October 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year
The Guardian, January 5, 2019

In October there are also new books that any reader who keeps up with the scene can hardly avoid hearing about. Zadie Smith is presenting fresh and perennial short stories in a volume called Grand Union, John Le Carré is publishing the spy novel Agent Running in the Field as mentioned in September, and Philip Pullman is adding The Secret Commonwealth to his Golden Compass books.

In the US, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey have written the book She Said about researching and publishing their news articles about film producer Harvey Weinstein's harassment and abuse.

(A Washington Post article about the rough interview with Bob Woodward at the book launch in Washington, D.C. is here.)

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Meanwhile, I am planning to finish listening to With the Fire on High (the young adult book about a Philadelphia high school student who dreams of becoming a professional chef) by Elizabeth Acevedo, and finish reading Regards from the Dead Princess by Kenizé Mourad.

After that, to read more of Another Country by James Baldwin and Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson in the new English-language translation, and a Larousse paperback volume of Pages choisies by Arthur Rimbaud.

In Berlin's Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, I've spotted Ayesha At Last, which I've been curious about for a while. It is a romance novel inspired by Pride and Prejudice. It was written in the setting of present-day Toronto, by Uzma Jalaluddin. Its Austenite and Canadian elements draw me, and I'm interested in Muslim life in modern North American and European cities. But I haven't bought it yet.

At the Kulturkaufhaus, I bought Ronja Rövardottar by Astrid Lindgren, to reward my efforts in learning Swedish on Duolingo. But I suspect that a competent dictionary is needed.

Then I've begun regularly reading O megalos peripatos tou Petrou, by Alki Zei. (It's a classic Greek children's story, written in the 1970s and set in 1940s Greece during the Second World War. Despite its subject matter, it is also rather funny.) My Greek colleague is helping by reading it together with me on Thursday afternoons. She has been explaining, for example, the historical context and vocabulary.

Lastly, I want to read more of Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay backlist.

In short, there will be no lack of books to read in October.

Faust in Copenhagen: A Physicist Revisits a Turning Point in Quantum Theory

In 1932 a group of physicists from around Europe met at Niels Bohr's institute in the Blegdamsvej in Copenhagen, in the final year before Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. (Quite a few of the physicists, like Max Born and Lise Meitner and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck were based in Germany, as Göttingen and Leipzig and Berlin were important physics addresses at the time). It was also the last period of innocence before their work would lead to nuclear weapons.

Aside from discussing the emergence of the neutron and the neutrino, which resolved important questions about the atom and changed the face of physics forever, they were also entertained by a theatrical parody of Goethe's Faust. One of them caricatured Paul Ehrenfest as Faust, another Niels Bohr as the Lord, a third Wolfgang Pauli as Mephisto, etc., and a Danish woman played a neutrino as Gretchen.

In the late 1920s and early 30s, Germany was no longer associated as strongly with the Kaiser-era imperialist and jingoist tendencies that undermined the moral stature of the German scientific communities during World War I.

(Scientists like Fritz Haber, Ernst Haeckl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Roentgen, composer Engelbert Humperdinck, artist Max Liebermann, and literary figures like Gerhart Hauptmann, signed a 1914 letter proclaiming amongst other things, in a mischaracterization of the invasion of Belgium, that:

It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire a part of the town as a punishment. The greatest part of Louvain has been preserved. The famous Town Hall stands quite intact; for at great self-sacrifice our soldiers saved it from destruction by the flames.

("Manifesto of the Ninety-Three" [Wikipedia] (Retrieved September 19, 2019))

Gino Segrè, a physicist who worked at CERN and Berkeley and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a book about the Copenhagen Conferences and physicists' progress in and around 1932, that 'year of miracles': Faust in Copenhagen (2007).

Bohr and Bohr's guests face almost no adverse judgment from Segrè's pen, in my opinion.

I don't know if the author was forbearing because he reveres these figures so greatly — his physicist uncle also met and knew a few of them; or because he is a rarely optimistic critic of human nature. Or perhaps he was worried about receiving angry reactions, or about betraying the understandings on the basis of which he obtained his material.

September 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

It would be a grim and exacting reader who would not be excited about the new books that are appearing this month and the next.

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Notably, 34 years after Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood has revisited her fictional land of Gilead (the dystopic society in which women are treated as chattel) and written a sequel: The Testaments.

