Recent Reading - All Things Are too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, by Becca Rothfeld

On the whole, All Things Are Too Small, a collection of essays by Becca Rothfeld is a joy to read, full of intelligence and humour. It does contain a couple of essays that are of no interest unless you have encountered either the works of Eric Rohmer or the novel Mating by Norman Rush. Additionally, there is one deeply unpersuasive and entirely unamusing essay, Only Mercy, which begins with that most unpromising of phrases "Studies show" and, among other things, goes on to label Louise Perry as a Puritan, (a disparagement in the context), instead of countering Perry's arguments. I suspect this particular essay may have been written at an agent's behest, (can we have some sex please?), or in order to gain street cred among the author's own generation, (this might also be the motivation behind the uncritical references to Marx that pop up from time to time).

But let's set these pieces aside and declare the book mainly a pleasure. The essay on Marie Kondo, after all, is such a delight. In it, Rothfeld nails the madness at the heart of the decluttering doctrine: 

"The ultimate goal is to inhabit even permanent dwellings not only as if we were about to leave but also as if we have just arrived" she says, adding, 

"We can yank ourselves out of the mess and mayhem of the past and install ourselves in eternal immediacy only if we are willing to live in rooms without any contents."

The essay entitled Ladies in Waiting is also excellent. In it Rothfeld demonstrates that in certain respects, despite the supposed march of feminism and women's rights, little has really changed when it comes to men and women and dating. She describes the pain of waiting that most women must endure if they are to successfully gain a mate - and thus go on to have children (in an age of instant gratification is a lack of training in patience behind the decline in the birth rate?) 

"The messages that I answer immediately" Rothfeld explains, "without inserting a buffer of delay calculated to give the (always erroneous) impression that I'm busy or unavailable, come from my female friends, and they often constitute an agonised refrain: How soon should I reply? Can I say something yet? Should I call? I know I shouldn't text him, but ... My advice ingrained in me by years of comparable counsel from comparably responsive female friends, is always: wait. Waiting is the rule, the convention, tacitly enforced by men who retreat from female aggression and actively perpetuated by some who self-police. This is the agreement we opt into when we receive the first day-after texts with such awed gratitude, as if we didn't deserve them."

She goes on to produce some nice aphorisms about the state of waiting:

"Waiting is the transformation of time into misery", she declares; and

"Waiting is sustained by the possibility of fulfilment that is yet to be decisively precluded." 

In her essay on meditation - Wherever You Go, You Could leave -  and the whole big business of mindfulness, Rothfeld is as acerbic and funny as she is on Kondo:

'"No matter how hard I tried" she tells the reader, "I never understood the injunction to 'practice mindfulness', as if it were piano or a dance routine. I knew, of course, what I was supposed to do, at least at the most literal level: I was supposed to sit, close my eyes, and attend to my breathing. I was not supposed to do anything else. I wasn't supposed to feel my emotions, but I wasn't supposed to think about them either. If any mental matter assailed me, I was supposed to acknowledge it and discard it. Under no circumstances was I supposed to evaluate thought or feeling as good or bad, smart or stupid, intriguing or boring. Perhaps at a more advanced stage, I would be able to circumvent the indignity of thinking and assessing altogether, but, in the interim, I was supposed to exercise something called 'non-judgmental awareness', which I would one day learn to achieve in any and all situations but which for now I could cultivate in its purest form by way of 'meditation'."

Her description of the process of trying to be mindful is hilarious:

"The voice is instructing me to 'become aware' of my breath. I was already aware of my breath, in a general way, and now I am aware in a specific way, which seems to make little difference. Up my chest rises, down it falls. Up, down, up, down, a testament to the dull cunning of the body. What am I supposed to do now that I am aware that I am breathing? I think - oops, I don't think - I am simply supposed to go on being aware of it, languishing in virtuous boredom...If the mindful person finds herself thinking, how idiotic, she should tag this interjection as an instance of Thinking and direct the beam of her attention back toward her respiration ... Cogitation is an unmitigated evil, an annoyance ... What is supposed to be so enjoyable about the breath, which is always the same slog in through the nose and out through the mouth...Only someone who longs to be no one could savour the deprivations of a decluttered mind."

In the end she gives up on the whole enterprise and decides on a different solution to anxiety - moviegoing. That would be very sensible if they were still making good movies, one could say, but of course it is still possible to see old films if you find the right cinema. 

