UNESCO Part XIII

When I read a book like Arthur Schendel's L'homme de l'eau, I say to myself that it is for such books that I read the UNESCO list. It is the story of a Dutchman of the last century, who finds his personal sense of religion amidst the Calvinist fundamentalists in his family, falls in love with a Catholic girl and raises a son with him, repeatedly gives away his inheritances to live according to the values he professes, and dies drowning after rescuing his dog. There are unforgettable scenes here, of people evacuating after the dikes are breached ("What have we done to offend God!" cry the old women), of poverty and steadfastness. Schendel truly has immortalized the stoicism and strength of his countrymen. I found it moving and I also felt I understood even the modern day Dutch better for it.

I also read Prus' La poupee, a serial that reads like a 19th century Polish soap opera. Contrary to the expectations I held through just about 1000 pages, the guy dies and the girl enters a convent. It certainly defined my expectations. There was also anti-semitism aplenty, something I would have thought the Polish government of the era (this was translated in 1961) would have been at greater pains to conceal.

Finally, I also read to day Osman Lins' Le fleau et la pierre, a novel about rural Brazil. I thought the opening terrific, and it is filled with psychological truth, but I can't say I was gripped.

UNESCO Part XII

I read De Gaulle's Fil de l'epee, an interwar essay on the military. As my partner Tony ably put it: "How many ways can you say: "I'm important!"?" What stands out for me is the line, roughly translated, which reads: "Men can no more go without leadership than they can go without food or water." And who is going to provide that leadership, may we ask, Charles?

I also read L'exclu by Constantin Toiu. Translated from the Romanian and published as a monster hit in the totalitarian period, I don't understand why it wasn't banned. Granted the protagonist slowly grows to become a dissident in his own thoughts, and the scene with an interrogator is a masterpiece of political jousting. It's towering, but otherwise it's fairly pedestrian. I wonder if it isn't context, if the book wasn't different with its slow hints compared the drivel allowed by officialdom at the time.

I also read Le cousin Basilio, a Portuguese novel, by Eça de Queiros, which didn't make much of an impression on me.

Rum Island by Simon Vestdjik was a standard historical romance, except that it was written in Dutch about the Dutch West Indies. There was no actual bodice-ripping, thank goodness, but otherwise it was a cut above some drivel I used to read for relaxation. Now I find it too dumb, just like I kept reading this book to the end expecting for it to deviate from the expected.

UNESCO Part XI

I finished read Hahn Malsook's Chant melodieux des ames, and it started to remind me of Mrs. Dalloway, with the lover's suicide and the hearing of the protagonist's thoughts. It is a step down from stream of consciousness from Woolfe, just as Woolfe is a step down (thank goodness) from Joyce. I also read Vent du Nord Est, by Othman Kelantan, a novel translated from the Malay. Malay novels are not yet 100 years old, it's amazing, and this was a pastoral, the sad story of a fisherman who struggles to feed his family and dies in a storm. I also read Hiltu et Ragna, Sillapaa's novella of a suicide. Yes, it was up with people at our house last night.

Finally, I read two essays, Delighted States by Adam Thrilwell -- this is a post-modern essay with drawings and pictures and chapters called books, and interjections by the author, about the problems of translating great works of art -- and The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein-- predictably slaying the impact of technology on capacity to read.

UNESCO Part XI

I read Haut le coeur and de la Parra's Iphigenie. Haut le coeur is a novel of Japan's militaristic interwar period, with the protagonist a violent right-winger who frequents prostitutes. If the author's goal was disgust, he succeeded. Iphigenie is supposed to be a proto-feminist south American novel, but I found it a conventional novel of a young woman loving a man who marries someone else, and eventually refuses to become his mistress. Hohum. I read an issue of The New Yorker and The Economist. At present I reading Tagore's Gora, which I would call a philosophical novel about caste.

UNESCO Part X

I read Osaragi's Retour au pays, a postwar novel in Japan published as a serial in 1948. It is quite simple in language and plot, and was wildly successful for its implications at a time of lack of freedom of expression. Whatever those implications where, however, went right over my head. I also read another of Machado de Assis' madness novels, called Philosopher or Dog? It was surprisingly conventional, for the subject matter.

