The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fascinating. It gave me a six month obsession with the Neverland that is North Korea.

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The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Religion of Good Writing

Incomparable Bloom. Inspiring and informative in equal (and large) measure. Bloom's religion is literature; this is its originating text. Don't miss it.

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Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mixing Metaphors Is Dangerous Business

Theology, Harold Bloom recognises, is a style of poetry, mostly bad and often dangerous, especially when it starts up-ending established metaphors. Christian theology presents itself as commentary on foundational texts called the Bible. But these foundational texts are also poetic; they are theology not uninterpreted description. This is something which causes consternation to the theologians who wish to 'stabilise' sacred scriptures by fixing their meaning in order that theological thought can move on.

Literary criticism in the hands of a master like Harold Bloom breaks through the limits imposed by the discipline of theology. Specifically, literary criticism ignores theological intention. It doesn't care about faith or foundational texts. All texts are derivative. All texts are infinitely interpretable. The text, its characters, the coherence of its plot, its stylistic merits are the phenomena of interest, not its purported referent, God.

The question that Bloom poses is therefore literary: How does the mischievous, slightly insane character of Yahweh, one of the Hebrew divine names, become the sedate, unseen, somewhat redundant God the Father and his stand-in, Jesus the Christ, of the New Testament?

From a literary perspective, Yahweh is the supreme fiction created by any civilisation, anywhere, at any time. The only rival, according to Bloom, is Shakespeare's King Lear, who is clearly modelled on him. Yahweh is the protagonist of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, but not of the Christian Old Testament, which has high-jacked Yahweh as a character and re-cast him entirely.

The co-optation of Yahweh was possible because of the poetic nature of scripture. The dominant trope in theology is metaphor. Metaphors are malleable. Twist one component and the relationship among terms shifts in myriad ways. Yahweh of the Tanakh is a warrior, a somewhat irascible, often needy entity, who comes and goes without explanation. During his period of guiding the Israelites through the desert to the promised land he appears to go a little mad. He stands, sword in hand with Joshua at Jericho and directs the destruction of thousands of innocents from time to time. This is the God, Yahweh, of irony and hyperbole.

Shift the emphasis from war and unpredictability to unlimited power, however, and there is a totally transcendent entity with only the most distant relationship with his creation. Re-interpret petulant jealousy as fatherly concern and frustration with his children, we then have an intense regal love which is constant. Understand that apparent mass murder is part of a grand master plan and the bloodshed is subsumed within an eternal mystery in which we must maintain faith. This is God the Father of the Christian Trinity, a God of omnipotence, omniscience, and of total impassivity. Not the character Yahweh. Different play. Different script.

This poetic process of metaphorical transformation applies equally to the person of Jesus. Bloom counts at least seven different Jesuses in the New or, as he prefers, Belated Covenant. Jesus is, among others, the pious Jewish man who continues the traditions of the Tanakh as suggested in the Epistle of James. He is visibly transformed through the mysterious and ambiguous metaphor Son of God in the gospel of Mark. And most dramatically he is cast as the overwhelmingly metaphoric Word, the eternally present companion of God in the gospel of John.

This last metaphor is sufficiently powerful to replace even the Tanakh itself as the focus of worship. Bloom is quite explicit in his appreciation of the intent: "The entire argument of the Belated Testament is that a man has replaced scripture." And not just scripture: Jesus’s remark “Before Abraham was I am” is a clear literary dig at Yahweh himself who self-identified in the Tanakh as ehyeh asher ehyer, “I am Who am.”

The literary process reaches another local high point in the gospel of John. As Bloom correctly notes, "There is very little basis in the Synoptics [the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] for the runaway Christianity [and anti-Semitism] of John....The central irony, for anyone who is not a Christian believer, is that the living Jesus of the Synoptics does NOT believe he is the Incarnation of Yahweh, and least of all at the moment of his death..." Thus there is a great deal of necessary back-filling theologically speaking, which will continue for several hundred years.

This process of literary transformation is triggered by Paul of Tarsus, a Jew who had never met Jesus but created a movement in his name. Jesus of Nazareth is entirely replaced by Paul with Jesus Christ, who is not to be known but simply 'believed on.' He has neither biography nor history that we can rely on.

