Cameron’s Book Round-Up: 2023, third part

We write these on the off-chance that people might click through on the link, go to bookshop, and buy the books (doing so supports us a little bit, and local bookshops a bit more; we like that fact more than we like giving Amazon any more money than we have to.) However, there are two things I’d like to point out and suggest that people donate to help with: the specific state of the internet archive, and the more general case of supporting the rights of transgender people.

First, the Author’s Guild has won a court case against the Internet Archive, and this puts the fate of that incredibly important resource in jeopardy. They’re appealing it, but need funds to continue the fight. You can donate here.

Second, the drumbeat of anti-transgender hate continues in the US (and the UK, but I don’t know what do suggest there.) It’s bad elsewhere in the country, but I’m a resident of Missouri and it’s getting bad here – please consider helping my friends, loved ones, and neighbors with a donation to PROMO, a statewide organization attempting to fight the bills currently on the dock here.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

A novel I taught for my literature class, and which was well-received by my students. It comes in two parts – the first of which is a long monologue from the central character, and the second is the series of events that prompted the monologue, putting his life off-track. In my view, the two parts mirror one another, pivoting around the brieft 11th chapter (the first part is 11 chapters long, the second is 10.) One could see this as describing a cycle, showing a sort of Nietzschean eternal return, except for two problems – first, it came out 21 years before Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, and second, it centers around what I can only describe as a “Larry David character.”

As we have commented upon before, I believe, Dostoevsky is a lot funnier than people give him credit for, and it would be very easy to read this book as a bone-dry take on the adventures of George Costanza in Tsarist Russia. Take, for example, the first chapter of part 2, “Apropos of the Wet Snow”, in which the melancholic central character, a bureaucrat living in Saint Petersburg, on a nightly sojourn, witnesses a bar fight and decides that he wants to involve himself in it, thinking it would help him feel more alive. He fails, and goes searching for another one, but gets cold feet. One of the participants, a cavalry officer, decides he’s in the way and simply picks him up to move him. This enrages the narrator, who spends months stalking this officer, discovering where he likes to go walk, and concocting elaborate scenarios in his head of what will happen when he finally confronts this man and demands satisfaction (he imagines many scenarios, and many of these scenarios feature the other party sobbing and begging forgiveness and pledging friendship; the Underground Man wants to be loved and esteemed, but cannot actually make a connection.) He follows this course of action for a very long time, and decides that the way to start things off would be to walk directly towards him, not step aside, and shoulder-check him, which will no doubt result in a duel. He has to be dressed properly first: he borrows money from his boss to purchase appropriate gloves and a proper collar for his coat, sewing it, himself. Eventually, he manages to shoulder-check the cavalry officer, who doesn’t seem to notice and moves on with his life.

It is then revealed that this happened fourteen years ago, and the narrator still recalls all of the key details and esteems it as important.

This is exactly the sort of thing that this book is about – it is the philosophy of anxiety and the people suffering it; it is a portrait of the self-deceiving, self-obsessed melancholic. I think it’s well worth reading, because how many of us qualify as that these days?

It’s not my favorite book out of this set, but this is my favorite cover out of the lot.

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman.

Sort of a...historic high fantasy? Medieval horror?…novel set during the hundred year’s war. The central character, Thomas, is a former knight who fought – and was nearly killed – at Crécy and lost everything in the settlement afterward, being reduced from landed gentry to wandering brigand. He saves a young girl – who is not named for the first third of the book, but who is later revealed to be named “Delphine” – from being raped and then is compelled by her to travel with her to Avignon.

Throughout the novel, Delphine is presented as an ambiguously holy figure – she is either a saint in the making or a witch, but the things that are chasing her, and which she needs Thomas to protect her from, are certainly worse.

Intercut with this narrative are events in heaven, hell, and other unseen places. God appears to have withdrawn from the world, leaving a godless heaven to defend against attacks on its gates by the bulk of hell’s fallen angels. Only a small number of angels – fallen or upright – are interfering with events on Earth, but even so, the world of human beings is not in a pretty state, being wracked by plague and famine, as well as more uncertain threats.

The author did a great deal of research, and it feels more thoughtful in its orientation than the other work of his that has been reviewed on this website, The Black Tongue Thief (reviewed by Edgar here.)

The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno.

This book is a golden – and early – example of the type of fiction I’ve called afterfiction here on this website. It takes the protagonist from a particular type of fiction (in this case, middle-grade mystery, fiction, like Encyclopedia Brown or similar; off-brand equivalents to the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, et al. appear as well) and imagine their lives long after the fact, after these whiz kids have turned into depressive adults. To a certain extent, the most comprehensively successful of these was The Venture Brothers, a television show that centered on the idiot sons of a former boy adventurer in the mold of Johnny Quest as he grapples with the legacy of his own, Doc Savage-esque father in the ruins of the jet age. The boy detective fails is that, writ small (and it uses the interiority open to it as a novel to make this work.)

