Shamelessly borrowing a webpage from Cosma Shalizi’s books, here is an aggregate of my casual notes on some books casually read over the summer. I have been posting these on the federated book-reading site bookwyrm: you can fedi-follow me there from any-fediwhere as agoldst@bookwyrm.social, if that’s something you like to do (sickos).
Robert P. Goldman, ed., Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India
Over the last couple of years, I have been irregularly reading my way through the Princeton Library of Asian Translations edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. I just finished this seventh and final volume. I love a good philological extravaganza, and my one year of Sanskrit in college made me particularly enthusiastic about the ins and outs of that beautiful language. So this gigantic mega-edition, with tons and tons of paratext bulking out the 24,000-odd ślokas of the epic, had lots of appeal for me. I didn’t know much at all about the poem when I started. My single college course on Indian culture (beyond the Sanskrit) spent some time on the Mahābhārata but not on the Rāmāyaṇa. I had the vague idea that the latter is, Eurocentrically speaking, the Sanskrit Odyssey, which sounds cool, and I’d read A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” because I admire Ramanujan and because it was, sigh, in the news for a while. Ramanujan also makes it sound cool and supplies a stretch of quite beautiful translation (in collaboration with David Shulman) from Vālmīki’s version (alongside his renderings of other versions).
The Princeton translation is deliberately prosaic and can’t match what Ramanujan can do. I found it perfectly readable, but it hit aesthetic climaxes pretty rarely, primarily when the two lovers are separated (as they are, over and over again). The introductions are long and tediously thematic; every volume spends dozens of pages surveying the “characters” in that installment of the story, a strange choice given the bibliographic care lavished on the edition and the incredible complexity of the textual history reflected in the notes. The notes also approach a variorum-like coverage of the commentary tradition, which I have to admit I didn’t always read carefully, but which gives a striking sense of how divergent two thousand years’ worth of interpretations can really be. For a casual reader, it’s difficult to escape the sense of reading something with multiple chronological layers charged with conflicting ideologies and conflicting cultural-political contexts as well. The story is about moving through these contexts: are we in the world of mythic origin-story (Bālakāṇḍa)? Kṣatriya courtly intrigue (Ayodhyakāṇḍa—one of the volumes translated by the great Sheldon Pollock)? Monkey superhero antics (Sundarakāṇḍa)? Good-vs.-evil army showdown? (Yuddhakāṇḍa)? Mise-en-abyme narrative-within-narrative (Uttarakāṇḍa)? Gotta love the moment when Rāma’s unrecognized sons, having been raised by the putative author of the epic, show up to sing the Rāmayaṇa to him.
But above all: what about Sītā? She gets two endings, Ramanujan says. Even the Goldmans (editors and translators in chief), who generally try to tie the whole epic together as a single rationalized theodicy, dwell on the signs of trouble over her fate in the Uttarakāṇḍa. It is, shall we say, an earth-shaking final episode.
Annie Ernaux, La place
I read this in French, but my comment is in English, and my main observation is American: Ernaux’s account of social class is the polar opposite of American-style identity discourse. In the American cultural doxa all identities are identities you’re born with, and all expression is expression of identity. Therefore nothing can be more virtuous than to express “your” identity as a social underdog. For Ernaux, those are all lies. She recognizes that acquiring the ability to narrate her father’s and her own class trajectories meant leaving her origins behind and entering a new class. He was also socially mobile: a laborer from a peasant family, he became proprietor of a small-town café-épicerie; but Ernaux represents her own departure for the heart of Culture (first as a schoolteacher, then, implicitly, as author) as a much sharper break. In fact it’s a betrayal, because, as she tells it, her father’s whole ethos would have rebelled against such a literary act of self-reflection: it would be immodest, it is too much work without being real work, it would attract scorn from others. She cites the implicit rule of the household: “Règle: déjouer constamment le regard critique des autres” (60). By contrast the book begins with Ernaux passing the final stage of her teaching exam (the “Capes”), dragging her students through a demonstration class and getting a full dose of criticism in turn, before being admitted to the profession.