As the protagonist of the New Testament Jesus Christ eclipses, or upstages, God the Father. The script laid out by Paul doesn't even have the Father in a walk-on part. Paul in fact conducts a very forceful aesthetic war, not against Yahweh whom he dares not attack, but against the vulnerable Moses, his go-to guy.

In Paul's hands Moses doesn't even rate second-billing. He's yesterday's news. Paul mis-quotes where he can and slanderously mis-interprets where he can't. Bloom can't resist Frederick Nietzsche's take on Paul:

"Paul is the incarnation of a type which is the reverse of that of the Saviour: he is the genius in hatred, in the standpoint of hatred, and in the relentless logic of hatred...What he wanted was power: with St. Paul the priest again aspired to power."

Bloom's own opinion of Paul is only slightly less heated: "Paul is an obsessed crank, who confuses anyone attempting a dispassionate stance toward him."

Bloom's objective in the book is to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, and Yahweh are three totally incompatible literary personages. That he succeeds is without doubt. He leaves the theological implications of this incompatibility largely to the reader.

Addendum

The day after posting this review an interesting academic pre-quel showed up in my internet feed. Although written from a theological not a literary perspective, it confirms Bloom's hypothesis of the metaphorical development of the idea of Yahweh out of the previous names of God in the ancient Middle East:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...

This is the abstract:

It is often taken for granted today that the differing terms for God in the Hebrew Bible function as synonyms, although, originally, not all terminology used for God referred to the same deity. This article provides an overview of the terms El, Yahweh, and Elohim, which are all equated today, and a hypothetical reconstruction of when these terms came to prominence in Ancient Israel. After plotting and considering the contribution of each term to the development of monotheism in Israel, which ultimately laid the foundation for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the following analysis considers some of the ensuing implications for communities of faith today when relating to their differing faith traditions.

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The Book of J 
by 

Harold Bloom (Interpreter), 

 

David Rosenberg (Translator), 

 

Jahwist

Literary Chutzpah

Biblical scholars have been arguing for two and a half centuries about who wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Several things are agreed upon: it wasn’t Moses. It wasn’t a single individual. And it wasn’t written over a single lifetime. Beyond that things get sticky.

One of the hypothetical writers (four, or more if one counts all the editors) recognised by scholars is known as the Yahwist, or J for short. But no one is sure if J’s was the core around which others added. Nor is there agreement about which parts of the Pentateuch are firmly attributable to J. And there are alternative views that range over as much as 500 years about when J wrote. In fact, it is apparently impossible to determine if J is one person or many people writing in a similar style. Despite intense academic scrutiny there has been increasing divergence rather than growing expert consensus in recent years.



Given all this fundamental uncertainty about J, from his (or her) existence to his contribution, one might suppose that a modern literary critic who is not an expert in the subtleties of ancient Middle Eastern language, history and religious culture might be hesitant to express a professional opinion about him. But that’s only because they don’t know Harold Bloom. 

Bloom believes he knows precisely who J is: an educated woman of standing in Judaic society. He knows when she wrote: during the reign of King Solomon as a participant in his court. And he knows why she wrote: to establish a particular view about dynastic legitimacy. He also detects other things generations of scholars have failed to see: most importantly a pervasive irony in J’s writing which is the key to her real intention.

There can be little doubt that Bloom has a justified confidence in his skill in the interpretation of literary texts. It is unlikely that anyone has had a greater impact on the understanding of most of the major texts in the English language. But the jump he makes from the world of modern English to the ancient world of Hebrew and Greek texts in his conclusions about J seem more than a bridge too far. 

Bloom wrote the book in collaboration with David Rosenberg, a scholar who selected what he believes are the fragments of J scattered in the Pentateuch (mainly in the book of Genesis). This he translated and included in Bloom's book. As a critique of this translation, Blooms observations are perhaps warranted. However, as an interpretation of key parts of the Pentateuch, Bloom's is simply a pretence.

Bloom’s conclusions can’t be considered as anything more than poetic but unschooled fancy. He argument is an interesting narrative, but it ignores the mass of information that has been assembled by dedicated professional people for over two hundred years. He uses this information selectively and, often tendentiously, where he uses it at all. 

