction favorites (including Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco) after he cleaned out his bookshelf, who is one of the few people in my life to get a birthday present from me every year without fail only because I have a strong sense of Books He Should Read. It seems to be a fairly unerring sense as well, since he actually reads them and during one visit to Stockholm even remarked that I always manage to find interesting books he would have never known about or picked for himself. The same friend was also knocked the heck out from a gnarly viral infection, so his natural urge to play host and show off Hackney Wick was severely dampened by the sad state of his physical constitution. After a solo morning museum visit and walk through the park, I spent the entire afternoon of my last day there in bed reading while my host picked away at a programming task.

“I’m sorry you’re cooped up in here,” he said after an hour or two of companionable silence.

“No! No. This is exactly the kind of vacation I wanted. It’s fine.”

That is how I managed to read the bulk of 1913 over a single weekend. That’s exactly the kind of attention it deserves, because it’s full of names and events that keep recurring or developing; you don’t want to take a two week break and come to find you lost track of what Franz Kafka or Carl Schmidt was up to. Illies turns what could have been dry reportage into insightful, dare I say sensitive narrative. Presumably some poetic license is taken (did so-and-so really see so-and-so walking down the street as he gazed out his window?) but Illies has pages and pages of personal diaries and letters to draw from, so he can get quite close to his subjects. His background as an art historian probably means much of the subject matter was stuff he already had at hand, so to speak. Fair play also to Illies for giving as much consideration as possible to the notable women of the era, including their own perspectives and diary entries instead of just offhanded mentions about muses or mistresses or so on. Much like Svälten, Illies turns history into a narrative and the whole thing becomes deeply enjoyable reading despite the whirlwind of names and places.

The Swedish translation was done by Karin Andrae, who does not seem to have her own web presence anywhere that I can find. Here’s one selection from her translation catalogue over at Världslitteratur.se. She’s not listed at ÖversättareCentrum.se. There’s an article (and interview?) by Emilia Söelujnd behind the paywall of at least three regional newspaper clones: Tranås Tidning, Falköpings Tidning, Vetlanda-Posten, and probably more.

Imagine having such a reputation in translation that you don’t need to be worried about marketing yourself or having A Presence. The dream…

Svälten: Hungeråren som formade Sverige

Magnus Västerbro’s Svälten (Eng: The Famine) was another Swedish book club pick, but life conspired to keep me from actually attending the meeting so I don’t know what anyone else thought about it.

This was a rare foray into nonfiction for the club. Västerbro’s absolute brick of a tome dives into the three years of famine and food scarcity that plagued Sweden in the mid 1800s, bringing to bear not only a wealth of primary sources but deep research into famines and hunger as a whole and drawing connections to more recent events. It would be easy for this kind of book to become overwhelming, but Västerbo keeps the reader from getting lost by anchoring events to specific memorable characters. Each chapter also takes a very granular focus: one on the physiological effects of hunger, for example, or another on crime rates during famine.

For someone like me, who has at best only a fuzzy, broad-strokes understanding of Swedish history, this was a fantastic resource for filling in at least some of those gaps. As an American, it’s also interesting to read about the factors behind this or that wave of immigration from the inverse perspective, so to speak. Our textbooks never get too deep into this kind of national trauma, often distilling things into a few phrases or concepts: poverty, religious freedom, Irish potato famine, etc. In Svälten the historical tragedy takes center stage for its own sake instead of being the mere setup to the Great Experiment of American Democracy. My only complaint is that the concluding remarks feel tacked-on, with much less actual research and much more The Moral Concerns of the Zeitgeist—by which I mean some facile commentary that could be summarized as “oh ho ho, isn’t it ironic now that our biggest health problem is obesity instead of starvation???”. Granted, that’s always going to be a sore spot for me, but there is much less research here (measured in footnotes and bibliography references) than in the rest of the book. It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except to be an obvious, if uninteresting, way to tie things up.

Even though Svälten originally came out in 2018, it doesn’t seem like there’s been an English translation yet. More’s the pity, because I think it would be of immense interest outside of Sweden.

Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat

Out of something of a fluke, I ended up reading three very different books with very similar themes and topics (in this case, fat) in very quick succession while I was visiting my family for Christmas. I suspect this was the byproduct of working through my TBR backlog and hitting the vein of fat acceptance/health at every size/body positivity books that I had added to the list in 2017 or so, but still a bit weird for the cookie to crumble in just that way! But since they were anthropological nonfiction, a YA novel, and a dishwater attempt at satire aimed at adults, I decided there wasn’t much to be gained by combining them. At least for review purposes.