In Other People's Loves, Rothfeld portrays brilliantly and hilariously the temptations of internet stalking:

"I first navigated to Rachel's profile knowing that she was the person for whom Adam had left me. I clicked through beaches she'd visited and lumpy cakes she'd baked, passages she'd underlined and toddlers she'd tickled. Her bookshelf jutted into the background of a few photographs, and when I zoomed in and squinted, I could make out a row of mint-coloured Penguin Classics. An earlier, non-Adam boyfriend still liked some of her photographs, which I knew because I clicked not only through her pictures, but also through the profiles of all the people who had liked them, then through their  photographs, then through the profiles of the people who had liked those, and so on, until at last I found myself hunched over my telephone at five in the morning, staring at pictures of Rachel's ex-boyfriend's third-grade teacher's tomato garden."

The essay comes with some added stuff about various arthouse movies. I don't think these add anything and I suspect they are included as proof that Rothfeld is not just funny but an intellectual heavyweight. Being funny is such a rare and sublime gift, that it seems to me Rothfeld should stop fretting about demonstrating so called intellectuality. If you can make someone laugh, why would your audience beg for parallels with Bergman and Almodovar? Tommy Cooper managed perfectly well without giving us a quick side disquisition on Dostoevsky. Sadly though, the youth of today have a solemn bent. 

To sum up, this is overall a highly engaging book, the product of a brilliant young mind. Sadly, that mind has been trained in the slightly batty contemporary world of ideas where to be truly clever there seems to be a requirement - probably a result of French influence - to be unnecessarily (tediously?) complex. Ms Rothfeld obeys the strictures of her era by heaping on top of her wittiness extra helpings of theory and demonstrations of wide-reading. Luckily, she is so genuinely gifted that she does not completely bury her humour. Despite her very best efforts, she cannot prevent herself from being most of the time very entertaining, perceptive and making her readers laugh. 

Recent Reading: A Masculine Ending by Joan Smith

I found A Masculine Ending in the 25p box at the front of my local secondhand bookshop. I was intrigued by the fact that it was dedicated to Francis Wheen. 

The book turned out to be a murder mystery in which at first it isn't wholly clear whether a murder has been committed. The action takes place almost entirely in Paris, Oxford and London. The central character is a feminist academic who belongs to a feminist writers' collective that during the course of the novel meets twice in Paris in order to argue about whether masculine endings to plural verbs describing groups of people ought not to be abolished in the languages where masculine and feminine endings exist - and, indeed, whether all masculine endings ought to be dispensed with in those languages, (the solution of course would be for the entire world to switch to Hungarian, which is the only language I've ever come across that is utterly without gender of any kind - but I am straying from the matter of the novel in question.) 

The feminist academic - who, incidentally, does not support the masculine ending proposal - borrows a friend's apartment in Paris to stay in, while attending the first meeting of the collective. She arrives late at night and only as she is leaving the next day discovers that the second bedroom contains a corpse. For various reasons, she cannot stop to find out what has happened, and so begins a well-plotted mystery story that whizzes along nicely and works very well on its own terms - assuming those terms are to create something easy to read. 

After I finished the book, I looked up the author. When she dedicated the book to Wheen, he was her husband. On the back cover of A Masculine Ending, PD James is quoted as saying that "Joan Smith is a new and welcome addition to the Faber stable of crime writers, with a feisty and original heroine, of whom I suspect we shall hear more." Sadly, no more was heard of that heroine, so far as I can tell. Whether the silence had anything to do with the end of the author's marriage not long after the book's publication, who can say? Perhaps, without a fellow writer in the house to encourage her, Smith no longer had the impetus. It is a pity. A Masculine Ending is entertaining and well made.

CORRECTION: I have just learned that this is the first in a series of five books - so much for my silly imaginings about the author’s heartbreak. As my children often complain, I have a tendency to whip up a story where there is none.

Running on Fumes

In late November, we got into our car and started to drive from Hungary towards England. We spent our first night in Melk, which is a very pretty town clustered around a splendid Cathedral.

The abbey was built in the early eighteenth century.

Our second night was spent in Reitenhaslach in Bavaria, where a once thriving Cistercian monastery has now become a part of Munich University. The Cistercian hhurch remains in use and has a wonderful baroque interior:

It was created in the early eighteenth century.

Our third night was spent in Switzerland in Stein am Rhein. It is a small town with an old centre packed with half-timbered buildings, most with heavily decorated facades:

The buildings all date from medieval times.

In one of the buildings is a museum of domestic life in the 19th century, told through the stories of those who lived in the house itself. I will post about it later.

All I want to say in this post that I am concerned that we no longer seem to find it necessary to create beauty, especially beautiful buildings. What is the thing we have lost: patience? Or simply control of decisions? Is that the problem - decisions affecting locals are no longer made by locals but by people in far-off places, whose main interest in spending as little as possible and making as much profit as they can?

Is it too late for Europe? Can we find a way back to being a culture that makes the world more beautiful or are we destined to be a huge Disneyland of former loveliness, while our own civilisation is running purely on fumes?