Although the Pentateuch is certainly a literary document it is unlike any work of modern literature. It has been worked and re-worked, cut and pasted, edited (often badly) and more or less forced into the form we have received. Its purposes, political as well as theological, style and language are so heterogeneous that it is unlikely that the scholarly project to unravel its original bits will ever be completed. Bloom hasn't changed that situation in the least.

 

Christine Falls (Quirke, #1) 
by 

Benjamin Black, 

 

John Banville

 

The Law As Enemy

In the long ago past of an Ireland still ruled by the Church, when people actually said things like “Have you a cigarette itself to lend me?” and called policemen ‘peelers’, there lived an alcoholic consultant pathologist, with persistently questionable taste in women, named Quirke. As idiosyncratic as his name implies, most days he has a constant buzz on from whiskey, gin, or wine. It is fortunate therefore that he doesn’t have much to do with living patients. Not so fortunate, at least for him, that he antedates the Boys From Brazil.

The plot depends crucially on an unarticulated Irish cultural prejudice: that the Law in both its substance and its enforcement is an English invention intended to oppress. This prejudice is what allows Mr. Quirke to tolerate not just death and murder but his own near demise while concealing crucial evidence from the police. Without this thin, almost invisible premise, what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, of the alienation from Law, Christine Falls would fall flat for lack of suspenseful narrative. 

But while creating the story, the persistence of alienation from Law does leave the reader continuously frustrated and puzzled. What must it take to provoke Quirke to seek a civilised solution to the problem in which he chooses to immerse himself? If it's that important to him, it would seem verging on the psychotic not to enrol the legal resources that are close at hand. Hitchcock had much more plausible MacGuffins.

Ah but ultimately who am I to judge the judgement of such a magnificent writer as John Banville? After all he kept me avidly reading right to the last page.

 

All the Names 
by 

José Saramago, 

 

Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

 

Registered Redemption

Most of Saramago's themes are found here: death, the community of the living and the dead, the beautiful uncertainty and fluidity of language, the ultimately indecipherable complexity of human communication, identity, the search for meaning. 

Saramago would probably have reacted harshly to the suggestion that he had created (perhaps 'outlined' is a better verb, but then again perhaps there is no adequate word at all) a sort of religion without a deity, the core of which is a humble irony laced with wit and grace. Then again perhaps he wouldn't object too forcefully; there are worse religious beliefs. 

Saramago’s point is after all to redeem, through a kind of communal registration and remembrance, the existence of every one of the unique human species that has become extinct. For, as Aquinas taught so eloquently, each human being is indeed a distinct species and deserves recognition as such. It deserves its proper name.*

*Proust had a similar theme in the third volume of his Lost Time. It would be interesting to know if Saramago was influenced by him in All the Names.See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 
Or then again, who knows, it could have been the Mormons. I’m open about it.

The Cave by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Making Words Visible

A love story for the elderly? A Lovecraftian fantasy? A documentary about craft pottery-making? A family saga of Portuguese modernity? Well actually The Cave is all of these and more as Saramago crosses genre boundaries with his usual and unique style to create a remarkably readable philosophical novel. What binds the book together is Saramago's lifelong concern about words. The Cave is an exploration of how much we can trust words. His answer is: Just about as far as we can throw them. Many of us are familiar with his suspicion of language, that...

"...vague obscure feeling of being part of something dangerously complex and, so to speak, full of slippery meanings, a whole made up of parts in which each individual is, simultaneously, both one of the parts and the whole of which he is a part."

The one-word description of how Saramago treats words is 'delicacy'. Not just delicacy in written description, but how we as human beings are delicate in our use of words with each other in everyday life. Delicacy is far too delicate for crude philosophical dialectic. In real relationships delicacy doesn't depend on conflict but on appreciation and the holding of conflict in suspension.

Patience not decisiveness is required for delicacy to emerge. It takes time to sweep in and collect what is said with what is unsaid. How so much unsaid in fact goes into making the words that are said. And how much of the unsaid is communicated very effectively indeed through what is said. Delicacy demands a sort of spiritual stance:

"...some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters."

