Review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I went in fully prepared to find this book over-hyped. Since its release, I have seen its minimalist avian cover everywhere one could possibly encounter something literary, but never a review or a critique or a reflection that made me understand why its contents deserve such a prized place. (Contrast this with, say, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation, which has been similarly plastered about and for which I regularly stumble upon interesting reflections about where she succeeds or fails in capturing Homer’s age-old story, or how it captured someone’s fancy.) Quite to my surprise, I loved it.

I can see immediately why this epistolary novel captured the literary crowd: it is a very literary book. In their correspondence with each other, the characters reference books and authors constantly. The main character, Sybil, and her best friend end their letters to each other with “What are you reading?” The books that characters select for each other or for themselves relate to the familiar reader something about their inner lives and preoccupations, and this intertextuality lends itself to a rich reading experience. For example, Sybil maintains a correspondence with Joan Didion. Having recently read The Year of Magical Thinking, I can imagine why she first reached out in the years following the death of her son.

But there is more to the book than just the satisfaction of “getting the references.” The central character is a complex but compelling woman with a strong sense of herself, but who has locked up her heart in the wake of her child’s death and as a defense mechanism as an early pioneering working woman in a male-dominated field. Her past is revealed to us slowly, satisfyingly. For example, her eloquent rage at the levity with which a newspaper covered a boy’s accidental death becomes more understandable once we learn of her own experiences. Her correspondence first introduces us into a number of disparate plotlines, which we slowly discover are really different versions of similar struggles: family separation and re-unification; forging familial relationships outside of one’s bloodline; and fitting into the world awkwardly, whether because of one’s gender, orientation, immigration status, or neurodivergence. The weaving together of these themes from many different angles produces an emotionally resonant work.

The author’s writing was beautiful, moving; I highlighted many passages. Here are a few:

I am finding I have nowhere to put all of [these thoughts]. I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve come home from the grocery store overburdened with bags, but the cupboards, the refrigerator, the pantry, the countertop are all already full.

I was afraid to have a girl because what if I couldn’t understand you? I’d never found a way to fit into the world, not really, and what if I didn’t know how to be a mother to you? I was afraid and that’s the whole thing. I was afraid all the time of losing something or ruining something, and then I did.

You and I have enjoyed an honest, confrontational friendship for going on sixty years.

Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning.

My letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job, the letters amount to who I am.

Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

What to say about Roberto Bolaño's wild, wild, 1100-page journey of a novel? Did I find the plot gripping, its unending pages flying by? No. But did I find the characters emotionally resonant, such that aspects of the human experience were revealed or made clear to me? Also no. But did I delight in the prose, marveling at the ingenuity of the mind to have fashioned words together in such an evocative way? Once more, no.

But I did really enjoy this book for the unique way it developed its themes. The book is structured as five very different (almost) standalone novels. No single story makes a strong statement about a particular topic, but by touching on a given idea from a variety of angles, the theme comes into focus.

One such example is the idea of how easy it is to escape the horrors of the world and remain in one’s comfortable intellectual community. The first of the five volumes revolves around a tight-knit community of scholars who have devoted their lives to the study and translation of the novels by a mysterious German writer, Archimboldi. As these characters unravel their love triangles and academic tensions, we hear the briefest murmurings of some tragic story in a small town in Mexico. In a few scenes, there are moments of shocking racism and violence, but ultimately these conflicts barely matter. Questions of the heart and intellectual musings occupy the characters. In the second volume, we see more of the unrest and violence in Latin America, and we are introduced to a troubled, drifting woman, but through the eyes of a busy academic. Matters of violence and sexism and racism affect him insofar as they affect the people he loves. When it comes to broad issues affecting humanity, Professor Amalfatino’s more memorable reflections revolve around literature and intellectual culture. The third volume brings us closer still: through the eyes of a reporter, we learn about the startlingly frequent and brutal murders of women in the town of Santa Teresa. But Oscar Fate’s beat is African American affairs and his editor won’t allow him to expense an investigation into issues that affect Latinas. Three different explorations of how sites of knowledge production avoid systemic issues of violence and sexism. The fourth volume hits us over the head with the events in Santa Teresa, striking a format somewhere between a police blotter and a novel. The discovery of each woman’s body is described in detail, as is the largely fruitless investigation into their murder. The author shows us how poverty, misogyny, and American imperialism contribute to these deaths, and hinder their investigation. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” a character reflects.

