Review: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The various currents of American identity jump out of this novel’s pages, and then sing you to sleep with flowery, melodramatic Victorian prose.

The first of these currents is puritanism, sharply criticized by the narrative for its hypocrisy and unneighbourliness. That this streak remains within American culture despite the novel’s consistent place in school reading lists suggests the critique doesn’t quite land. Do readers laugh at the townsfolk who snub the lovechild of an adultress until she becomes a rich heiress (I certainly did), but not see themselves in these small-minded, selfish folk (I certainly didn’t)? 

Another current is the pride and tenacity in standing up for one’s beliefs, no matter the social opposition — even if it demands braving the Atlantic to reinvent oneself. This theme, too, the author weaves into his work with intention. Adulteress Hester Prynne’s quiet rebellion in transforming the scarlet letter she is forced to wear into something beautiful, her refusal to cover the letter in shame… these passages are touchingly written, heroic.

Combining these two currents together, there is a deep mistrust in the state — which is, after all, composed of people, who tend towards being cruel puritans. Highlighted secular institutions are the prison and the cemetery. Elections are pompous, revered, capricious rituals. Social interventions callously and sanctimoniously try to part mother and child. Through personification in Hester, the virtues elevated by the narrative are individual charity and truthfulness to oneself.

Some currents perhaps less intentionally flow from the author’s pen. The noble savagery of the indigenous neighbours is an artifact of the author's era. There is a heavy christian morality that coats every character’s emotions — particularly that of guilt. It weighs so leadenly on the characters that I find the novel almost not worth reading for its lack of insight into human psychology, the focus of the novel.

Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

This is an ambitious, vivid debut novel. The retelling of the story of Buddha’s son was clever and fresh, and meaningful even if you are not acquainted with the mythology. The prose was elegant and evocative and flowing. The world felt packed with mysteries, swirling with people and politics. The fantasy version of Sri Lanka felt so fun to explore, and the author deftly wove in the scars of colonialism, and its relationship to fascist popular uprisings and religious fundamentalism, and the way political violence is given cover by a liberal tolerance more concerned with bureaucracy and comfortable vacations in the mountains than halting pandemics and pogroms. The pandemic setting also felt eerily familiar: the narrative is very aware of who is masked, which strangers intrude within breathing distance.

But I felt like overall it came together not quite right. Some scenes had awkward transitions and some events were unclear; I had to reread a passage to confirm that a key character had actually died, and it didn’t always feel natural why a chapter started where it did. The mysteries didn’t unravel at the right rate; given the prominence of the Bright Doors, their connection to other worlds felt insufficiently dwelled upon, and was overshadowed by a somewhat out-of-nowhere appearance of a long-lost lover. I expected more coherence between the various mysteries of time shifting, doors, devils and prophecies. Perhaps their seeming disjointedness is given cohesion by familiarity with South Asian folklore. 

The ending also came a little suddenly. From the very first pages of the book, we learn Fetter’s shadow has been torn from him. At the emotional climax of the book, we suddenly learn the narrator has been Fetter’s shadow all along, and we cease seeing the world through Fetter’s eyes as the shadow sets out to complete its own goals. This reveal was well done, and I enjoyed revisiting parts of the story with this knowledge. It was also a clever way to resolve the contradiction between Fetter swearing to never kill again with the prophecy that Fetter would end his father’s life: Fetter’s shadow played the role of assassin (via an ignominious mode of death) while Fetter played the role of non-violent dissenter. Fetter is lighter than air, the shadow operates by causing pain, disgust, indigestion, shame. They form a yin/yang. 