STOP PRESS: After putting this post on the blog, I went downstairs and started going through the backlog of newspapers I've been ignoring. I came across this brilliant and apposite article. The writer begins by asserting:

"Every age has its own distinctive building type. For then19th century it was the railway station, for the 20th century it was the sky's raper. For the 21st century it looks like it'll be the data centre."

The writer goes on to point out that:

"Ancient peoples used to build temples to the gods they wanted to please and appease, to make them sacrifices and offerings. In the process they created architecture.  We are somehow going the opposite way, creating the gods that could destroy us while housing them in the most nondescript, generic buildings imaginable."

The whole article is immensely worth a read:

Recent Reading - V13 by Emmanuel Carrère

In September 2021 a trial began in Paris. It had a nine-month schedule and its purpose was to provide some kind of justice following the terrorist attacks that took place on 13 November, 2015 in Paris, in which 130 people were killed, many others maimed - and following which at least one person who survived one of the attacks has subsequently committed suicide. In the court in 2021, twenty men stood accused of greater or lesser involvement in the attacks; many of the ringleaders were absent because they had detonated explosive vests during the attacks and blown themselves up. 

The French writer and journalist Emmanuel Carrère volunteered to attend the trial for its full nine months and write a weekly column about the experience for Le Nouvel Observateur. V13 is a synthesis of those columns.

Carrère begins by explaining his reasons for taking on the task:

1. "I am interested in justice";

2. "I am interested in religions, their pathological mutations, and the question: where does this pathology begin? When it comes to God, where does the madness start? What goes on in these guys' minds?";

3. He wants to hear the survivors tell of their experiences - this will be a major part of the proceedings.

Disappointingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the book doesn't really provide any clear answer to the mystery of what goes on in the minds of perpetrators of terrorist acts on civilians, although Carrère's comments on the video put out by Islamic State claiming responsibility for the attacks may contain a clue: "It's pure propaganda" he says, but propaganda of a kind that "is completely unprecedented...Normally propaganda hides horror. Here it puts it on show. The Islamic State doesn't say: this is war, sadly for good to triumph we must commit terrible acts. No, it lauds itself for its sadism. It uses sadism, displays of sadism and the permission to be sadistic to recruit." Carrère also mentions regularly, in passing, the extraordinary amount of marijhuana most of the perpetrators smoked habitually; although Carrère does not make the connection explicitly, I can't help wondering whether marijhuana may not play a considerable role in warping the minds of young Islamic men, allowing them to become open to the sadism that those directing them glory in. 

As to the witnessing Carrère was hoping for, the book is full of stories, mainly of the victims and their relatives, but also of courageous people who tried to prevent the attacks (notably Sonia), of survivors and of the lawyers, particularly those who are defending the men accused of terrorism - "we obviously do not defend paedophilia or terrorism, but we are prepared to defend a paedophile or a terrorist" one tells him '. I don't always see things as Carrère does - for instance, he claims that the judge's annoyance about a three-year-old who runs around screaming the whole time her Serbian mother is giving evidence would have been replaced by compassion if the child had been the daughter of a blonde woman from Bataclan, whereas I think screaming three-year-olds are always a pain, regardless of where they come from. All the same, he recounts many moving stories and introduces the reader to some intriguing details about those involved and their preparations, not least the strange fact that the computer upon which many of the perpetrators habitually watched Islamic State's videos of beheadings and torture was also used to watch "a recording of a stage production of Cyrano de Bergerac, Robert Hossein's adaptation of Les Miserables, and above all two comedies by Sacha Guitry, Royal Affairs in Versailles and The Virtuous Scoundrel ... black-and-white films...shot in the 1950s, with dated language and crackling sound."

Carrère's interest in justice might encompass, unspoken, an obvious operational question - how were the attacks allowed to happen? He certainly provides an answer of sorts, while reporting on the evidence of Bernard Bajolet, former Director General for External Security in France. Carrère tells readers that Bajolet admits the whole thing was "a cock-up",  explaining to the court that both the French and Belgian police forces had the information they needed to prevent the attacks, having picked up "a petty jihadist named Reda Hame in August 2015 on his return from Syria [who] divulges what Abaaoud [the ringleader of the plot] is planning". Sadly, the two police forces took absolutely no notice of this information.

As to spiritual justice, while not as full of forgiveness as Georges Salines, a victim's father who has begun a friendship with the father of his child's murderer, Carrère is not as unforgiving as Antoine Leiris, whose wife was murdered at Bataclan. Personally, I do not judge Leiris - forgiveness is a matter for those who suffered because of the terrible events of that November evening and, if he is not ready to forgive, that is a matter for him. 