Most of these mysteries go unsolved; the author seems to be cautioning us that mysteries in life do not typically have a climactic, satisfying conclusion. Despite Volume 4 resembling a police intrigue more than any other genre, we never find out who murdered all the women in Santa Teresa. Most likely it was many killers. Many killers, and broader socioeconomic problems. Volume 1 sets up the mystery of who Archimboldi really is, but ends without providing any answers — neither to the reader, nor to the scholars desperate to meet him. In Volume 5, the reader learns just about all there is to know about the life of Archimboldi. He is ultimately not a particularly interesting man (notwithstanding his quiet assassination of a bureaucratic Nazi). Nor is he a particularly compelling character, remaining always a little emotionally distant from the reader. Would the scholars that devoted their lives to dissecting his every written word find satisfaction in finally getting to meet him? 

It is a pessimistic novel. Or perhaps that diagnosis goes too far? The author shows us that real peace and happiness can be found in love. But the novel is broadly sorrowful about the state of society and we see few glints of hope for transcending it. Vulgarity and violence (particularly against women) — permeate the novel: the pummeling of the taxi driver in the first volume; the woman pushed into the ravine to her death by her own husband in the fifth volume; the spectator sport of fighting that drives the plot of the third volume; the systematic slaughter of Jews recounted by the unrepentant bureaucrat in Volume 5; and of course the litany of murders of the fourth volume. The refrain "she had been anally and vaginally raped" is repeated so often that I found myself anticipating the blow of hearing it every time another body is found. 

It is a very self-conscious and self-referential work. Bolaño’s characters discuss literature and art, and much of the commentary applies to the novel they appear in ("The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere."). Bolaño wrote this novel seeing his own death approaching on the horizon, and there are moments where he appears to reflect on his own place in the literary canon:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

What is that "something that terrifies us all" that Bolaño saw himself as struggling with, in this imperfect, torrential work? It’s a question the book rewards with many answers. Contemplating what these might be, long after you’ve put down the book, is what makes this novel enjoyable.

Review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

This is a lively and approachable essay collection for introducing the reader to anti-capitalist discourse in modern India. The opening essay, which lends the work its title, is an evergreen socioeconomic analysis of India: how has capitalist production dispossessed the workers? How do Western imperialism and homegrown monopolies shape the laws and relations of production? How do NGOs support this exploitation, despite their lofty rhetoric? And how does gendered and caste exploitation figure into all of this? It's a great read, and I recommend it as a stand-alone piece.

The remaining essays are much shorter, and focus on hot issues of the 2010s: the increasing militarized policing of Kashmir, the Jan Lokpal Bill, and the clandestine capital punishment of Mohammad Afzal, for example. I was unfamiliar with these events, and the discourse around them, and took the opportunity to learn more about India's recent history. Roy seems to cut through the murkiness around these social issues with clarity, highlighting power relationships and financial ties between capitalist firms and the media companies that misleadingly report on these events, and the role of US imperialism and the military industrial complex in taking advantage of these fracture points. Given the temporal and geographical distance between me and this subject matter, however, these are less relevant to my context, and their anthologization is not more than the sum of the parts.

Review: The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism by Torkil Lauesen

Okay, so you’ve decided you want the end of capitalism. To figure out how to get there, you need to know the history of attempts to supersede it. There has been several centuries of such history, and much of it has been written by the victors — the capitalists, not the socialists. Torkil Lauesen’s 2024 book serves as an introduction to this history, and I would recommend it for a curious reader interested in learning more about socialism.

The overarching argument is that the transition towards socialism has been and will be a long process, involving changes in the way economies produce goods, in how social systems and cultural institutions are structured, and in how nations interact. The majority of the book is comprised of a roughly chronological narrative of socialist projects, beginning with the 1848 revolutions and ending with Xi Jinping’s reforms in China. These past efforts have shown us the need for state structures and for increased technological development, against utopian socialist visions for stateless and pre-industrial forms of socialism. At the same time, Lauesen argues, rigid and technocratic state structures and overemphasis on economic development have also brought economic collapse, misadministration of justice, climate devastation, worker exploitation and other ills of capitalist production.

Lauesen untangles history with nuance, carefully considering competing economic interests and capabilities. He emphasizes throughout the changing understanding of internationalism, sovereignty, development of the forces of economic production, and the role of the state in constructing socialism. Lauesen’s analysis leads him to support China, which he sees as now reining in the capitalist excesses of its transition to modern economic production towards the construction of socialism, and acting as a bulwark against western (capitalist) imperialism so that other socialist projects could hope to do the same. 

These historical sections are book-ended by a brief introduction on his method (dialectical materialism) and concluding remarks on how the contradictions of imperialism and capitalism are unfolding in different regions around the world and on what is to be done to bring about socialism. The Introduction I found compelling. The concluding sections I found a bit overly long and yet also too superficial to provide enough to sink one’s teeth into. Still, I appreciate the author’s having placed stakes in the ground for what he predicts might happen, since it allows future readers to better evaluate the accuracy of his assessment.