It has been published with great fanfare — for example a Booker Prize nomination.

Here is one of the reviews: "The Testaments by Margaret Atwood review – hints of a happy ending" [Guardian/Observer], by Julie Myerson (September 15, 2019)

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Salman Rushdie has released a new novel, Quichotte, that parodies the state of the United States with the tale of Don Quixote as a parallel.

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From Penguin RandomHouse

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written Water Dancer, a magical-realist novel about slavery, which will come out on September 24th. I've already read an excerpt, based on which I think it struggles to come out of the shadow of Toni Morrison or George Saunders (at least, Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo), and that imagination is needed to trust that the prose is like anyone's internal monologue, either in the 1800s or now:

I yanked at the reins but it was too late. We barreled right through and what happened next shook forever my sense of a cosmic order.

It's a degree of abstraction that most people could not spare brainpower or time for in the first-person narrator's situation. Except if they have taken so many creative writing courses that it is now encoded in their DNA.  (Also, I doubt that many 19th-century people would have used the phrase 'cosmic order,' although after searching Google Books I did find it used in a scholarly article from 1882.)

July/August 2019: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

"The swimming venue of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin."
by A. Levers, dated 2008
via Wikimedia Commons

ASIDE FROM the Humboldt travelogue, I've listened this summer to an audiobook of a modern journey: Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian - My Story of Rescue, Hope, and Triumph Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini's involuntary travels from Damascus, through Turkey and Greece, the Balkans and Austria, to Berlin. She grew up with her parents and two sisters — one older, one younger — in the suburbs, until their house became part of the war zone. Then they took shelter in the city of Damascus itself, which became increasingly precarious as bombs and shrapnel became risks in daily life. Her swimming ambitions were also endangered by a peacetime obstacle: girls were not strongly expected to become professional swimmers as grown women, since it was assumed that they would drop out of training to marry and have children. So her father (who had moved to Jordan to find work as a swimming coach, given the oversaturated job market in Syria) sent his two eldest daughters the money that would be needed to flee to Germany.

Yusra and her older sister Sara stayed in Turkey briefly, riding in a bus to the shore near Lesbos. Then, after a smuggler swan-dove overboard and abandoned a boat full of refugees with a motor that had stopped functioning and that lay too low in the water underneath their weight, they were stranded for hours near the Greek island without being able to reach it. To keep the boat from sinking, some of the refugees slipped overboard and held onto ropes, and nudged the prow of the boat so that it was pointed toward the Greek shore even if they could not propel the heavy vessel themselves. Yusra emphasizes that Sara was in the water as well as she was. What is more, a few fellow refugees also slipped overboard even though — unlike the Mardini sisters — they could not swim at all.

The journey from Lesbos (the boat was saved) through Hungary and Austria is a long story in which the generosity and the venality of strangers is absurdly intermingled. There is the degrading treatment and the brutality with which refugees' money is exploited even by 'respectable' authorities and individuals: money taken for substandard lodgings, tickets sold for trains which people are never permitted to take, beatings in Bulgarian forest escape routes by 'law and order,' etc. Even so, Yusra Mardini points out that those who could afford to travel over Greece into Europe were the lucky ones; those with no money at all are stranded in Turkey or Lebanon. There are also, by way of contrast, gifts of clothing, the offer of an Orthodox church as a night shelter, and other practical assistance. It is strange how all of these actions are natural to humanity, and it is a sign of strength that Yusra's head and heart seem to have accepted these contradictions without bitterness.

When Angela Merkel expressed the wish to handle asylum claims for all Syrian refugees in 2015, Germany became a comparatively welcoming country. Indeed Yusra saw cheering crowds at the station as she arrived across its borders. And yet life here was not perfect.

Mardini remembered the war trauma and was still losing friends who had stayed behind; and Berlin was not nearly as pretty or familiar as Damascus. Then her parents and her youngest sister hoped that German government policy would reunite them; then they were forced to abandon that hope at least temporarily. In the end they risked their necks smuggling themselves into Germany as well; they fortunately succeeded. Then her sister Sara performed the endless waiting for asylum claim processing at the LaGeSo in Berlin (the State Office for Health and Social Issues), which was one of many trials prepared by the German bureaucracy. Add the fact that the housing schemes, for instance, for refugees were at times negligent or even inhumane. Also, she did not want to accept charity all the time.