And at the same time, Ernaux has to reckon with being the bearer of her father’s aspirations, “l’espérance que je serais mieux que lui” (73). There’s a painful irony at the end of the book, when Ernaux encounters a former student, working as a supermarket cashier, having failed to follow in her teacher’s footsteps. The book’s cold style seeks a narrow way, a “voie étroite, en écrivant, entre la réhabilitation d’un mode de vie considéré comme inférieur, et la dénonciation de l’aliénation qui l’accompagne” (53–54). Somehow the dispassionate analysis and wryly comic evocation of Ernaux’s parents’ way of life balances perfectly with a few disconcerting, powerful hammer-blows of incident. Her father’s life wasn’t easy, and, though Ernaux has accomplished the upward mobility he desired for her—“Chaque composition réussie, plus tard chaque examen, autant de pris, l’espérance que je serais mieux que lui” (73)—there’s no redemption here.
Georges Simenon, Maigret en meublé
Trouvé sur l’étagère dans l’appartement où je passais quelques jours de vacances. Tout le monde le sait déjà, mais la résolution du crime n’est pas important chez Simenon (et d’ailleurs elle est assez arbitraire ici), c’est l’évocation ironique et détaillée d’un petit monde urbain, ici celui du “meublé,” du point de vue phlégmatique de Maigret. Le livre étale les personnages de ce monde: la propriétaire, “vieille fille” grosse et comique; les immigrants de province ou de l’étranger qui cherchent, sans espoir, à se naturaliser; et, rien de surprenant, la “petite putain” qui lit des romans toute la journée et fournit à Maigret l’indice essentiel. Les descriptions des bruits de nuit d’un tel immeuble (l’enfant qui hurle, etc.) sont très amusantes et vraies. Maigret mange et boit beaucoup (ça me rappelle Kurt Wallander).
Je me félicite d’avoir pu le lire en français (sans comprendre les mots d’argot et autres choses sans doute). Ecrire un petit commentaire comme ceci est un grand devoir pour moi. Mais je l’ai fait et sans aide mécanique d’ailleurs. Simenon, je l’aime beaucoup.
Jim Butcher, Cold Days
I normally space out my dosage of this series, but I had a lot of travel and I had this one around. Much better than the prior entry: presumably Butcher himself figured out he should return to form—massive silliness, fairies, violence, the revival of the original Unresolved Sexual Tension. Still tiresomely talky, especially in the fight scenes, which are reminiscent of those fight manga where the action is padded out by endless words about the techniques being used. The big revelation/retcon about the Big Bad (this Whedonian term is all too appropriate given the models) is (spoilers) just silly for 2012, but by 2026 suggesting that “our” world is perennially under threat by sinister “outsiders” who must be kept out by constant amoral violence and a blockade of a giant “wall” (but who also have already infiltrated “us”) hits, as they say, different. On the plus side of the ledger is the admission by our sweatily heteronormative hero at a crucial moment of moral testing that it’s okay for someone to be gay (again, hello 2012).
Jim Butcher, Ghost Story
Have been dosing myself with this series fairly gradually. Provides the expected thrills and peripeteias in reasonable proportions, though this is a particularly weak entry, with more over-writing than usual, a very embarrassing colonial ghost character, and, worse, ever more decay from unapologetically dumb magic fantasy/hard-boiled crossover to smarmy theological fantasy. I’d like my silly adventures stories with fewer perfectly heroic priests and (spoiler, I guess) smirking archangels, please. But such things are a familiar hazard in American fantasy/SF.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Dreams in a Time of War
There aren’t too many writers whose memoirs I could read purely for pleasure, but the great Ngũgĩ is certainly one of them. However, nothing is pure, and as I read the resonances with Petals of Blood, which I teach in a crime fiction course, became so unavoidable that I had to at least write them down somewhere. Maybe someday I’ll try to write about what’s going on with the use of biographical material in the novel. Because of its deliberately hyperbolic characterization and its massive totalizing historical ambition, it’s a bit surprising to find names and incidents taken from Ngũgĩ’s own life.
