Granskningar och kommentarer

Outside, the cold went up against the night and the moonlight shone through all the green and red windowpanes.
Tell me about snow, said Moomintroll and sat down in his father's sun-bleached garden chair. I don't understand it.
Neither do I, said Too-Ticky. You think it's cold, but if you build a house from it it's warm. You think it's white, but sometimes it's pink, and sometimes blue. It can be the softest thing of all and it can be harder than stone. Nothing is certain.

In which Moomintroll wakes up to what looks like a dead, cold winter world, and gradually discovers so much about it. One of the best things written about winter and growing up, and, knowing that Too-Ticky is based on Jansson's girlfriend, quite a sweet understated love story as well.

What is the reason for the recent upsurge of antiscientific passion? My own view is that it is, in part, a result of the anger, fear, frustration and humiliation suffered over the years by the losers in the culture wars: Those who would have kept women in the kitchen, blacks in the back of the bus, and gays in the closet. It is also a consequence of the deep and terrible universal fear of old age and death. But I don't believe these emotions, by themselves, could have created the antiscientific backlash of recent years. The fault may well lie in the ease with which these emotions can be cynically manipulated. It is pretty clear that the battle was engineered by provocateurs who may not even have wanted to win the battles they provoked. What seems much more likely, in view of the gingerly way that politicians have skirted such issues as Roe Vs Wade, is that the provocateurs want to lose the battles and in that way keep the anger and humiliation at fever pitch.

How should scientists respond to this strategy? I have to admit that I'm conflicted about this question. One response that might be effective is to simply ignore the battle. The usual derisive treatment of the "Know Nothings" tends to whip up the fury and thus play into the hands of the cynical political forces who know so well how to use it. Both sides, it seems, are being manipulated. So, then, what if we scientists refuse to play the game? After all, what great harm would come from teaching intelligent design in Kansas? Most likely, within a couple of years, parents worried about their children's ability to get into good universities would be petitioning their school boards for better biology classes.

Unfortunately, I suspect there is more at stake than biology textbooks in Kansas. As a longtime observer of the science-government-politics triangle, it looks to me as if there is another hidden agenda: to discredit the legitimate scientific community. A well-respected scientific community can be a major inconvenience if one is trying to ignore global warming, or build unworkable missile-defense systems, or construct multi-billion dollar lasers in the unlikely hope of initiating practicable nuclear fusion. (...) Today we have the ridiculous comedy of a Yale- and Harvard-educated president who plays to his antiscience audience by (deliberately?) mispronouncing the word "nuclear."
- Leonard Susskind, 2006

Or insist that it's even physically, let alone practically, possible to build a wall that will keep migrants out and magically solve all problems, I guess.

** Those were the days, eh?

A spaceship hurtles towards a distant constellation, going faster than anything in human history but essentially standing still from a relative point of view.

That wasn't the point, of course. They were just supposed to be temporarily evacuated to Mars and Venus while Earth "recovers". All of humanity being shipped out on spaceships - each one just making a routine trip, just on a much grander scale. Except for the Aniara which gets hit by a meteor shower. Her steering gets knocked out, her SOSs go unanswered, her AI kills itself after it sees Earth be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and the Aniara and her thousands of passengers are sent hurling on a 15,000 year journey towards Vega, with only their memories for company.

It's staring. It's staring cold outside.

It sounds like a potentially cheap sci-fi movie, it is actually a pretty fucking great sci-fi story except told in verse. Martinson tells it through the eyes of the AI operator whose job it is to keep the systems running as the years pass, the systems fail, and all the distractions - virtual reality and social media (yes, in 1957), religion, sex, music, science, even suicide - lose their allure and only the impossible vastness of space remains. He switches style from canto to canto, examining different characters, different aspects, different ways of trying to cope with the uncopeable.

Myself I questioned, but gave no reply.
I dreamt myself a life, then lived a lie.
I ranged the universe but passed it by -
For captive on Aniara here was I.

This book is 50 years old this year. It's lost absolutely none of its power.

4.5/5, really. Kindred is an astonishing novel with a lot to unpack. The only thing that bothers me about it is in the setup - the "Oh well, I guess I'm time travelling against my will, shit happens" aspect of it, where nobody ever asks why and how this is going on. I don't need reasons, but I need the characters to want them.

Once that's past, though, the past is present in all its messiness.

He can't accept that the woman he's fallen in love with from afar will marry someone of higher social standing, so he decides to become the King of Spain. Also, he whines about how muslims are taking over France.

Basically, the only thing here that doesn't make the main character seem like any current-day MRA loser is that he's actually thrown in the loony bin.