However with this thesis/antithesis established, I felt the lack of synthesis at the end rather unfulfilling: Fetter remains blocked off from his shadow, and more distant and difficult to read than ever. Perhaps it is the author’s intent for Fetter to fully reject forever the use of violence as “the only way to change the world” — his mother’s mantra. A permanent separation of shadow and body achieves that. On the other hand, a synthesis of shadow and brightness would indicate an acceptance of both violence and non-violence. However, in the final page Fetter indicates that he has achieved nearly this latter transformation — he continues to reject violence by his hands while supporting a movement that is willing to use force when necessary to overthrow their government. So then why did his shadow leave him, separate from him?

The crux of the issue is, I think, how the author tried to approach the problem of political revolution in fiction. An author has, broadly, two choices: (1) the main character(s) can play the central role, acting as world-changing heroes (Babel), or (2) the main character can play a small role, some side battle in a bigger war (For Whom The Bell Tolls, Wheel of Time). The Saint of Bright Doors tries to have it both ways: (1) the main character is prophesied to kill his father, and (2) the main character is but a small part of a dynamic, growing movement. While the objective of (1) is completed, the day is not yet saved, and the movement built by Fetter’s friends (2) is poised to contest power. However, Fetter is strangely absent in both aspects: (1) it is his shadow that takes agency in the first arc, and (2) Fetter’s friends who take agency in the second arc. As a result, Fetter’s arc is mainly to drift through the story, and come to terms with his relationships with his parents, while others get the political work done.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

This history of the United States is familiar history, in the way that Wicked is familiar to The Wizard of Oz fans: the formation and development of the United States told from the perspective of those indigenous to the continent. Rather than extolling the inventions of liberties and freedoms, this history is a tragic devastation of a rich network of communities, and their struggle for survival, recognition and restitution.

One of the key themes of this work is how genocidal ideology doesn’t spring out of nowhere. The dehumanization of peoples in Europe preceded the dehumanization of peoples of the Americas, if to a less radical degree. England used bounties to capture priests (who they would then kill) as part of its conquest of Ireland; to conquer the vast distances of the Americas, this practice turned into scalping (Chapter 2). A religion whose God called upon them to wander the wilderness, defeat the heathens, and to occupy a promised land, went on to do just that in the New World (and then later, in Palestine), calling it Manifest Destiny (Chapter 3). The dispossession of peasants across England during the birth of capitalism reverberated in the dispossession of indigenous people of the Americas, using many of the technologies of capitalism — debts, cheap commodities (Chapter 3) — and benefitting from a self-interested volunteer army of settlers (or squatters) instead of the compelled labour of feudalism (Chapter 7). 

Another key theme is that this ideology is not a thing of the past. As the conclusion argues beautifully, the same techniques of quelling insurgencies, the same dehumanization of the barbarous enemy are present in United States imperialist wars of the 20th and 21st century (Vietnam, Iraq, Yemen, the Philippines, Kora, and others). Manifest Destiny developed into a belief that is the United States’ right to have military bases across the world, to bend the world to its will through legal tools and economic tools and, of course, violence. 

I think everyone should read this book.

Review: Heidegger and the Ideology of War by Domenico Losurdo

When we say we are anti-fascist, it doesn’t mean we are only against the specific forms of fascism that developed in Italy and Germany in the mid-twentieth century, but that we are against all forms of fascism—an ideology of war and violence to benefit the community of the privileged off the subjugation and genocide of the out-groups. Fascism adapts to the specific conditions of a time, and it is happy to put on disguises to best appeal to the needs of a nation. That means we cannot be so reductive as to divide philosophers into camps of “Nazi” or “not Nazi” (or “fascist” or “not fascist”), but must understand and recognize those schools of thought that give birth to fascism, or otherwise nurture it and give it cover. 