Dogs know this. Which is a good reason for making a dog one of The Cave's central characters. Dogs are able to reduce what are - to humans - complex patterns of speech to simple emotional conditions - happiness, meditativeness, anxiety, frustration - and leave it at that. Dogs have only a limited repertoire in responding to delicacy, however; mainly they just remain attentive to it. Human beings go the step beyond and, at their best, respond delicately to delicacy with remarkable finesse.

Human wordiness is the bridge of relationship, even when, perhaps especially when, words are withheld. Words obviously have power: to move, to instruct, to reconcile. In a sense they are the essence of humanness. Or rather, it is what we do with words that makes us human: we play:

".....what you call playing with words is just a way of making them more visible."

It is when words become invisible, that is indistinguishable from reality, that they become a danger to humanity, and to the rest of the world. Words used indelicately, even unintentionally, can hurt. They can distort what is real, especially by crudely mendacious mis-naming. They can cause unnecessary anxiety, even when they are meaningless, or especially when they are meaningless jargon. In the mouths of those who want to dominate us, they of course can be devastating, perhaps lethal. Saramago makes visible the nonsense of contemporary ad-speak:

"You're our best customer but don't tell your neighbour."

The skill required to make the power and limitations of verbal and written communication visible, and to make them in turn equal with the variety of other symbolic ways we express ourselves, to ourselves as well as to others, is immense:

"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be of knowing, recognising and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."

Even greater skill is required to use words to describe these basic skills of controlling language. At this Saramago is an undisputed master. His guiding principle is clear:

"...we must never violate what constitutes the exclusive and essential character of a person, that is, his personality, his way of being, his own unmistakable nature. A character can be full of contradictions, but [it is ] never incoherent..."

It is this basic presumption, that human beings, always and everywhere, are pursuing purpose, even when they appear to be floundering, that is the core of Saramago's work, nowhere better stated than in The Cave. Thus he shows the profound connection between our appreciation of words, aesthetics; and our appreciation of other people, ethics. Remarkable indeed.

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The Aleph and Other Stories 
by 

Jorge Luis Borges

 

Down and Out in Lovecraft and Borges

At some point (but not today) I intend to do a review of Borges and Lovecraft together. Not to say anything important but merely to understand how they depend on one another. I think it is clear that Borges borrowed from Lovecraft. And I think it is just as clear that we read Lovecraft in light of what Borges did with the genre of fantasy/horror. 

At least a half dozen stories have been identified by readers as ‘cross-overs’ as it were from Lovecraft to Borges. And it is difficult to conceive of an interpretation of the genre that doesn’t presume the philosophical challenges put by Borges. But I think the influences may be much more widely seen in the detail of the stories. 

One obvious connection is the way both authors use the Arabic world, and Islam especially, as a focus for spiritual mystery. Borges admitted to trying to write in the Arabic tradition during a seminar in the 1970's. Lovecraft flirted with Islam in his young adulthood and clearly is familiar with Islamic, particularly Sufi, mythology. 

Another connection between the two authors is their use of space in a story to represent spiritual awakening, often in an inverted form: Lovecraft tends downward, inward into the earth and to the South when he enters the realm of the soul, hell, and fear. Perhaps this reflects his New England upbringing and the remnants of Puritan myth. Borges also goes downward but then typically rises upwards and puts his most primitive worlds in the North. Could the swamps and relative wildness of Uruguay and the Ibera Wetlands be a sort of gnostic symbol of earthly chaos directly opposed to Protestant certainties? 

Who knows, maybe in my twilight years something will emerge.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Deep Inside Lisbon

How is it possible to combine Kafka, Proust, and Borges to create something entirely unique and compelling? Only Saramago knows for sure. With him Portugal is the home of Everyman who copes with the quotidian as well as the bizarre with panache and fortitude. As an incidental benefit, Ricardo Reis also provides a synopsis of Iberian literary history as well as an interesting travelogue of Lisbon. Read this with Google Earth at hand as he takes you round Baixa and Rossio.

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Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Triest in Trieste

An amazing tour de force of sustained irony, sending up everything from male feelings of superiority to psychoanalysis.

It is, I suppose, never easy being a successful businessman; or for that matter even an unsuccessful one. Dealing with the vagaries of commercial life on top of the usual quanta of personal tensions is bound to produce certain idiosyncrasies and, well, 'tics' in a person of taste and discernment. Just look at Donald Trump.

