The three best (and most important) non-fiction works I read in 2023 were Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, by Malcolm Harris; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff; and How Civil Wars Start, by Barbara F. Walter
The three best fiction works I read in 2023 were The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (set in 1910s Alaska); The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger (a Jewish family in 1930s Germany); and Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris (set in contemporary Saudi Arabia.)
And my best re-reads of 2023 were Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev; The Black Swan, by Thomas Mann; and The Owner of the House by Egyptian writer Latifa Zayyat.
It is always bracing to re-read books that have been on my shelves for decades, to investigate how they resemble or recast my memory of them; it’s stimulating to encounter a text anew finding, different facets, different emphases, different interpretations in light of much later reading and experiencing -- from a new place in the ongoing story of one’s own life.
So, here is my Re-Reading Review
Thomas Mann’s The Black Swan stayed in my mind the way certain stories, do even years after reading them, in this case because of the plot. Written in 1954, but set in 1920s Germany, it feels a little like a Chekhov story. I still find it pretty good despite being slightly irked, this time around, by some of the excessive ornamentation of the dialogue between mother and daughter. Intense and concise, it illustrates how delusional we can be in the face of death. The main character is a widow with adult children; she is probably all of forty-five or fifty years old but “old” in the context of this era. She falls in love with her son’s young tutor and feels for a time as if she is young again. There is much to say about Thomas Mann, but this little tale is a nice gateway to some of his longer works if you or someone you know has not read him. A personal note: When I was teaching Literature at Otis-Parsons in Los Angeles I used sections of Mann’s Magic Mountain as a text. Imagine trying to convey to 18-22 years old in the mid-1980s the significance of the fact that the period setting is the start of World War I. And further imagine my amazement in 1999, at a luncheon above Davos, Switzerland, as I realized why the place seemed so familiar, as if I had been there before: I was in the specific physical setting of The Magic Mountain! That does speak to Mann’s ability to create vivid scenarios.
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. This 1862 novel was the first “modern novel” to be widely admired outside of Russia – by the likes of Flaubert and Henry James. The first English translation, by the sometimes-maligned Constance Garnett, was titled called Fathers and Children, which more closely tracks the Russian meaning of the title. Written and received in a world in which only the opinions and ideas of men mattered, the protagonists are in fact two sets of father-son (plus an uncle). But there is also a strong woman character, Anna Sergeeyevna who is an independent thinker. Today, the opinions and ideas of women are consequential too, though there are plenty of books and movies that lack that crucial point. Turgenev wrote this story to illustrate the cultural generational gap he saw between the liberals of the 1830s/1840s: the land-owning class who wanted reforms (admittedly, to avoid a revolution that would destroy them, as is often the case with Reformist ideology) and a philosophical viewpoint that was captivating the young in that period. The book made more widely known the concept of "nihilism" – a position or attitude that refuses to take anyone's word for anything, does not believe in emotions such a romantic love or patriotism and, accepting only that which is scientifically proven, and advocates destroying existing institutions. The character of young Bazarov is compelling in his stubborn arrogance and intelligence and the debates between him and Uncle Pavel are rich with possibility. But Bazarov dies not long after due to a careless mistake he makes while performing surgery. While both the reformers and the younger nihilists sought Western-based social change, another faction in Russian society believed Russia’s real destiny lay in its traditional Orthodox Christian spirituality. It’s striking to consider how this dynamic is still very much operational in Putin’s world-view and has an impact on global politics due to his disastrous war based on the expansionist fantasy of a Greater Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union should have shown everyone that such a fantasy is as unattainable by Russian society as it is untenable in today’s world. Turgenev is one of my favorite Russian writers and for his time was very progressive. Still, he ended up in exile in Germany, like the character of Uncle Pavel, (who believed that ‘aristocracy’ was a principle, and “principles are important”) to live a life still clinging to the privileges that were being eroded in a changing Russia. Plus ca change.
The Owner of the House, by Latifa Zayyat. This narrative can be somewhat confusing in terms of sequence and motivation. I can just hear the voices of my Fiction Book Club colleagues protesting that it jumps around and repeats itself and is unclear about some basic reality. Yet it has hung around on my bookshelves for many years, and it is by an important female Egyptian literary figure born in 1923. It tells a story set in a time before many of the things that define the middle east were in place; a time of political turmoil in a modernizing 1960s Egypt -- in the early post-colonial period, which is scarcely recalled today despite current intense focus on the region. While there is a strong narrative arc (and some interesting characters) it is fundamentally a subjective exposition of a woman’s struggle to define herself in a traditional but radically changing society. A woman’s husband has escaped from political prison and his friend is hiding him in a rented house in an obscure neighborhood. The “owner”, landlord of the house they shelter in, is a murky, volatile, frightening force. He could be a stand-in for the patriarchal society the women is trying to break free from. Now, as we confront the failure of the Arab Spring, with the War on Terror still casting its awful shadow, and a horrific hot war raging in Gaza, it may be worth going back to an earlier radical transition to hear what it was like and how it may have lessons to teach us today.