While I agree, for the most part, with Lauesen’s main points (as outlined above), I found much to quibble with, and would recommend against using this book as a historical reference. This was particularly true of eras of history which I have studied more closely, which leads me to believe that there are many other historical beats that were not quite correctly portrayed. Some quibbles are mostly inconsequential: for example, Lauesen states that “Marx’s critique did not affect the [Gotha Programme]” while Lars Lih compellingly argues that important parts of the programme were “completely rewritten” in response. Some quibbles are a matter of polemics and interpretation: Lauesen, in his typical anti-Stalin bent, makes much of Lenin’s dying thoughts on succession, when, in my opinion, socialist states should use more democratic means of selecting their next leaders.

Several of my concerns have more historical import. Lauesen presents the Stalinist purges as very top down, and led by Stalin himself, minimizing the role played by workers and party members throughout the state. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet Union is interpreted as a top-down betrayal, more akin to Zubov’s bourgeois nationalist assessment than Kenney and Keeran’s Marxist analysis of economic conditions and philosophical battles. While Lauesen is particularly uncharitable to the post-Lenin USSR, I believe he goes far too easy on the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which he presents as “a much-needed showdown with bureaucracy, expert mentality, and hierarchy.” There are also some notable absences, such as the DPRK — which presents an important example of a nation that, unlike China or Vietnam, has chosen isolation rather than integration with the capitalist system.

Still, this book organizes a long and complex history, and presents it approachably. Its gaps and missteps can be addressed with other readings, or through critical discussion in a reading circle.

Review: Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

I’ve read a few other books by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and loved them. This Accident of Being Lost and Islands of Decolonial Love are collections of short stories and poems that explore different aspects of connection, love and belonging from an indigenous perspective. These works showcase a writing style that is deeply personal, beautiful in its emotional intensity and particularity.

In The Theory of Water, Simpson leaves the realm of fiction and poetry to speak more overtly politically. While I found this premise interesting, I felt flat-footed: despite the title, this book is not a work of political or philosophical theory but a personal memoir. Simpson looks back on the process of grieving the loss of Doug Williams, an Elder and friend who guided her in reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. When writing figuratively — such as in her metaphor of sintering, that joining and mutual transformation of snowflakes that could form a basis for radical communal movement — Simpson’s prose is evocative and compelling, even in this non-fictional form.

However, her engagement with political theory left me disappointed. Works seemed haphazardly referenced, and were summarized subjectively: I recently read X and it made me think of Y. Her approving references to Gramsci and Aimé Césaire appeared carefully worded to give the impression they were opponents of communism, rather than committed communists with specific disagreements with specific communist parties. Her epistemology was also too irrationalist for my tastes (“Cyclical time comes from land. Linear time is a European construct that overlays cyclical time — a mechanism to organize the world in a homogeneous way to facilitate, of course, capitalism.”) Still, I found it interesting to see how she incorporated radical Black authors like Cedric Robinson into her vision for the radical indigenous movement.

Perhaps if I had gone into the book expecting a memoir, I would have appreciated it more for what it was than been disappointed for it not being what I wished for.

Review: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The Safekeep explores political themes through a sapphic romance. However, it neither satisfyingly interrogates its political tensions nor weaves a compelling love story. The point of failure is the same for both aspects of the novel: the mutual understanding between the two main characters is just not believable.

The protagonist is a small-minded and reclusive Dutch woman, Isabel, who cares for her family home like a shrine: her parents are dead and her brothers have moved out, leaving her alone to tend the garden and obsess over the silverware. Early hints suggest to us that there is more to the house than Isabel would prefer us to know: her family moved into it during World War II fully furnished and touched with signs of its former inhabitants. We later learn that it was vacated because the Jewish family who lived there was sent to a concentration camp, then evicted for non-payment of the mortgage.

Isabel’s brother finds himself needing to travel internationally, and places his new girlfriend, Eva, in the “family home” while he is gone. Isabel treats her horribly, mocking her manners and her appearance and controlling her actions, while Eva remains peppy and full of life and keeps trying to break through Isabel’s hard exterior shell — a manic pixie dream girl, but queer. Because Isabel lacks any redeeming qualities, Eva’s patience and interest in her appears unmotivated. When they suddenly initiate a romantic relationship, it feels unearned, inscrutable, forced. Romantic chemistry springs from two hearts recognizing each other, whereas in this novel, hatred melts into love without that moment of genuine mutual discovery. The sensuously written passages of hazy, heady new love felt flat. What did each woman see in the other?