The first in this Fat Triptych is Susan Greenhalgh’s Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat. It isn’t impenetrable by any means, but it’s definitely an academic and scholarly approach that’s a cut or two above more popular science fare. Greenhalgh is an anthropologist (specializing in China, apparently, which was not at all apparent to me reading Fat-Talk Nation!) and admits in the introduction to the book that she fell into writing about this topic basically by accident. Class discussions in a course on feminism she was teaching brought diet culture and fat shaming into her awareness when before it had largely been absent for her; being a person of average weight, she explains, meant she hadn’t personally been subject to body scrutiny. Stories from students prompted her to conduct an entire research project that eventually became Fat-Talk Nation.

The bulk of Greenhalgh’s material here consists of student essays, the majority of which from her own students (writing such an essay was an optional piece of extra credit for a class she was teaching). She may have followed them up with personal interviews as well? I’m writing this three months after the fact and some (many) things have since slipped my mind. But all the participants included in the book give informed consent, names and so on are changed, and Greenhalgh situates their stories in the context of diet culture (local to Southern California but also nationally), biology, and so on.

(Expertise in China might have surprised me, reading her biography now several months later, but “the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society, and their consequences for human health and social justice writ large” are very much part of Fat-Talk Nation.)

Much of the book centers around BMI, both itself as a concept and also a wedge or vanguard for larger discussions about what Greenhalgh calls “biocitizens” in arenas like doctor’s visits or public schools. Reading these initial chapters brought back memories of countless gym and health classes where we dutifully learned to crunch our own numbers to see if we were fit or not; embarrassing visits to the school nurse for check ups. My second grade teacher posted our photos, heights, and weights on the bulletin board for a month or two. It was dressed up in the cutesy way elementary school teachers do bulletin boards (I think maybe we were all, like, apples hanging on a tree?) but I still wanted to melt into the floor. The second-fattest kid in the entire class.

And all that misery without BMI!

In retrospect it seems so pointless. Everyone can see who the fat kids are, including the fat kids themselves. What good does it do to also tell them that, according to this metric, you are going to keel over dead?

Greenhalgh also uses the BMI categories to structure the book, looking at the experiences of students according to whether they were underweight, average, overweight, or obese. This is the bulk of the book and, for me, is a compelling case for empathy. (Granted, I went into this book biased.) There are plenty of absolutely brutal stories about how parental anxieties and concerns about (bodily) perfection in their children strained or even ruined family relationships. Greenhalgh makes the point that the appearance of scientific legitimacy given to BMI makes it easy to stoke concern in parents who might say or do horrible things out of genuine concern for their child’s health. At least one of the respondents in the underweight and overweight categories talked about how their parents had never been worried about their weight, or were even aware of the metric, until the school nurse sent home some kind of note or comment about the child’s undesirable weight.

Upon reflection I would say that the focus on BMI is maybe the book’s only flaw. It’s not that I think Greenhalgh is on a hobby horse or anything, far from it. When you’re looking at “the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society,” then BMI becomes the most obvious marker for that in a discussion about obesity. It looks quantifiable and objective, it’s easy to calculate, it’s used everywhere under the guise of being “scientific.” It’s more that our pop-science understanding of obesity, and the terms we use to discuss it, have evolved. It’s only in the last section that I think Greenhalgh has overstated the case, waxing overly optimistic about the potential good of taking BMI out of public discussions—and, indeed, about the overall potential of the body positivity movement.

This is also an Obama-era book, so Michelle Obama’s various First Lady initiatives to reduce childhood obesity get mentioned a lot—relic of a bygone era. It would certainly be interesting to see an updated version or even a sequel, a full ten years later. I can’t help but think that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs would replace BMI as the locus of state, science and biocitizen discussion.

Even though Fat-Talk Nation feels a little, or very, out of date in places when it comes to discussions of policy, overall it holds up because of the survey responses. People’s lived experiences will never feel dated in the same way that reading about First Lady Michelle Obama does. I’d also like to think that those are the most persuasive sections of the book, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m a big ol’ softie.

On the off chance you’re curious about this one, be aware that there are several books with “Fat Talk” in the title that come up when Googling. Double check the full title.

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.

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.