The story is fairly simple: Billy Argo, former boy detective, returns to his hometown after a stint in a mental hospital and takes up residence in a halfway house that also plays host to a small number of his former nemeses. Billy is grappling with the suicide of his younger sister and fellow detective, Caroline, who killed herself while Billy was in college, discovering that majoring in criminal justice is far different from being a boy detective.

Billy haunts his hometown like a ghost, working as a wig salesman by phone and trying to solve the mystery of who decapitated his neighbor’s pet rabbit. He cannot solve the mystery of why his sister died. He cannot get the woman he sees picking pockets on the bus out of his mind.

It’s a fun little book. It’s simultaneously meditative and dripping with irony – in that way, it seems to capture the zeitgeist of the time of its publishing nearly perfectly (it came out in 2006, around the time the economic high of the housing bubble was just beginning to show signs that something might be going wrong, and the jingoism of the way on terror was beginning to break like a fever. It was a time when truths could only be spoken sarcastically.)

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga.

Despite the fact that this book is the source for my ludo-analytic writing, I actually felt it was a bit underdeveloped. I’m sure that some fascinating things have been drawn from it by people more clever than I, but I honestly have no specific thoughts on it at the moment to add to what I have said previously.

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami.

The fourth book in the trilogy(?) of the Rat, which began with Hear the Wind Sing, continued in Pinball, 1973 (these two reviewed here), and appeared to conclude in A Wild Sheep Chase (reviewed here). There are some things to recommend this book, but I happen to think that the good is outweighed by the bad here (thus far, it’s the only of Murakami’s long fiction to elicit this reaction from me.)

The good: it features Murakami reckoning with the relative disposability of his female characters before then – all through the trilogy of the Rat, in Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Norwegian Wood. The fact that he does this while the narrator and the serial killer that killed his ex-girlfriend are eating dinner together in a Shakey’s Pizza is distasteful and perhaps holding himself up as the object of mockery. It also represented one of the more coherent pictures and theorizations of the metaphysical underpinnings of his works (much like Borges, while there isn’t a coherent world presented, there is a mythological structure that underpins the work, and a series of repeated signs and symbols that elucidate this – for more on that, see The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami, which I reviewed here.)

The bad: the narrator, who is a man on the verge of middle age, who we have followed through three novels, spends a fair amount of time hanging out with a junior-high-aged girl, and seems to have some romantic charge in his dealings with her. This, on the whole, was discomfiting and I wish that he had handled that whole situation differently. The fact that it’s a non-physical relationship makes it slightly better, but it was a type of emotional intimacy that seemed strange to present between the two characters: I didn’t need that in there, I don’t think anyone really needed that in there; it made the narrator seem less sympathetic, and going from that to his aforementioned dinner-conversation-with-a-serial-killer-in-a-Shakey’s-pizza almost made me put the book down; to the point where I stuck with it principally out of a desire to be completionist.

That’s because, while I picked it up to finish the trilogy of the Rat, I realized partway through that it and Sputnik Sweetheart were the last two Murakami novels I had yet to read from before 1Q84 (I still that need to read Killing Commendatore, but that’s for later.)

Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds.

I wanted something speculative after that last one, so I grabbed the last of Alastair Reynold’s Revenger books. Bone Silence seems like the last of the trilogy (I’ve reviewed the first two, Revenger, here, and Shadow Captain, here), and it is an interesting enough ending – I could see him returning to the series, but it seems to me that it’s protagonists, the Ness sisters, are done.

After the events of the prior novel, the economy of the Congregation – the collection of small, artificial worlds around the sun – is in turmoil, and it’s been pinned on the Ness sisters, so they find themselves and the small crew they have collected. The only thing that can save them – as they have been labeled pirates and outlaws – is to fundamentally change the situation around the Old Sun by uncovering the mysteries of the quoins (the currency that may or may not be a machine holding the consciousness of a destroyed alien race) and the Occupations (the mysterious disappearance and reemergence of humanity in the Congregation.)

It’s a fairly satisfying conclusion. Reynolds does an excellent job of both respecting science and presenting a fun little romp. Most of the plot he goes into was seemingly designed with the purpose of being (a) scientifically plausible and (b) legible as conversant with pirate fiction. On both accounts, he succeeded. Recommended, but check out the prior two, as well.

Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks.

Okay, Revenger was fun, but it was YA fiction. Now, I felt like eating my vegetables, and drilled down to read Teaching to Transgress. The theory of teaching is derived from the pedagogy of the oppressed talked about by Paulo Freire in the book of the same name (reviewed by me here.)

I found hooks’s own articulation of it to be much clearer than Freire’s – not, mind you, necessarily better, but easier for me to understand. This might have been a result of the translation I listened to, or possibly to my manner of reading it (I think I would get more out of both books in print than in audiobook format.)

There is a lot here that challenged me – I fear, reading hooks and Freire, that I might be a bad instructor. Of course, recognizing this is the first step towards changing it. I fear, though, that while the Critical Pedagogy they discuss is something that the full professors who sit above me in the hierarchy no doubt view as laudable and good, there are two main problems: the fact that it seems as if it would be impossible for me to “get it” without having an example to work off of, and also that it seems like the exact sort of thing that would get an instructor canned by the administration.

With all understanding to my colleagues who are trying to do the right thing and make the programs they teach in as good as they can possibly be, contemporary education seems to me to be about the bureaucratic achievement of certain goals. Much like how one couldn’t get entrance into graduate school without the GRE, but one’s scores on the GRE didn’t matter, many students seem to view it as a kind of “asshole tax” – i.e., an arbitrarily imposed drain on time, energy, or resources that is meant to be paid to show one’s commitment to a course of action. Critical pedagogy, which is meant to engage students in a process of becoming aware of the metaphorical water in which they swim, seems like a perfect antidote to this.

Unfortunately, singing the praises of something, describing its theory, and demonstrating its practice in a way that can be broken down and reassembled in a coherent way is something that critical thinking – much less critical pedagogy – cannot be subjected to without destroying what makes it work. This is part of what I was trying to grasp in my piece for last week, but I think that I won’t really “get it” without more research.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman.

I didn’t know that I’d experienced any of Grossman’s writing before (though we’ve both reviewed a number of his brother’s works), but apparently he’s had a long history of writing for video games, including the first System Shock game, the original Deus Ex, and some on my to-be-played list (Dishonored), all of which have been praised for their writing. There’s a certain commonality between his approach to fiction and the video games that he wrote for – a kind of unselfconscious humor that is too dry to really be “wacky” but avoids the irony-poisoning that one might expect from such things.

This is a work of superhero fiction, centered around supervillain Doctor Impossible (a kind of bargain bin Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom), though it alternates between his perspective and that of cybernetic superhero Fatale. Fatale, despite being a fusion-powered cyborg is new to everything, and so grounds the fiction by being a bit of an audience surrogate in places. Impossible, however, is the star of the show. His endless, compulsive quest for world domination – caused by his “Malign Hypercognition Disorder”, which is essentially the condition of being a mad scientist recast as a DSM-IV-TR (it was written in 2008) diagnosis – lends him a sisyphean air, and the fact that he is being hunted by superhuman and godlike foes gives him a certain underdog quality that makes him compelling.

The one real downside is that it’s a book, honestly. We have loved some superhero fiction in the past (we both raved about Hench, reviewed by Edgar here and me here) but, frankly, I’m beginning to think that really good prose superhero fiction is about on the level of a mid-tier comic book or graphic novel, because so much of the genre has such a visual angle to it – typography (for print) and vocal performance (for audiobook) doesn’t really cut it. The spectacle becomes denatured.

Soon I will Be Invincible might be one of the pinnacles of superhero prose fiction, and I heartily recommend it, if only because it treats the subject with the right mix of seriousness and humor to actually make it work (I loved the bit where Grossman described a super-powered fight as essentially being in a series of near-deadly car accidents, and the way that plays upon the human nervous system.)

Generally speaking, highly recommended, with the caveat that the genre and format, itself, have limitations that I’m not sure that any author would be able to overcome.

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber.

Back to the vegetables – and I don’t want you to imagine that’s a bad thing here. This was a quick bite of brussels sprouts with balsamic and red pepper: small, delicious, and filling (I need to go get dinner after I’ve posted this.)

When we lost David Graeber in 2020, it was a parasocial thing for me. I had grown to love his books, and I lamented that no more would be published. Thankfully, some of his work is still in the pipeline, but it’s a limited resource. I’ll be honest, as much as I liked this book, I might not have thought to pick it up if I weren’t looking for more of Graeber’s writing to experience.