In the third act, the reader learns that Eva is the daughter of the dispossessed Jewish family, and the lone survivor of the camps in her family. She concocts a Hollywoodesque scheme of seducing Isabel’s brother to reclaim her home, or at the very least, reclaim some of her family’s dinnerware. Conveniently for the plot, the scheme is surprisingly successful, and Eva’s sojourn at her family’s former home is interrupted only by Isabel’s stumbling across her diary, where Eva had recorded the reclaimed dinnerware.

This reveal explains Eva’s patient persistence in befriending Isabel, but a mystery remains for the reader: what was this intense love actually founded on? We are told that Eva really did inexplicably love the abusive Isabel — it was not a mere ploy. Despite their relationship being founded on deception, we are told Isabel still loves Eva. The two women work out their pain in a series of emotional confrontations that explore the hurt of being kicked out of one’s home and not belonging anywhere. Isabel maneuvers to get the house put in her name — rather than her brother’s — and invites Eva to live with her. And so they live together happily ever after. The closing words of the book are in Hebrew: “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).

The novel is a study of dispossession. Published in 2024 and written by an author who spent her childhood in Israel and who has spoken about her opposition to the Israeli government, it is impossible to read this story without thinking of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Isabel’s fierce attachment to her house as her ancestral right despite the living dispossessed inhabitant’s desperate desire to return home renders her a symbolic stand-in for Israel. On the other hand, Eva’s suffering in the Holocaust and in the callousness and antisemitism of the Netherlands post-War is distinctly Jewish. The Israel-Palestine conflict is thus transfigured into one between Israel and Jews. The resolution of this political tension is shallow and Utopian: if the two sides simply fall in love they can share a home together.

But where does the mutual recognition for this unification come from? The answer is as unclear as the basis for Isabel and Eva’s love.

I could see an alternative restructuring of the story in which Eva’s motivations are revealed earlier on. Rather than reserving her intentions for a climactic reveal towards the end, her affections for Isabel could then be developed more transparently. Perhaps the romance could grow as they tend the garden together, connecting with each other as they connect with their shared land and construct something new. I would find it more believable from a character perspective, and perhaps from a political perspective, than an inexplicable attraction between two souls.

Review: Materialism and the Dialectical Method by Maurice Cornforth

Where does one go to learn about Marxist philosophy and dialectical materialism? Cornforth provides one avenue in Materialism and the Dialectical Method. This work is written in an accessible style, with the ideas developed in an intuitive and clear manner in plain language and with helpful examples. Cornforth includes lengthy quotes by the most prominent names in Marxism (predominantly Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, but also Hegel, Marx, and Mao), giving the reader a sense of the intellectual tradition. The book covers the difference between idealism and materialism, contrasts dialectical versus metaphysical modes of thought, and introduces various principles of dialectics (contradiction, development, interpenetration, negation of the negation, etc). It’s a solid place to start, and I think it is a good option for a curious beginner.

That said, I found it not particularly useful as a more advanced reader, and here it stands in contrast with other works that I think also serve as good entry points to Marxist philosophy: Ludwig Fuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy by Engels, The Dialectical Biologist by Levins and Lewontin (for scientists, in particular), The Development of the Monist View of History by Plekhanov. These works present philosophical problems with more depth, and query philosophical failures in greater detail, rewarding the advanced or repeat reader. They also present the history of philosophy as a battle of ideas, showing dialectical materialism to be the winning philosophy. In the hands of these authors, philosophy feels very alive and yet incompletely solved; it is portrayed as a rich, developing field and invites the reader to join it. Cornforth’s book is undoubtedly written in more accessible language, but it is also more didactic; the party higher-ups have done the studying, and identified the solution, and it is up to the reader to learn the material so they can help change the world. A curious beginner up for a more challenging read may get more out of these other works.

Something I did find interesting about my read of this book was comparing its evolution between editions. The first edition (1953) lauds Lysenko as a shining example of dialectical materialism applied to the natural sciences. By the fourth edition (1968), Lysenko had become a cautionary tale of dogmatism. To a lesser extent, language around Stalin and the Soviet Union also shifted. Reading between the lines, Cornforth seems to hew close to his party’s line. This isn’t, on its face, objectionable, but I wish that his editorial notes had revealed more about his reflections on how he had made such an incorrect assessment (about Lysenko) to start, and how that shaped his thinking.

Cornforth’s introductory book is, at this point, over half a century old. Some of his examples would have been more topical than they are currently (e.g., nuclear bomb, the space race). There has also been considerable philosophical development since then: Marxism versus analytical philosophy, and Marxism versus post-modernism are pertinent debates absent from Cornforth’s book. Perhaps it is time for a new introductory book?