UNESCO Part IX, Banfield, Maxwell

So far today I read Revolution aux Philippines by Jose Rizal, Martin Coucou by Jeno Tersansz, Banfield's Phantom Table, Maxwell's Integrating the Mind and Yao Xueyin's La longue nuit. Revolution is a political novel, that is to say a novel written for political reasons, about the turn of the century political troubles in the Philippines. Coucou is a picaresque novel translated from an everyday Hungary. Banfield is that essay on Virginia Woolfe that was jargon laden: and so it was, right to the last page. Maxwell's book is an edited collection on cognition; I only read five essays about analogical cognition, and as with the rest of this field, I was disappointed. Yao's book is an autobiographical novel of a Chinese youth kidnapped by a roving band of criminals and adopted into their fraternity against his will. All's well that ends well, but it is hair-raising to think what the poor guy went through.

UNESCO Part VII

I read an issue of OK and started the latest New Yorker yesterday, but I also read three titles from the UNESCO list. Yaka, by Pepetela, is an unusual story of the white community in Angola for the last hundred years. The narrative device is the statue, Yaka, which observes all the sad occurrences of colonialism and post-colonialism, and sometimes speaks. In Gallegos' Cantaclara, cavalier errant, I could feel the sun on the drenched plains of Venezuela throughout the book, however conventional the plot was. Finally, I read Kemal's Memed le mince, the story of a maquisard, a story filled with ineffable sadness at the circumstances that drive such people to such difficult lives.

More odds and ends

I forgot to mention, I think, that I read Force of Choice and Evolution of Special Forces in Counter-terrorism, both by J.P. Taillon. They were both dissertation-types of book; precise, detailed, prose obviously worked over.

UNESCO Part VI

I read Youssouf le taciturne, whose author was assassinated as a political subversive in Turkey. The value of this novel seems to have been in the quality of the language, which in translation has not been preserved. The novel is otherwise conventional. I also read L'Espadon, about Cyprus: this was a plotless novel noticeable for the integration of Turkish and Greek characters.

As I wanted a break from this type of reading, I read The New Scientist's latest issue, two issues of Eclectic Reading, and Trente-six strategemes by Phelizon. I was not familiar with this Chinese work of strategy, which was only discovered in the forties. I found the introduction interesting for the questions it raised in my mind: are all strategies outside the military stratagems? How does the classification of frontale, oblique and laterale dovetail with Andre Beaufre's action and persuasion, direct and indirect classification? Does the author believe that strategy outside the military or economic sphere exists?

I also read Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, the first time I read Gaskell. I liked it mostly because I enjoyed the miniseries I got as a gift. I also started to read the Phantom Table about epistemology and Virginia Woolfe, but the book was so laden with jargon I put it down after only sixty-odd pages. I had better luck with Distracted, which I read cover to cover, but I found the diatribe got in the way of the argument, regarding the assault on powers of concentration by technology.

UNESCO Part V

The effect of reading so much in so many languages of origin is like a kaleidoscope. There are many really interesting experiments in structure, and generally they work better than the ones I've read in English. So I read the first novel in Creole, Atipa, by Alfred Parepou. I don't have a strong opinion about it, I didn't find it gripping, but I'm glad I read such a landmark book. My edition came with the original Creole, which was interesting. I also read Pham Quat Xa's Le reve du papillon, which is a fantastical romance dram, I assume from Vietnamese mythology. It was written originally in French. I also read Muniz-Huberman's Dulcinee, which I didn't like. I spent the whole book trying to figure out what the author was thinking when she was writing this book, which has an autobiographical basis but is fantastical. Prevelakis' Chronique d'une cite was more interesting, a novel where the protagonist is a city. Moricz's Sois bon jusqu'a la mort gave me a real feelinh of what it is like to be at a boy's boarding school in turn of the century Hungary. I liked it for its emotional truth, but then that is usually what I like all novels for. Matsumoto's Tokyo Express was a great detective novel, and I relieved happily the punctuality of the entire Japanese train system, around which the plot turned. Obianim's Amegbetoa is another one of those books that is usually important to the Ewe speakers of this world, but is conventional in every respect for a Western reader. Nosaka's Tombe des lucioles is not an up-with-people kind of book. It tells the story of a street child in occupied Japan, dying of dysentery in a train station while remembering the mother who died in the bombings and the sister who died of malnutrition during the war. It comes complete with comments from passers-by ("Really, someone shouldn't let that corpse sit there, when the Americans might come by any time") and a description of the urchin weakly trying to cover the yellow stain of his diarrhea by covering it up with the dirt of the station. His body is cremated and dumped in a common grave, along with 30 or 40 other unknown children. The author survived the war, obviously, but his mother and sister died as described in this short little novel. Boy. It was hard to take. Nguyen Du's Kim Van Kieu is a familiar story of a young woman forced to redeem her family by her prostitution, and her pure love for a pure youth. Another novel of great psychological truth is Musique d'un puits bleu, a novel about the end of childhood in World War I Norway. It's all here, the birthday party to which one isn't invited, the scraped knee the cost of a hidden disobedience, the discovery of parents' flaws. The Brazilian novel Angoisse reminded me of nothing so much as Hamsen's Hunger, enough to make me wonder whether one author had read the other. Finally, I read an interesting Swedish novel, Le voleur de bible. What was interesting here, apart from the fact that the ending is a stomach-churning description of a death in a house fire of one of the main characters, with descriptions not unlike those of the Madrid air catastrophe this week, is that religion and the Bible figure in the narrative in the same famously neutral way the Swedes use nudity and sex in their cinema. It was striking in its difference, its lack of either judgment or glamorization of religion.