To do so, we must correctly understand the political currents of these proto-fascist philosophies at the time they were written. Philosophy fails particularly spectacularly at this task with Heidegger, a philosopher still widely upheld and read today, as Losurdo lays out:

The debate regarding Heidegger and his relationship with Nazism is still unsettled, and it encompasses several unique aspects. Usually, the historian of philosophy tries to single out the interlocutors and the concrete targets of a certain position, and then tries to reconstruct the real historical framework, even for propositions that have the ambition of being valid sub specie acternitatis. He does this not for the sake of historicist reductionism; on the contrary, his starting point is the awareness that even the excess of one theory with respect to its time cannot be grasped and evaluated without a preliminary attempt at historical clarification. In the case of this debate, however, many interpreters of Heidegger seem dominated by the opposite preoccupation: that of relegating all of his texts, even those in which the political dimension is explicit and declared, to a rarefied, politically aseptic sphere. In this way Heidegger, who not only in his letters and occasional speeches, but also in his theoretical writings, tirelessly comments upon the events of his time, is subjected to a purifying process that is supposed to cleanse him of any worldly contamination.

Losurdo places Heidegger in his historical context again, connecting his philosophical work with his political commentary, and comparing him with both his colleagues that clearly denounced the Nazis (Jaspers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Husserl, etc) and those whose philosophy is much more broadly accepted as aligned with Nazi ideology than Heidegger’s (Schmitt, Spengler, Junger). Losurdo traces themes of community and belonging, historicity, epistemology, identity, modernity and war through the philosophical developments between the start of the war in 1914 through the end of the war in 1945.

One of the difficulties with understanding fascism is that within their political movements, at any given time and over the course of time, different strands of philosophies become expressed. For example, the Nazis upheld a bucolic ideal, but then facing the pressures of war, had to elevate mechanization and production, its antithesis. Heidegger’s relationship with fascism is sometimes excused by pointing to these different currents. His denunciation of the Nazis for giving into mechanization and modernity is hardly a damning blow against fascist ideology. It is not particularly exonerating to criticize certain Nazi ideologues for being too liberal: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) — have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’,” (1935) nor is his rejection of specifically biological racism much consolation given his strong antisemitism. His philosophy elevated the transformational aspects of war and volkische community throughout the war, and he shows little self-criticism for his relationship with the Nazi movement after the war.

Losurdo’s argument here hits similar beats as his masterpiece on Nietzsche, however where that work demolishes Nietzsche as a possible pillar from which to build progressive politics, this blow to Heidegger landed as less fatal. This might be partly due to the length; at only one fifth the page count, Losurdo doesn’t have the space to prevent a full intellectual development of Heidegger. Are there parts of Heidegger that can be salvaged, developed towards some other end? It seems unlikely, but Heideggerians might follow their lodestar in doing a poor job of self-critique.

Review: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy by Joseph Stiglitz

This book works as a corrective for people who think that government policy has little impact on wealth equality, but who also care about wealth inequality as morally bad. I'm not sure exactly what audience that is. Some elected democrats, I suppose, and some of their more dedicated but privileged voters. And that is, of course, who this book is addressed to. (Stiglitz wrote this report in 2016, presumably imagining a Clinton administration. In 2024, his discussion of recession recovery, inflation rates, etc, seems already somewhat dated.)

There are many entirely reasonable policies presented here. Capital gains rates should indeed be taxed at a higher rate. Worker bargaining needs to be strengthened. Patent laws are stifling innovation and hurting the general public, who cannot afford life-saving medications, or who have to pay exorbitant costs for it due to laws that block the public sector bargaining for a discount. Addressing these issues would indeed lead to a better economy for the majority of Americans. Though (perhaps because of this work and works like it) there is nothing particularly novel about these recommendations nor the way in which they are advocated.

There is very little role for the State to play in Stiglitz's path forward, other than simply tweaking the rules here or there. I, for example, would argue that if a business is too big to fail, it should be a state owned enterprise, while Stiglitz thinks such banks merely need to have better wills, and maybe be held to a higher level of scrutiny. I also think there should be a public retirement savings plan and many other such public programs, subsidized and well-governed, while Stiglitz believes the main responsibility of a public program is to encourage better market competition and that they should not be subsidized or otherwise given "unfair" advantages.

