A Selection from my 2022 Reading
The Distant Marvels, Chantel Acevedo: This novel about storytelling has a cinematic quality that makes it unforgettable. Through compelling characters, it traverses a history of Cuba that most Americans do not hear about -- slave rebellions, concentration camps for Cubans who dared to resist the Spanish, and later the impact of the Americans. An almost classical plot structured around the gathering of people, eight unique women, taking refuge during Hurricane Flora in 1963 in a former governor's palace in Castro’s Cuba. It proceeds via the mixing of memories, sweet and bitter.
In a room on the top floor of a former governor’s mansion, watched over by a young soldier of Castro’s new Cuba named Ofelia, the women listen as Maria Sirena, a professional storyteller who was a lettura in the cigar factories, tells the story of her childhood and the fierce courage of her parents during Cuba’s Third War of Independence. Personal histories interweave with the wider history to complicate and electrify the situation. As the world is currently learning with regard to Ukraine, to understand a place it is essential to know its history.
The Vegetarian, Han Kang. This strange novel about a woman's long drawn-out death wish provides some insights into family life and dynamics in contemporary South Korea.
Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe. Part of the trilogy that includes Things Fall Apart, for which Achebe received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It continues the exploration of how an African society (in Nigeria) copes with the imposition of white political rule which also includes the aggressive intrusion of Christian missionaries into its animistic world view, and the conflicts this creates within existing structures and local and family power dynamics. It is worth reading to get a strong sense of a social order that existed before the imperial project forever shattered it. It was far from perfect (I have written elsewhere, in my review of Things Fall Apart, about the mind-numbing misogyny that is part of its author's accepted world-view) but it allows for an intimate glimpse into another way of being human.
Aleppo: A History, Ross Burns. A well-written exhaustive history, focused basically on architecture but informative about the history of what is now Syria and the surrounding areas, from early pre-monotheistic times when it was the site of a "weather god" temple, through its centuries as an important trading hub for the region, the Crusades, and the Turkic dynasties that ruled there for centuries. Given the fact that much of Syria has been bombed to smithereens in the past decade, this is profoundly valuable work by an Australian who was ambassador to the region and later went on to get a degree in archeology of the region. Well-written, lots of maps.
Sometimes I go rather intuitively back to a book that has been on the shelves for many years and see how it strikes me now, how the ideas hold up. It was worthwhile picking up The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid by Octavio Paz. A literary-Nobel Prize winning poet, novelist, essayist, and diplomat, he was a familiar with the myths and ideas of many cultures -- his writing on India remains interesting. Here he interrogates and interprets his own country and its fundamental metaphors. The pyramid is an organizational form, a psycho-geography, a place of sacrifice. He links the pre-history of Mexico with the then-current social unrest and the massacre of protesting students in 1968. The parallels to today's America are astonishing. Sacrificial child-murders are allowed by the refusal of Conservatives to regulate the tidal wave of weapons sloshing around the United States in the "free" exercise of imagined Second Amendment meanings. And the vicious refusal to take precautions against the COVID virus by isolating, masking and getting vaccinated -- again in the name of a ghastly Imaginary "freedom" -- in which poor, elderly, even children, and otherwise vulnerable people are willingly sacrificed as surely as the victims of Aztec sacrifice were to some idea of a power or right that seem to us now largely hallucinatory. Your death is a small price for me to pay in service to My Ideology, which includes Freedom and The Market.
In one of the best non-fiction books I read last year, Behave: The Biology of Humans at their Best and Worst (2017), Robert Sapolsky explains how in the primate societies he has studied (baboons in Kenya, for example) when a high status monkey picks on a lower status that animal, who then turns around and mistreats another one lower in the power hierarchy. That is a key psychological insight that explains so much in terms of politics and oppression. Sapolsky, a neurobiologist, has shown that primates (including humans) suffer stress in direct proportion to how much or little control they have in their lives; this goes a long way toward explaining the lower life expectancy of poor and oppressed groups, world-wide. We can see this in historical terms helping explain why poor whites who did not own slaves were willing to fight for the Confederacy so long as they were guaranteed a superior status to all Blacks. With chickens we call it a pecking order. [e.g.In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart the protagonist, the story of an African man dealing with the takeover of his world by European imperialism, it is quite explicit that the man needs to maintain control over "his" women (multiple wives, in particular) and children as part of trying to sustain his world and its order.]
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch. One of her many novels of intricate social life in which people often behave quite badly. From the early 1960s it is not an easy read for today's reader. There is some misogyny, of course and some anti-Semitism (part of the social scene she was describing -- well-to-do white Brits in mid 20th century) and full of things like extreme drinking and constant cigarette smoking that were par for the course in that milieu but today sound very nearly like self-abuse. In the tradition of Kingsley Amis (though less spiteful) and Michael Frayn (though less hilarious), it shows us insufferable people cluelessly stumbling through moral quandaries; with Murdoch there is an element of philosophical sang-froid, enriched by a novelist's eye for detail.
Exposure: Native Art & Political Ecology. This beautifully designed and important book by Santa Fe's Radius Books combines reportage and artwork by indigenous people about the world-wide legacy of nuclear power; it chronicles the imposition by imperial powers of both nuclear testing and uranium mining on indigenous people in the USA and the Pacific region.
The Big Silence, Stuart Kaminsky. Another mystery by the prolific and enchanting American writer. This one from his series about a Jewish Chicago detective.