I'm worried that rejecting the label 'refugee' as Mardini does undermines the cause, although it's cheeky of me to speculate at all. While the press is undoubtedly wrong in finding Syrian refugees more presentable than, let's say, Sudanese refugees, I don't know if it helps to make flight respectable for anyone, if 'refugee' seems to remain to the end of this book as a degrading term for weak dependents rather than as a neutral term for individuals who seek to stay in another country because their own government will not protect them.

Her book is also about media frenzies. It starts with one or two interviews with reporters who bump into her while she's still traveling between the shore of Lesbos and the outskirts of Berlin, and who find to their delight that she speaks English. Some of these journalists use their skills and experience to assist her journey through the Balkans, which seems justified even if I'm uptight enough to worry about journalistic objectivity. But later, when Yusra is considered for the Olympics, other journalists bombard her and her German swimming coach with interview requests, waylay her so that she is afraid to leave her housing for fear of missing her morning training, ask impertinent and hurtful questions of her sister and, after hounding Yusra for the boat story for the thousandth time, then misrepresent the story so that she tows the boat to shore like Skippy the heroic dolphin. Yusra was just 17 years old when she took the boat from Turkey to Greece and, whether she inspires people or not, perhaps adults can find a spokesperson in a more ethical and thoughtful way, preserving something of her private sphere and respecting her age and her family.

Butterfly is aimed, I'd guess, at teenagers. But I enjoyed it as an adult. From a literary standpoint, the boilerplate descriptions of people (I think at least two different people have 'open faces' and others are helpfully described by hair colour) and the first-person, present-tense narration are bound to shock the snooty critic inside me. As for the narrator — Lameece Issaq — besides rendering the Arabic names perfectly, or so I assume, she does a brilliant job of the German language. She only mangles LaGeSo (lah-GAY-zoh) and Sonnenallee (ZON-nen uh-LAY), the street that is famous as a hotspot of Arabic-speaking Berliners; and I'd say that her sometimes boastful, upbeat athlete's tone, not out of place when describing the Olympic triumphs of Michael Phelps in the swimming lanes, is at times just a bit out of place when describing war.

Note: I was led to listen to this book by Emma Watson's "Our Shared Shelf" book club on Goodreads.

July/August 2019: What We'll Be Reading Next

Quick, illogical assumptions motivate me to state that I have not been terribly keen on any books that were published in July or are to be published in August.

Instead I have finished older books. Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai, Humboldt's travels in Russia, winding up in a border station to China, then returning past German settlements founded by Catherine the Great, past Astrakhan, and through the Caspian Sea, braving an outbreak of anthrax and innumerable mosquitoes, were picturesquely set forth in later travelogues by Gustav Rose (a science professor who was a fellow traveller) and in Humboldt's letters.

The letters are not saintly, in my view. Humboldt writes to Count von Cancrin, the Russian government minister who granted his journey, in tones at times confident and friendly, at other times servile and toadying. His views in these letters are much more blissful than his views in letters to his brother and friends. His euphoria about Russian military victories against the Ottoman Empire also seems a little bloodthirsty now. I did roll my eyes a little at Humboldt's worries that he might be nominated for a prestigious position back in Berlin, which two hundred years later I'd characterize as a 'First World Problem.' Also, it's easier to sympathize with the mosquito problem, than with his boredom at being greeted by lengthy dinners and eager delegations wherever he goes.

Астрахань Городская клиническая больница №2 имени братьев Губиных (1838)
via Wikimedia Commons

AT ANY RATE, journeying and surveying the natural world through Siberia and back, experiencing a lifelong dream, Alexander von Humboldt was an emissary of the Russian government. Not only was it paying him a fabulous sum and gratifying a wish; it was also organizing transport with a lavish hand — teams of horses that were frequently changed out, etc., and military escorts, transported him over thousands of miles with an ease uncharacteristic of the times — and shelter.