The analysis is overall flawed for three reasons, one economic, one political, and one philosophical. First, Stiglitz believes that "The American economy is not out of balance because of the natural laws of economics. Today's inequality is not the result of the inevitable evolution of capitalism." This is stated without further justification, as an axiom on which the rest of the book rests. Capitalism necessitates inequality, and sharpens inequality. If everyone has equal wealth and opportunity, there would be no workers for capitalists to hire, or no capitalists for workers to sell their labour to. Because owning capital means you can make money by having money, and without working, inequality naturally rises. Stiglitz takes aim primarily at the financial sector for not doing its job of providing liquidity for investing in production. This is, of course, not the job of the financial sector. The financial sector, like the manufacturing sector and every other private sector, has as its task the goal of accumulating capital. That is what it means to live under capitalism. The finance sector has done a fantastic job of accumulating capital. Stiglitz's proposals, such as implementing a tax on all financial trades, are no more than a game of whack-a-mole of trying to curb the less useful innovations in accumulation of capital.

Second, Stiglitz appears to be uninterested in how policy changes. There is, of course, a hand-waving towards how the government is primarily composed of the wealth, and how the private sector has captured the bodies that regulate them. These issues are to be solved with, for example, easier voter registration and holidays on election days (which are, I agree, policies worth fighting for!). But why would people with political power fight to disprivilege themselves? There is little evidence presented that they would, and Stiglitz seems convinced that simply reasoning with his audience and presenting them a few statistics would be enough for them to willingly sign over a few extra million dollars of their own wealth each year.

Finally, Stiglitz's analysis is ahistorical. In his telling, past efforts were all simply misguided policy decisions. "We now know" that "[supply-side economics] is incorrect and outdated", that "developed economies can rise without lifting all boats," that by "giving into such threats" that businesses would move elsewhere if we did not deregulate we "lost doubly" by hurting the economy and worsening income inequality, and that "the arguments put forward by advocates for capital tax breaks--that they spur investment--is wrong." But these were known before. Each of these policy changes were sharply criticized and opposed at the time. These critics have been proven correct, to little fanfare or reward. But Stiglitz seems uninterested in pursuing why we made these erroneous policy changes. And without asking that question (is it because of who had political power? is it due to fundamental assumptions about economics that must be revised, such as whether capitalism inherently breeds inequality?) how do we know we are not making incorrect policy decisions once more?

Review: Women, the State and Revolution by Wendy Goldman

This book serves well as a reference, but for a full picture of women’s issues in the USSR, there is a considerable amount of context missing. 

Goldman’s introductory chapter provides a brief but excellent history of feminist and socialist thought up through 1917. Though initial conceptions of the role of the family in a socialist state were radical, with this intellectual history, the Bolshevik 1918 family code and the discourse around it are shown to be well-reasoned and strongly grounded in the progressive philosophy of the time. What would have made this chapter indispensable would be a comparison with family code legislation in other countries (recall that French women only got the right to vote in 1944, French illegitimate children only became equal to legitimate children in 2002, and at-will abortions are still illegal in England and massively restricted in many countries in the West). The innovation in the 1918 Soviet family code was not really brought home in the way it should have been. How did feminist achievements in the first socialist state impact the movement elsewhere? 

Alas, answering these questions would have been a very different book, and Goldman keeps the readers eyes focused tightly on the interior of the country, with little comparison to the legal treatment of women and children in other countries. (How did other countries handle the surplus of orphans following a war? How did other industrializing nations handle unemployment of women and lack of birth control technology?). We also see little in terms of foreign relations (largely hostile) or economic challenges that provide context towards the country’s challenges in feeding and clothing its people; to what other ends did the country direct its resources, and were its investments successful?