It is, more than anything else, a history of European pirates in Madagascar, with an eye towards the relationship between the pirates and their Malagasy neighbors. Graeber’s own history with Malagasy culture, and his recent explorations – detailed in The Dawn of Everything with David Wengrow – of early discussions between indigenous and European people, and the critiques that were made of European culture, mean that this feels like an exceptionally long, cut chapter from the early part of The Dawn of Everything.

The essential thesis that Graeber puts forward is that early pirate settlement resulted in a conflict and then a creolization, creating a kind of “internal outsider” in Malagasy culture (the Zana-Malata) as a result of active efforts by malagasy women who married into the pirate settlements. This interchange – which brought not just European, but also Caribbean, culture into the Malagasy sphere – kicked off an early, proto-Enlightenment democratic experiment. This is in opposition to what many people write about the Zana-Malata and the early “hero figure” Ratsimilaho (who is described as being an absolute monarch) – but Graeber argues convincingly, and with personal experience of Malagasy culture.

Am I necessarily convinced? Well, no – I don’t know enough about Malagasy culture to be convinced one way or another. Graeber tells a fascinating story, and cites many sources, but all of my knowledge of Madagascar comes from anecdotes he’s told, which means that I’ve got a grand total of one source. I generally trust his scholarship, but I’m skeptical of my trust in that scholarship, if that makes sense.

In any case, I might do more reading on Madagascar and Malagasy culture (I know enough people obsessed with Japan and England, maybe I should become fascinated by a less-imperialist island nation), and treat this story as a fascinating story until I learn more.

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami.

And we reach our end – the last Murakami novel (other than his most recent) I have left to read before I’m caught up on his long-form fiction. Sputnik Sweetheart is an interesting one – it fits into a gap between his first real epic, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which marked a turning point in his career, and Kafka on the Shore, which marked the maturity of the third phase of his career.

As an aside – in my reasoning – the first phase includes his “nameless novels”, the trilogy of the Rat and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; the second phase is when he begins to name his protagonists, but is still largely concerned with atomistic stories focused in individual experience: Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, and South of the Border, West of the Sun. In the third phase he moves in to a more socially-responsible-but-still-individually-motivated stance. Things begin to get a bit weird around the time he published 1Q84; I suspect that marks the transition into a fourth phase, but I’ll need to read Killing Commendatore and give it some thought, though. It’s hard to characterize such things in-process, but it’s entirely possible that his forthcoming The City and its Uncertain Walls might be the watershed of this particular phase or, potentially, the first work of a fifth phase.

Sputnik Sweetheart, though, is a work shaking off cobwebs. At that point in his career, it seems to me, Murakami was trying to figure out who he was as a writer. He’s long been at odds with the Japanese literary establishment, notably refusing to give interviews to Japanese publishers and broadcasters. He thinks of himself as a world author, and this is the only of his works I can think of that take place substantially outside of Japan (there is a long digression to Hawaii in Dance Dance Dance, as well as a non-Japanese character who is key to that section of the plot, but it’s a few chapters, while this is more than half of the novel.)

The novel’s plot is fairly simple for most of it. The narrator, K, is an elementary school teacher, recounting a story that largely concerns his friend Sumire, who is an aspiring writer. Sumire is taken under the wing of an older Korean-Japanese (again, an internal outsider; a resident alien) woman who goes by Miu. Sumire is recruited as her assistant, and is later brought along on a trip to Europe. The two of them (Miu and Sumire) end up on a small Greek island where Sumire disappears. At this point, K is brought in to help look for her.

The plot could have been done fairly straightforwardly, but it stays wrapped up in Murakami’s patented metaphysics, where the underworld and the collective unconscious are mixed together into a strange and potentially dangerous other world.

I liked this book much better than I did Dance Dance Dance, though Murakami’s handling of the homoeroticism between Sumire and Miu felt somewhat clumsy – I feel like this was kind of rough draft of the character of Kafka on the Shore’s transmasculine librarian, Oshima, whose character was much more fully and interestingly drawn than that of either Sumire or Miu. I get the sense that Murakami might have difficulty understanding queer issues. Of course, this was a. written in the late 1990s, b. from a cultural perspective that I have heard about but haven’t experienced closer than second-hand, and c., was also translated in the 1990s, so I’m more than willing to give him a pass, personally. He was trying when very few other people were, so we can forgive him for not being 100% correct.

Of the two, I would recommend this one over Dance Dance Dance, though I think I’ll always have soft spots for After Dark and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World as my favorites of his work.

Sometime soon, I’ll read through Killing Commendatore and finish reading Underground,and then I’ll have read through all of his long-form prose that I feel compelled to read at the moment (his work on running, I’m sure, is quite fine, but it’s not really a topic that directly interests me; I am, though, open to being persuaded.)

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