PLANT PORN WINS BOOKER PRIZE

...was the headline in Swedish newspapers when The Vegetarian won the Booker last year. Not that all those papers had read the book, obviously, quite the contrary (though it will be out in Swedish in a month or so, but sadly translated from the excellent English translation rather than from Korean, which is a whole other thing). But someone at the news agency spent five seconds reading a synopsis of the book and learned that there was a sex scene and that there was a woman transforming herself into a tree, drew his (or possibly her, but let's play the odds) own conclusions about what the book might contain, put a click-friendly headline on it and put it out there, and all the newspapers who hadn't read the book reprinted the item as it was. And hey presto, Han Kang was now a vegetable pornographer without anyone having asked her about it.

"I had a dream."

There's a metaphor in that which works rather deliciously for this story about a woman whom nobody has asked about, well, anything, ever. Her decision to stop eating meat, then to stop eating altogether, and then to stop being a woman (with all that that entails in a world not run by women) has an explanation, but whenever she (at first) tries to explain it, nobody's interested. Look at how she's embarrassing her husband, her father, her family. Why can't she just be NORMAL? Kill things and eat them. Take your place in the chain of violence inherent in the system. Be something we can classify.

"I'm tired... I said I'm really tired."
"Just put up with it for a minute," he said.

The Vegetarian, of course, is neither plant nor porn. It may well be perverse, but that's another thing entirely. Like a feminist Cronenberg adapting Bartleby The Scrivener (and it is very cinematic despite its short length), she tracks Yeong-hye's gradual descent or ascent (whichever it might be) through the eyes of others - her husband, her brother-in-law, her sister - but never letting the reader in on the answer, letting them draw their own conclusions. I'm still not sure what mine are, I'll have to mull this over. But damn.


ETA 17/1/26:
Two thoughts after seeing Han Kang talk about this and Human Acts tonight:
1) She talks a lot about acts as defining who people are - the title of the latter novel is not hers but her English editor's, but it really suits her.
2) When asked about Yeong-hye's motivations and whether she's insane or just too sane, she stresses that there's a reason she never gives us Yeong-hye's POV, but just those of three people close (or at least near) to her; much like they project their reactions onto Yeong-hye's choice to NOT, she forces the reader to do the same thing. My reaction: Damn, she makes me as a reader complicit in the violence against a character who wants to categorically reject all violence - even the violence of having to put her decision into words, into explanations that can be accepted.

ETA 25/08/22: The idea of refusing the violence of society? How does one NOT be a human? What actions can one take to get out of it? What does the dream mean? How does each new novella build on the previous - do we understand more or less by the end than we did by the first third?

In which Lila gets married and falls in love (not in that order), and Elena tries even harder to pretend she's just the objective chronicler.

The only woman's body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?

I was just talking to a friend about the original title of part 1; L'amica geniale, a title that the English title ("My brilliant friend") comes close to and the Swedish ("My fantastic friend") nowhere near. Of course, Lila is very much portrayed as a genius - or a "Mary Sue", if you will, that phrase that gets trotted out any time a fictional female character manages to walk in a straight line without falling over. Lila, from childhood through early adulthood, seems able to do anything better than anyone else, or at least better than her biographer - but only once, before getting bored of it. At the same time, of course, genial she's not, and who can blame her? Part 2 is one long lesson in how the world would work for a poor, uneducated, working-class, beautiful girl in a man's world; anything she does or has done to her just limits her opportunities, and she's smart enough to see it, but powerless to do anything about it except act out in ways that dig her in deeper. She stops reading because it's always the same story: inside something small there's something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there's always someting larger that wants to keep it a prisoner. When she starts back up - pulled by the promise of a way out - Ferrante seems to deliberately echo this picture:



As much as the book claims to be about Lila, though, it says as much about Elena, always comparing herself to her friend even as Lila's life goes horribly but, thanks to Elena, Shakespeare-tragically off the rails, and coming up short, hating and loving the other woman for making her a part of it or not. Elena, and the readers, are pulled in by Lila's (mis)fortunes, unable to not keep projecting; perhaps that's the reason for all those tiresome Knausgård comparisons, whereas KOK deliberately writes as vaguely about his feelings as possible so that anyone can recognize themselves in it, Elena seems at first like the passive observer we can all see through vicariously, and only gradually you see the angles she herself brings to the story - not so much an unreliable narrator as a narrating unreliable human being.

I zip through this in days. The writing is stunning, the portrait of women turning against each other as their choices become fewer and fewer, the hunger for something else whether it be found in love, sex, violence or learning, the way it effortlessly captures a time that seems historical by now but still is only a thin layer of dust away from today... Bring on part III.

The Machine Stops for the Tumblr generation. Sort of. What remains of Western civilization as one big jerk-off in front of a mirror of social media and Like clicks, where even the terrorists just want to feel validated and non-Europeans are only useful as metaphors. But damn, he doesn't half go on about it and there has to be some way of doing it without creating characters you just wish would die already.