Most of the subsequent chapters provide detailed statistics and touching first person accounts about the difficulties experienced by orphans and women during the aftermath of the first world war and the civil war. The author editorializes somewhat, with each instance of suffering being terrible, but every attempt to fix it being somehow worse. Was there anything the author believes should and could have been done differently, with the wisdom of hindsight? These chapters were informative, but not particularly insightful.

Chapters 5 and 6, however, were more illuminating. In these chapters, Goldman skillfully maps out the fiery and varied debate about the 1926 code. The challenge of finding a robust set of rules that would serve both the urban proletariat and the peasantry — a way of life already diminishing by 1917 — and protect women and children and advance feminist conceptions of love and gender was an unsolvable puzzle. 

Perhaps particularly because of how brilliantly Goldman untangles this discourse, the subsequent rollbacks in family law in the 1930s appear to come a little out of nowhere. Was it truly so difficult to find writing regarding the thought process over the criminalization of abortion and the increased emphasis on the family as an institution for promoting economic security? The last two chapters felt a bit lazy; the conclusion was presupposed that these regressions in social policy were all “political” ploys by the Stalinist regime, and it was not necessary to dive deep into archives to understand why. Wendy writes, "The ideological reversal of the 1930s was essentially political, not economic or material in nature, bearing all the marks of Stalinist policy in other areas." A “political” decision to what “political” end? Unclear.

I picked up this book in part to answer the question of why the first nation to legalize abortion rolled it back not two decades later. I have my answer: initial legalization of abortion was viewed as a remedy to the problem of vast child poverty that the state was unable to support, and somewhat secondarily as a way to alleviate health issues arising from illegal abortions. It was not primarily an issue of the right of a woman to bodily autonomy. Conversely, when abortion law became once again more restrictive, it was viewed as a remedy to declining birth rates (discussion of the impacts of illegal abortion appears to have been minimal), and sold as something no longer necessary due to increasing economic resources for women. In the West, we view abortion so firmly within the language of bodily autonomy and right to choose that to take away this right is seen as a despicable encroachment on human rights. The USSR’s changing attitudes towards abortion do make more sense when viewed as a method of addressing social issues. Though, of course, I think they were wrong to take away this right.

This is a tragic story. The Bolsheviks correctly saw marriage as a tool of patriarchal oppression of women, and wished to bring about its withering away. Now, a century later, it has, in many ways, withered. Better birth control methods give women the confidence to enjoy sexual relationships outside of marriage, better educational and work opportunities give more women the independence to support themselves without a partner, and the laws of many countries have caught up to this material reality by providing legal protections to “de facto” marriages, much like the Bolshevik feminists fought for.

Review: Friend by Nam-nyong Paek

There are two approaches to reviewing Friend. I’ll start with the road less-traveled, which is to comment on the themes, the characterizations, the aesthetics, the author’s apparent intent, and so-on, i.e., the typical book review structure.

Part 1: On The Book

The novel investigates the fracturing of a marriage. Chae Sun-Hee seeks a divorce from her husband, Lee Seok-Chun, and by luck the judge overseeing her suit is Jeong Jin-Wu, a man who experiences difficulty navigating his own marriage, and who steps in to be the friend the divorcing couple didn’t know they needed — someone who listens to them empathetically and helps them see their marital problems and individual needs from another angle.

We see deeply into the hearts of these three people, we learn who they were when they first fell in love, and how their priorities in life shifted as they aged, discovered new interests, and dedicated themselves to their professions. These challenges are common ones — the difficulty in balancing the professional development of two individuals, the difficulty in finding common ground with a spouse with a different level of ambition or worldliness or who is motivated by different causes. The author skillfully portrays believable characters, with each character being “right” in their own way even as they disagree with each other, and with each character presenting both human flaws (withdrawness, selfishness, snobbery) and human aspirational qualities (dedication, empathy, ambitiousness).