Grimm Fairy Tales: The Star Talers

"Illustration of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale 'The Star Money'" (1862)
by Ludwig Richter (1803-1884)
via Wikimedia Commons

GROWING UP amongst the dark firs and bristling blackberry bushes, fragrant lilacs and apple trees, and the distant rushing of the wind in the hill where my family lived in Canada, I became immersed in the world of Grimm fairy tales. I would sit in the attic, where my siblings and I slept like contented nestlings as the nightlight shone from underneath the window, and imagine a fairy tale in old Europe with the help of Ludwig Richter's illustrations (frogs, ancient leafy trees, wells and courts and birds whose species were unfamiliar beyond the Atlantic) from the early 1860s. We had an expurgated edition that did not have all of the tales and was in modern High German, no regional German dialects as far as I recall.

I read, for example, The Star Money, "Die Sterntaler." It is as brief and as simply-cut as its heroine's shirt, because the Grimm brother who wrote it down was sketching a mere memory of the tale's plot.

It presents a main character and nameless wayfarers: a parentless figure who wanders through the world, who sees the woes of fellow-travellers and has the means to 'fix' them — so she does.

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Es war einmal ein armes, kleines Mädchen, dem war Vater und Mutter gestorben, es hatte kein Haus mehr in dem es wohnen, und kein Bett mehr, in dem es schlafen konnte, und nichts mehr auf der Welt, als die Kleider, die es auf dem Leib trug, und ein Stückchen Brod in der Hand, das ihm ein Mitleidiger geschenkt hatte; es war aber gar fromm und gut. Da ging es hinaus, und unterwegs begegnete ihm ein armer Mann, der bat es so sehr um etwas zu essen, da gab es ihm das Stück Brod; dann ging es weiter, da kam ein Kind, und sagte: „es friert mich so an meinem Kopf, schenk mir doch etwas, das ich darum binde,“ da thät es seine Mütze ab und gab sie dem Kind. Und als es noch ein bischen gegangen war, da kam wieder ein Kind, und hatte kein Leibchen an, da gab es ihm seins; und noch weiter, da bat eins um ein Röcklein, das gab es auch von sich hin, endlich kam es in Wald, und es war schon dunkel geworden, da kam noch eins und bat um ein Hemdlein, und das fromme Mädchen dachte: es ist dunkele Nacht, da kannst du wohl dein Hemd weggeben, und gab es hin. Da fielen auf einmal die Sterne vom Himmel und waren lauter harte, blanke Thaler, und ob es gleich sein Hemdlein weggegeben, hatte es doch eins an, aber vom allerfeinsten Linnen, da sammelte es sich die Thaler hinein und ward reich für sein Lebtag.

THE FAIRY TALE is read as an allegory about the Christian's notion of charitable deeds.*

* See "Allegorie" in the Wikipedia article here.

It is a tale that, to my leftist mind, epitomizes the absurdity of the world before modern social security, where a girl could be abandoned by society and yet be forced by her conscience to rectify the world's inequality out of her slender means.

To the proto-feminist part of my mind, it is impressive that the tale's reward for kindness is financial independence at nobody else's expense rather than, let's say, a husband.

But I have to add: from a non-cynical, religious standpoint, the insistence that a kind gesture to meet the needs of others is never in vain and never unappreciated by God is touching, although it is implausible and difficult to realize.

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There was once a poor, little girl. Her father and mother had died, she had no house left to live in, no bed to sleep in, and nothing in the world other than the clothes she wore on her body and a piece of bread in her hand, which a pitying person had given her. But she was pious and good. She went away then, and along the way she met a poor man who begged so much for something to eat that she gave him the piece of bread. Then she went further, and a child came, and it said, "I am so cold where my head is, please give me something that I can bind around it." So she took off her cap and gave it to the child. And when she had gone a little further, a child came again and had no jacket, so she gave it hers; and still further, a child begged for a frock and she also gave it hers. Finally she reached a forest, and it had already become dark. Another child came and begged her for a shirt, and the pious girl thought: 'It is dark night, so you may as well give your shirt,' and so she gave it. All at once the stars fell from the sky and were many hard, shining coins. And although she had given away her shirt, she had one on after all but this time it was made of the finest linen. So she gathered all of her coins into it and was wealthy for the rest of her life.
(Free translation, based in part on Margaret Hunt's version.)

"Das arme Mädchen (1812)" [Wikisource - in German]
"Grimm's Household Tales, Volume 2/The Star Money" [Wikisource]
"Die Sterntaler" [Wikipedia - in German]
"Star Money" [Wikipedia]

June 2019 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

In June, I haven't found many book appearances that greatly interest me, although it is absurd to say so. So I have been keeping my nose between pages of past works.