What better way to expiate these little personality defects than a sort of literary therapy? Write it all down so it becomes visible, conscious, and therefore subject to the will. Again, let Trump be our guide.

Ah, if it were only that straightforward. One's life is just so....intractable, implacable. One feels like one is in the midst of a more or less permanent sigh. Without Twitter it was of course infeasible to be fully virile in Trieste of the 1920's And that's not even considering the possibility of man-flu.

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América by Franz Kafka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Certainly not his best work but it has value.

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The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Human Genius

Dmitri Shostakovich is a human being. Really. He's a hero at the very same time he's a coward, a steadfast lover and a cad, a musical genius and a hack, a prodigy and a parvenu. He is what he has to be to survive in a society that considers him a tool. And who of us escapes that fate or the personal and professional compromises demanded by it? Nevertheless at least some, like Shostakovich, can be heard above the noise of their time. I recommend listening to the Piano Quintet in G minor, or even better, the Eighth Symphony if you have the time, while reading Barnes's biographical novel to get a fuller meaning of his text.

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The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx by Arthur Nersesian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fraternal Revenge

If you hate the man who created, over a period of four decades, the transportation chaos and suburban sprawl of New York City, namely Robert Moses, as much as I do (see Robert Caro's The Power Broker for details), read this book for some literary affirmation and a sense of revenge. This is the second of Nersesian's intended 'Five Books of Moses'.

Moses is the dedicated civil servant who, among many other atrocities, made the South Bronx uninhabitable by running the Cross Bronx Expressway through the middle of it in the 1960's. Unelected and unaccountable except to himself, he 'circumcised' the borough against its will and created arguably the densest traffic jam in America.

Few know that Robert had an older brother, Paul, who had also graduated Yale (as an electrical engineer). For reasons that only a Sigmund Freud might understand, Robert, through his positions of political power, ensured that Paul was unemployable in NYC. Through his family power, given him through his mother's pointedly vengeful will, he denied Paul an inheritance that would have allowed him to save his own business. Paul died in utter poverty aged 80 in a New York slum.

Paul Moses is appropriately the protagonist of The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx. He offends the family by falling for a Mexican shiksa (named Rothschild!). Upon returning to the US, Paul takes up residence in the Bronx along the intended route of his brother's road. As in his actual life, things do not turn out well for Paul. There is little else to do than become more bitter and twisted as his brother moves from success to success.

Robert Moses was an all-round bastard. He deserves a little literary vilification. One can only hope brother Paul is resting easier in his grave.

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wonderful...at half the length. Donna needs a domineering editor.

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The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx by Arthur Nersesian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fraternal Revenge

If you hate the man who created, over a period of four decades, the transportation chaos and suburban sprawl of New York City, namely Robert Moses, as much as I do (see Robert Caro's The Power Broker for details), read this book for some literary affirmation and a sense of revenge. This is the second of Nersesian's intended 'Five Books of Moses'.

Moses is the dedicated civil servant who, among many other atrocities, made the South Bronx uninhabitable by running the Cross Bronx Expressway through the middle of it in the 1960's. Unelected and unaccountable except to himself, he 'circumcised' the borough against its will and created arguably the densest traffic jam in America.

Few know that Robert had an older brother, Paul, who had also graduated Yale (as an electrical engineer). For reasons that only a Sigmund Freud might understand, Robert, through his positions of political power, ensured that Paul was unemployable in NYC. Through his family power, given him through his mother's pointedly vengeful will, he denied Paul an inheritance that would have allowed him to save his own business. Paul died in utter poverty aged 80 in a New York slum.

Paul Moses is appropriately the protagonist of The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx. He offends the family by falling for a Mexican shiksa (named Rothschild!). Upon returning to the US, Paul takes up residence in the Bronx along the intended route of his brother's road. As in his actual life, things do not turn out well for Paul. There is little else to do than become more bitter and twisted as his brother moves from success to success.

Robert Moses was an all-round bastard. He deserves a little literary vilification. One can only hope brother Paul is resting easier in his grave.