And yes, if you're counting, it's twelve books I've read today, but I did a lot of other things too.

UNESCO Part IV

There are books in this list that have the power to make you see what other cultures' imaginations are like. And then there are books that have the power to make you feel that you know what it's like to live in that culture. The latter are few, but they are like jewels: I read two since my last post. They are Condamne a vivre by German Santamaria, and Jouer avec le Feu by Jo Jong-nae. Santamaria writes a conventional novel about various passions, but I feel like I too was a survivor of a great volcano eruption and landslide in Colombia. I could almost feel the grit under my nails when the hero went to buy a bun (reference passions). It was extraordinary. Jo's novel helped me feel what it's like to live in Cold War South Korea: it's a spy thriller about a double agent worrying about being discovered.

I also read Nakamura L'ete, to whom I refer as the Japanese Proust, with more and heterosexual sex. Natsume's Je suis un chat is a comic novel, and I generally don't like those, although I did crack a couple of smiles over the 400 pages. And nondescript despite their recommendations were Les eperons d'argent by Mejia Valleo, Verga's Mastro-Don Gesualdo, Kafu's Sumida (and I spent a lot of time on that riverside when I lived in Tokyo), and Souvenirs de misere by the daughter of a Danish king, Leonore Christine. The latter is supposed to be a jewel, adn I'm well disposed towards noblewomen writers of past centuries, but it failed to hold my attention. I also read Balanchine Variations by Nancy Goldner. It turned out to be disappointing -- although reading about dance, in particular choreographies of dances, is always going to be challenging.

I also read seven other books from the UNESCO list. Histoire de Dame Pak is a book about a disfigured woman who is a faithful wife. I don't recall the other six titles, and the library site is down so I cannot check my titles there.

I also read one issue of Eclectic Reading.

UNESCO list part III

I read so many books since yesterday I don't know where to start.

I read an interesting turn of the century Japanese novel, called Life of an Amorous Man by Seikaku Ihara. What is striking about this novel is its treatment of the gay lifestyle, which is remarkably un-judgmental for the time it was written. it's a short novel, I read all the short ones up front to clear my nightable. I also read a meditation on the crucifixion of Christ, La Cite inique, by a Muslim, Hussein Kemal. It was remarkable for the insight into the humanity of various actors in this passion play, without of course considering Christ more than a prophet appealing to conscience. From a woman Korean writer, Ch'oe Yun came Avec cette neige grise et sale, about the illicit publication of political tracts, which ends in the death of the leader, also a woman. It was short, and it was a potent cautionary tale about the freedom I take for granted.

In the ancient texts category, translated from the Persian, I read Faramarz, fils de Khodadad Samak-e Ayyar, possibly the oldest extant Persian novel. I also read Zhen Fu's Memoires d'un lettre pauvre, about a faithful talented wife who dies unappreciated in a classical Chinese family.


I read a colonial novel, The Cross and the Sword, about the Dominican Republic, by Manuel Galvan, which I found unremarkable; Fernandez's Adriana Buenos Aires, which I enjoyed for its witty experiment in structure -- and I usually don't like experiments in structure; I attempted La carthagenoise by German Espinosa, but I found it literally unreadable, and I plowed through Proust and Joyce. There are in that book as many periods as there are chapters. I gave up after three periods. More colonial novels with Emechita's Le corps a corps, an Ibo novel about the induction of a 16-year-old into the militias in Biafra, and Krishkanto, probably the last of my Bengali novels, about a youth's growing up first in rural, then in more urban Bengal.