Anyway, the memoir itself is indeed pleasurable to read, especially the moving evocations of the author’s mother and the lost paradise of the nationalist primary school Ngũgĩ attended (Manguo/Maanguuũ—also the name of the school Munira teaches at in Petals). Then comes the Emergency, which Ngũgĩ I think aims to render as it seemed to him as a child—intermittent episodes of terror or violence which then fade back into the background as he tries to get on with school. His older brother’s narrow escape from arrest and execution for joining the Mau Mau guerrillas forms the frame for the book, appearing first in its most baffling form at the start, then clarified and retold near the end. (Not only the content of the episode but also the cyclic narrative structure is reminiscent of the story of Abdalla and Nding’uri in Petals).
Finally there is the genesis of the novelist, which is sketched out with a very light touch here, but still with a wonderful sense of the interplay between oral storytelling and the enchantments of the written word, both Gĩkũyũ and English. It makes a counterpoint to the starker and more polemical story he told so famously in Decolonising the Mind.
Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister
Actually I read this in a Pan paperback stolen from my Aged Parent’s shelves when I ran out of things to read on a visit, which is only fair considering how many years the Aged Parent has had MY Timothy Zahn Star Wars novels on his shelves. I guess this was another research-adjacent “leisure” read, since Pan was an important paperback line for transmitting US genre fiction categories to the UK field (though also vice-versa, with the enormous success of James Bond as a prototype for the international spy thriller?). The garishly literal photographic cover illustration shows you that not all British book design followed the oh-so-tasteful Penguin model.
As for the novel: it’s certainly by Chandler, with everything you might expect from the overstylized prose, the overelaborated plot, the overflowing combination of cynicism and sentimentality. Somehow doubles down on the misogyny of the earlier novels, attaining depths previously unconsidered. Offers a pathetic sop to the cops at the end, which I guess The Big Sleep does too, so no surprise there. Obviously I enjoyed myself and burned through it at a high rate.
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
Long ago I read the first chapter; decided to read the rest finally (hmm, what could have prompted me to go back to a book on “responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states”?). The first thing to say is that the title is a TOTAL FAKEOUT. I assumed (and everyone I’ve ever heard refer to it seemed to assume as well) that Hirschman posits a choice among three alternatives. If you see decline, you can exit, you can use voice, or you can stay loyal. Make sense, right? Leave, resist, or capitulate. Good job, eccentric mid-century social science guy!
But no! Actually, there are only two options in Hirschman’s model, exit or voice. Loyalty is the moderating factor that changes the potential costs/benefits of those two choices--not just to the individual but to the organization. Loyalty is what makes me choose voice when I could get something as good somewhere else...and that is no bad thing. Hirschman is especially funny on the way an oligopolistic market can get away with offering a small number of equally shitty choices. Demanding consumers switch brands in disgust, but the firms don’t have to improve their products when their rivals are equally shitty and sending their disgusted exiting consumers back to them.
I guess there is an implicit third “stand fast” choice, but Hirschman is mainly interested in the case where people have reached the threshold to do something. His big point is that exit is king in markets and in economic thinking, and voice occupies the same position in states and political science, but in fact you need both in both for organizations to actually persist in the face of adverse fortune. I did say it was mid-century social science.
Also “mid-century” is a little bit of a misnomer. Look at that date. The book keeps coming back to the question of what all those children of 1968 are up to with their dropping out, their Black Power, and so on. Likewise Hirschman is clearly appalled at the way so many good liberal functionaries exercised their (loyal) “voice” on Vietnam instead of honorably resigning (and, in his view, exercising more power back on the state by exit than by being coopted as toothless dissent.)