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The Vicar of Justin by Louis Auchincloss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

His best, although the title on my copy includes Rector not Vicar. Perhaps a more Anglican tone is suggested by the latter. In any case this is a book about the fate of all human endeavour: ultimate failure no matter what the motivation. But under Auchicloss's direction this isn't depressing, merely human. The society we inhabit is unavoidably political and draws us all into political compromise incrementally. Our ideals are transformed in the process, often paradoxically to precisely those they opposed. Disaster and tragedy are avoided only because consequences, often beneficial in ways we do not intend and of which we have no awareness, result. Auchincloss is a master of the East Coast upper class and its trials. Incredibly, we are drawn into this world of casually accepted privilege and find that it too includes humane human beings.

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A World Of Profit: A Novel by Louis Auchincloss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Wall Street Got Nasty

In addition to being an important piece of American literature, A World of Profit is a memoir of an historic milestone in American business. But it's never had a written review or a summary (or even an avatar) on GR. Shameful.

Almost all of Auchincloss's considerable oeuvre is concerned with the cultural transition that took place in New York professional society after WW II. As a successful corporate lawyer and socialite there could have hardly been anyone better placed to document the sometimes subtle shifts in power and influence that were occurring, first in NYC and then progressively throughout the country. Auchincloss was the Samuel Johnson of his time and place.

I have a personal interest in The World of Profit because much of it involves an old house in an area called College Point near Flushing in Queens County, an area thick with my forebears who flowed into it at the end of the 19th century from Ireland. The protagonist is, appropriately in the age of Trump senior, a parvenue property developer who wants to demolish the house, which is owned by a modestly wealthy 'old money' family, and create a 'complex'.

Auchincloss is always careful about taking sides in the transition from the old gentlemanly (all male at the time of course), word-is-my-bond, virtually hereditary holders of legal and financial power in the City, and the new, aggressive, disruptive, unconventional, often even Jewish(!) entrants into upper class bastions. He is careful to note the prejudices and idiosyncrasies of both those on the way up and those on the way out.

One way to characterise what Auchincloss describes is a fundamental shift from the aesthetic to the economic, or more precisely the financial, in the culture of the time. Although old-fashioned investment bankers and stock brokers and corporate lawyers certainly had a standard living much more comfortable than their fellow citizens, manners not money was the standard of acceptability. This had been the case since at least the reign of the robber barons of the turn of the 20th century. It is the society of William James, particularly in its gentility and its European affinities.

What Auchincloss sees is this ideological change which he aptly captures in his title. The morals of society are less and less those of conventional politeness and more and more about the correct use of capital. And not one's own capital but capital as a force in the world, with its distinctly non-politesse purposes. This new world is one that rejects good behaviour on principle because it is inefficient. Auchincloss occasionally mourns the loss but he doesn't condemn the new regime outright.

I think Auchincloss's observations are as important to modern American society as de Tocqueville's were to an understanding of the American idea of itself. Not only America but most of the world seems to be living out the legacy of the cultural transition that began, and I risk provincialism here but I think justifiably, in New York society. The only real evidence I can offer for this hypothesis is an extraordinary study published in 2009 by Karen Ho. But that indeed might be enough to make the case: Ho, Karen Zouwen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press ; Chesham : Combined Academic [distributor].

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The Double by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quantum Physics of Identity

"Only a common sense with the imagination of a poet could have invented the wheel." Not a bad self-referential summary of Saramago's The Double.

This book is common sense and imagination applied to human identity and the result is a literary wheel turning round and round in the minds of two apparently identical individuals. Is one merely a copy of the other? Are their fates entangled like quantum particles? Do they become parts of the other simply by knowing of the other's existence? How random is life anyway?

Once again Saramago creates a situation in which to explore the oddness of being alive and knowing it.

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Death with Interruptions by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lethal But Not Morbid

A great theological/philosophical book of ideas about how human beings deal with death - as a concept as well as their own individual fate. Saramago knows what most of us know but don't know how to say. He knows how politicians and academics and policemen and peasants talk and what they mean when they talk, which is often the opposite of what they say. And his gentle irony accepts the fact that we all lie by inevitable omission every time we utter a sound. So death for example may be lethal but perhaps it is not morbid. Perhaps it too can be embraced in life.

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The Provocateur by René Victor Pilhes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A generation ahead of its time. A must read in business lit.

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