V13 does not provide answers to all the questions provoked by the Paris attacks, but it is still a book worth reading for anyone curious about the Islamo-terrorism that has become part of life in the west. It is full of interesting detail, not least, for me at least, an introduction to the phenomenon called taquiya. Taquiya is a word used by Muslims to describe the Islamic tactic of living and working "like submarines in a society they hate and wish to destroy." According to Carrère, Muslims use taquiya because "to fool the unbelievers, you have to blend in with them. You have to pass yourself off as a nice Muslim who's happy to pray without bothering anyone, in full respect of the social pact." This means that "a cold monster could well be hiding behind your neighbour's familiar face."

Returning to the question of justice, Carrère ultimately comes down on the side of lenience. He is glad that some of those accused of peripheral involvement are not imprisoned, even though they are not declared innocent. He is troubled by the heavy sentence given to the terrorist who did not ignite his bomb belt and therefore is the only one of the main perpetrators still alive to be punished. Carrère seems persuaded by the idea that punishing this young man so severely will send a message to those on the point of blowing themselves up that they might as well go through with the act, as society will not be lenient to them if they back off at the last moment. I think this is naive. Anyone who has got to the point of wearing an explosive vest is beyond reason, even if they do hesitate and ultimately choose not to explode their device. Even though Carrère sat through this long trial and observed the accused and heard how keen they were to damage and destroy the society around them, he still seems to me to underestimate the threat men like them pose, living in our midst. For me his book - most particularly his insight into extreme Islam's embrace of sadism - increased my already growing suspicion that turning the other cheek against Islamic terrorism might be a misunderstanding of Christ's message and the West's most dangerous mistake. 

Recent Reading - You Are Here by David Nicholls

You Are Here is the most enjoyable of David Nicholls' books that I have read since One Day, (a book I absolutely love and hugely admire). Since reading One Day, I have also read Sweet Sorrow by the same author, which I quite liked but not enough to write anything about here (or was it laziness?) and Us, which I disliked so much that I decided not vent my spleen on the subject, as I felt it was obscurely unfair to do so.

What I found uncomfortable about Sweet Sorrow and maddening about Us was the way that Nicholls does not challenge the assumption inherent in each novel's plot line - that some people are naturally glamorous and out of reach, and those nice souls who are sparrows rather than birds of paradise ought to recognise they are too good for the likes of the glamorous and stay in their lane, worshipping from afar. Nichols doesn't seem to recognise the possibility that glamour might be worth questioning, that it might be a sign that a person has a desire to be admired and conducts themselves with that either in mind or perhaps only as a subconscious motivation. In Us, for example, the main character is so obviously worth a hundred of his wife, and yet at no point that I remember is there any faint hint that his wife is a self-satisfied idiot for despising her husband because he cannot get onboard with her appreciation of "the arts". He is supposed, apparently, to accept that the gift of appreciation she possesses sets her above him, rather than revealing her as a poseur. 

There is a touch of the same tendency in You Are Here, but it is somehow more bearable. The two main characters are slightly what the playground would term "losers", although endearing. In Nicholls-world, it is their lot to plod through life in their drab plumage and not to strive for glamour. If you accept the premise, the story is enjoyable, often amusing and from time to time touching. It certainly carries you along happily - I suppose what I am trying to say is that it is very easy to read, without ever being trashy (and in my view that is a huge achievement).

There are many amusing and touching moments in the book, and yet by the end I felt faintly melancholic. I wonder now what Nicholls's background is and whether he was brought up a Calvinist. It might explain the idea it seems to me that he always proceeds from, (whether consciously or otherwise) - the belief that individual fate is essentially preordained. 

Hotel Art

The pictures hotels choose to hang on their walls are usually awful and generally mass-produced. Those who select them probably sit in committee with a bullet list of requirements - not too striking or offensive, soothing, ideally, (or, as some might call it, bland). 

Clearly, having nothing on the walls might be a bit bleak in box-like rooms filled with mass-produced furniture but would good pictures really upset guests? Or is there a fear that they'd pinch them if they were actually nice? 

Anyway, here are some pictures hanging in a place we are staying overnight which happens to be in a wine growing area. A decision seems to have been made that really bad paintings that have corks glued onto them is a perfect decorative solution. I am fighting the temptation to pull a few corks off.

Oh So Primitive

I am enthralled by the works of the so-called Northern Primitives, so I was really pleased to see works by two of them in Sibiu this week. Some might say something about photographs making these paintings redundant but I disagree. The works that van Eyk, Memling and Rogier van der Weyden have left us transcend photographs - although I cannot explain how.

Van Eyk, Man with a Blue Hat, (a portrait of Duke Philippe I of Brabant), painted in 1430; Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man Reading, painted in 1470; Hans Memling, Portrait of a Woman at Prayer, painted in 1470.

Part of the collection of the Bruckenthal Museum's collection in Sibiu, Romania.