I tore through a pile of reading on analogical cognition, including Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, by Vosniadou and Ortony; Complex Cognition, by Sternberg and Ben-Zeev; Integrating the Mind, by Maxwell; Sternberg's Handbook of Intelligence; and three or four articles. Not much was of use, since this area of research lends itself to experimentation, whereas I am primarily interested in insight and wisdom. Among the essays I read also Proust was a neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer, about illustrations in the arts of neurocognitive facts.

On top of that, I read Vanity Fair and two issues of The Economist. I guess you won't be surprised that I didn't do much else by read in the last 24 hours.

Biographies, odds and ends.

I was in the mood for escapism, so I read some biographies: Desmond Tutu's and Emily Dickinson's. Allen does a creditable job of writing Tutu's life, although I found it lacked insight. It also seems that Tutu's worst sin is not being to manage his finances properly. Well, big deal. I had hoped to find in the biography some of the charisma of the man, but that was reported on, rather than represented. Sewall's biography of Dickinson followed the pattern of that bio of Chateaubriand I disliked. It had chapters on the people in her life: family, friends, correspondents. I picked up the two volumes at the library and said to myself: over 800 pages, and nothing happens? But that, apparently is part of the myth of Emily Dickinson.

I also read an issue of The New Scientist and a issue of Eclectic Reading, and the New Yorker and OK Magazine. I'm in the middle of Petrostate, by Goldman, most appropriately as I follow the conflict in South Ossetia. This book is badly structured, down to the paragraph level, although the topic is fascinating and the detail is excellent. I also read Le Livre de Abdullah, a wonderful metaphoric book at the start, in the style of Kahil Gibran which the author, Antun Karras Garam translated and studied. It ends in more a scream of dismay at war.

UNESCO Representative Literature, part II

I read Race de bronze, about the indigenous peoples of Brazil, and Le mulatre. These are pastorals in the classical mode of western pastorals, and I've read many like them, although not from these cultures.

I also read a remarkable book, Introduction a la strategie, by Phelizon and Desportes. It's written in dialog, a form I don't usually like, but there was certainly no sacrifice of quality or content here, as it does in other dialog form books I've read. There was an acute observation about the fact that the US may be a victim of its own success and has never had to work hard at strategic thinking. At another point they discuss a new term for what we would call in English civilian strategists, i.e. scholars of strategy who don't actually practice it. That gave me pause: I consider myself a political strategist and I also consider that I practice it constantly; I also use strategy in non-competitive situations, like creative writing. So I'm wondering now how to categorize what I do within these various classifications. I don't think I fit easily.

I also read Governess, by Kate Brandon. This is may be a work of history, but the author is not a historian. Rather than look into what we know about governesses in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries through a lot of no doubt tedious archival work, she just provides us with the low-lying fruit of well-known women who were a some point governesses. Unrepresentative and unsatisfactory, doesn't live up to its billing. Her treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft in particular is completely disappointing.

I read a stack of articles on analogical cognition and await with impatience the rest of the books on this topic I ordered. I also read three or four books on Special Forces, one by Tom Clancy, two manuals for special forces off the Internet. And, since I had misplaced the latest issue of The Economist, I ran out of reading material on Sunday night! I have since found said issue, crumpled under a chair in my common-law partner's disorderly bedroom.

UNESCO list of representative literature, part I

Apart from reading The New Scientist and OK Magazine, I read a pile of books: a cultural history of Tobacco, two books by J.F. Phelizon, one on the management of prices in a company, another on Psychologie de la bataille (which contained some scary commercial strategies, some of which I'd never heard of), Anne Uberfeld's Lire le theatre, a literary theory for plays, and several novels from the UNESCO list of representative literature. I have two lists, one of French translations and one of English. They are already a revelation about the imaginary dimension of other cultures, cultures about which I thought I knew something. I read de Andrade's Macounaima, the picaresque adventures of a mythical native of Brazil. I also read Alencar's Iracema, a nativist novel, also of Brazil. I read two Bengali novels in translation, including La Complainte du sentier by B.B. Banerji, which I'm reading right now, and Chandra Chatterji's Testament de Krishnokanto, which I found conventional. Have I mentioned the Indian saga novel, Ilankovatikal's Roman de l'anneau? I also read a novel which reminded me of The Tin Drum, Lillelord by Johan Borgen, about a descent into madness; and a surreal novella by Abe, Le crime de Monsieur Y, in Les murs.