These are questions of mid-life, amplified by the characters undergoing not only changes brought about by their advancing maturity but also by changes in society. In days gone by, women stayed home and prepared meals and cared for children. The challenge of balancing these social expectations with the pressures of a career becomes a point of contention between a career woman and her husband. In earlier days, society lauded factory work, where in the time of the novel’s setting (1980s) there is growing need (and social reward) for more specialized roles requiring further education. The lathe operator without further training gets left behind.

The narrative of individuals discovering love, discovering heartbreak, and rediscovering love is reflected in the ever-changing wonder of nature. The snow can be both a thing of beauty and delight or of devastation. A mountain range is stunning, but the weary may nap through a scenic journey instead of appreciating it. And the wind? The wind represents the loneliness of a being who moves forward thinking only of their own excitement, not sometimes bowing to the needs of another.

From whence, from whom, for what reason was the wind running, like a fugitive, like someone who has abandoned his family? Who will ever know its point of departure, who will ever know its lonesome fate? It wanders the earth aimlessly, seeking refuge among the trees in the depths of a forest or by a river in an open meadow. It dashes by without looking back or it lurks around a single spot. At times, it affectionately embraces life, sharing warmth and love with everything near and far. At other times, it bellows with rage and devours everything in sight with a destructive force that makes the earth shudder. It gets soaked in the cold rain and freezes in the icy blizzard. It moans in agony and howls into the lonely night. But then, on a quiet day, it wakes from the warmth of the sun and embarks on its journey yet again, looking forward to the promise of a new day, a new adventure. This is why it can never find a mate and, therefore, lives a most miserable life. 

(...)

“When were you planning to leave for Yeonsudeok again?”

“If it’s all right with you, I was thinking of leaving on Monday.”

“Monday? Ah that is why you arranged our date on Sunday.” Jeong Jin Wu nodded as though he had solved a mystery case. Then he sighed. “It’s fine, Go on Monday. And next time you don’t have to leave notes. I already know what to do. I’m your research assistant.” Jeong Jin Wu chuckled again.

From outside the window, the wind noticed Jeong Jin Wu and Eun Ok enjoying each other’s company by the single lamp on the desk, and respectfully left them in peace.

Though the characterizations, plot, and structure are well done, the prose reads a little repetitive in its rhythm. My hunch is that the issue lies in the translation, but I haven’t read enough Korean to know for sure. I started to feel the lack of participle clauses and I wonder if the translation could have been more idiomatic to vary the rhythm of the prose more.

Part 2: On The Discourse Around The Book 

In short, this is a novel with compelling characters tackling familiar problems, written with emotional nuance and interesting metaphors. But you wouldn’t think it to read the other reviews, which bemoan its heavy-handed propaganda. Part of me wonders how these impressions might vary if the reader was blind to the novel's origin — it was written by an author from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the author is in good standing with the state. A blind read is of course impossible — the characters are Korean, the world changing around them is clearly a maturing post-socialist revolution society, and the chapter in which Jeong Jin Wu delivers his historical materialist thesis on the institution of marriage is a dead giveaway as to the author’s Marxist education. (I found him falling in love with his wife as she devastatingly critiques his thesis to be quite endearing.)

Yes, there is a moral to the story, and yes, it aligns with what their country views to be a social good. We see how the family is the basic unit of society and must be mutually supportive. We see how corruption hurts its victims. We see how people should study and improve themselves, advance science and technology and the arts, not only for their own self-fulfillment but because it leads to a more thriving society. Are these principles the other reviewers disagree with? Are these values scary, cruel, oppressive?

What’s more, I found myself wondering how these other reviewers fare with works like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. That book certainly hits you over the head with morals: the family is the basic unit of society and must be mutually supportive (so don’t just marry the first pretty thing you fall in love with); corruption hurts its victims; improve yourself and spend within your means. These are good morals to impart for a stable society, and the state and other institutions of the anglosphere have rewarded Dickens handsomely for it. Though I’ll give Friend the edge for its optimism that through hard work, a better — more creative, more technologically advanced — society is possible.