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.