So you can almost line the book up with Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus: another inquiry into mid-century institutional stability which was turned by history into an attempt to figure out why things were suddenly falling apart.
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
Bookwyrm, like all other digital book catalogues, is just a complete mess when it comes to distinguishing/combining variant printings, editions, states, etc. of a single work. Ten years ago FRBR was going to be the One Ring to Solve Them All but I picked up a hint somewhere that it has been superseded by a new, even Oner One Ring. Anyway I forgive bookwyrm because it’s plucky and fedi, but I do not forgive google, amazon, worldcat and the rest.
Anyhoo, I taught Larsson #1 to a grad detective fiction seminar a couple years ago, and enjoyed reading it so much I decided I could get away with reading the rest “for fun” rather than for research. Indeed, #2 is very good fun, and truly silly, even more so than #1. The Mary Sue quality of both Salander and Blomkvist is heightened, the Magical Hacker powers are more magical, the villains are Eeeven More Eeeeevil, the PowerBooks are top of the line specs for the time of writing, and so on. All this somewhat dilutes the political seriousness which underwrote the first one, but then again how much political seriousness do you need? About those specs, I am certainly the target audience for PowerBook G4 fetishism, so that’s nice. After a langorous opening with a long IKEA shopping expedition (really), things get rolling and don’t stop until the massive cliffhanger ending. Is the scene in which Salander miraculously escapes being buried alive a tribute to Kill Bill vol. 2, or is that pure early-2000s pop-cultural Action Girl coincidence? Onwards to #3.
Graham Rawle, Woman’s World
A friend and colleague loaned this to me because of my enthuasism for cheap magazines. It’s a novel made out of them, in the most literal way. Rawle clipped 1960s women’s magazines down into letters, words, and phrases and then reconstituted a novel he’d drafted out of them. (The pages are images of his collages.) Graphically it’s a really fun book, repurposing all the attention-grabbing typography of ads for a continuous narrative in ludicrously over-decorative, over-emphasized style.
The narrative text is more or less straightforward trans melodrama (spoilers, I guess, but only in the What Everyone Knows About The Crying Game sense). The narrator, Norma, is the female identity of Roy, a hapless loser who lives with his mum. The mother barely tolerates Roy’s wish to perform as, or be, Norma. There’s a traumatic backstory, and Rawle eventually spells it out for us: Norma’s identity is indeed constituted out of the women’s magazines Roy has read, reproducing at the level of plot what we see on the page.
The point would be, I suppose, that this understanding of femininity was always latent in the culture of the magazines, that all you have to do is take a scissors to enough issues of Woman and you too can grasp the basic Gender Trouble idea. I’m reminded a bit of Erin Smith on the exaggerated performativity of masculinity in hard-boiled pulp magazines’ ads.
From Butler to Butlerian jihad: the other thing that struck me is how much this novel is like a language-model output avant la lettre (ha). Rawle very literally tokenized a corpus of magazines, embedded it (by indexing his clippings for retrieval), and then prompted his model for a story like the one he had already drafted. The author’s note describes the “remaking” of his original narrative by the language of the magazines. Like language-model outputs, this text, presented as a coherent object for reading, floats between parody and pastiche: is it meant to be a convincing fake or an exaggerated take-off? Is it a nostalgic evocation of the charms of those old magazines and their corny ads, or a satire of the stifling limitations of femininity as imagined by 1960s mass media? Or is it the trans narrative that matters? Certainly Anglo-America displays no sign of coming to terms with the idea that some people’s gender presentation and their anatomy might not match conventional expectations. But a critique of that condition is not exactly sharpened by the high-spirited appropriation of the texture of old magazines. Then again, why do blank parodies of mid-century mass media keep on proliferating? Like the archaic torso of Apollo, the Mandalorian and Grogu seem to see me from everywhere.