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From Balzer + Bray (Harper Collins imprint)

American Street appeared in 2017. It is a young adult book about a teenage girl whose mother wants the two of them to emigrate to the United States. The mother is held back at the airport and transported to New Jersey to be detained by US border authorities, for a long while without being able to talk with her daughter. Fabiola Toussaint, the heroine, flies on to Detroit, where her aunt Jo and her three girl cousins accept her into their home.

Even her traumatic memories of the earthquake, gangs, and foreign interference, don't prevent Fabiola from recognizing that Haiti was perhaps a better, more homelike environment than America. She holds on fondly to her memories, the cooking, the language, and the voodoo beliefs and practices that her mother taught her. But she becomes familiar with America without antagonism. Fabiola speaks English instead of Creole at the behest of her aunt and tries to make a place for herself in the school that her cousins also attend.

American luxuries like plush carpets and new clothing, she had lived happily without before. They also lose their lustre when domestic violence, debt, and drug dealing are attached. The crime-fuelled American Dream hasn't brought joy to her aunt's family. Her aunt's husband is long dead, the bond between daughters and mother fraught; Fabiola begins to cook communal meals because no one else is doing it, for example, and I seem to remember that Aunt Jo struggles with addictions locked into her own room while her daughters pursue their own interests. Also, the teenager worries about what her relatives do to keep their lifestyle.

I felt that Fabiola's tale is targeted against American immigration policy. That indeed seems like a worthwhile target. But I think that the last few chapters manage to pack a remarkable multitude of plot — also, that the separation of a child from a parent is not very like the way it presented itself in my own life, i.e. extremely disorientating and weird, or as a deep and severe shock. But I guess we each have our own way of experiencing things, so perhaps it does not mean that the book is not as true-to-life in its dramatic moments as it feels very true in its nostalgia for a (second) home country and its ambivalence toward the mythology of the American Dream (I'm projecting here, because I don't recall the phrase 'American Dream' being used or criticized directly).

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From Virago

The British feminist publisher Virago has tapped into the spirit of turning to classics during the 'silly season' of summer by — in May, not June — re-releasing a set of novels in colourfully patterned paperback editions by Hannah Wood and Yehrin Tong.

So I began reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The author grew up in Florida, studied anthropology in the era of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and became famous as a (periodically rediscovered) novelist who wrote pioneeringly about African-American life. Written in the 1930s about a woman and her fate at the hands of the three men with whom she lives at three different stages of her life, Wikipedia reveals that this novel will not be a cheerful read.

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I also need to read a brace of books that I found while browsing the shelves at the Kulturkaufhaus:
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

After reading the first paragraph or two of a German translation (I think in the Piper Verlag) that's in the bookshelves of a library near the family apartment, I was really pleased with Halldór Laxness's Iceland's Bell and decided that I must read it too.

There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell.

Laxness is good, my mother said when I mentioned this to her, but a bit grim.

"Church in Mosfells valley, Iceland"
July 2005, by M. Morgner
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 license)

And I came home from an antiquarian bookshop with Helga Schalkhäuser's Riccardo Muti: Begegnungen und Gespräche, which at a glance looks like a distressingly hero-worshipping portrait of the Italian conductor, lord of La Scala opera house.

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Meanwhile, I've read the rest of Ronald W. Clark's Einstein biography. Then I visited the street, Haberlandstraße, in a Jewish quarter of Berlin, where Einstein lived as a professor until he fled to the US in the mid-1930s, and where he and his wife Elsa invited guests in the 1920s.

Also, the biography led me to the American journalist Lincoln Barnett's 1940s lay-reader book on the Theory of Special Relativity, Theory of General Relativity, and the unified field theory: The Universe and Dr. Einstein. Heinz Haber's Gefangen in Raum und Zeit came next; it reminded me a bit of Voltaire's tale Micromégas. Now I'm reading Teilchen-Detektoren, a survey of different particle detectors (radioactive particles, electromagnetic waves) that were around in 1971. It is written for Physics students, so I expect to have a headache or two.

But progress is also being made in Alexander von Humboldt's Russian journeys.