Review: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

The author is too charmed by her main character, Agnes (Anne) Hatheway. This is not uncommon in literature, but I think there are some interesting insights into how this particular version of the trope reflects our times.

This fictionalized version of William Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, is supernaturally intuitive, able to discern a person’s thoughts just by holding their hand. She is wise in the ways of plants and flouts social norms; these traits portray her as above the crude pragmatism and small-mindedness of the rest of the villagers. She passes gracefully from manic pixie dream girl to goddess mother, birthing her first daughter in the serenity of the forest.

The author has no problem subjecting her heroine to strife. Agnes’s beloved nymph-like mother dies in childbirth early in Agnes’s childhood. Her step-mother is cruel and her in-laws treat her little better. Her youngest daughter is born sickly, and needs special care. Her son dies.

The author is, however, unable to portray a real change in Agnes. At the end of the novel, Agnes is who she is at the start and throughout each of these challenges: plant-wise, norm-flouting, guided by intuition. She has climbed out of the depths of her mourning of her son, and discovered that her husband, too, was grappling with grief; and yet she has not confronted herself, her fears, her weaknesses, and transformed, in the way we expect of a novel’s heroine. Agnes is a fantasy: an ideal of womanhood and femininity that is all intuition, emotion, and connection with nature. 

This is a seductive fantasy, and so it is not surprising the author is disinclined to confront it — a necessary critique if Agnes is to undergo a character transformation. At first blush, this fantasy appears as a challenge to patriarchy: women are granted special powers, special knowledge, that men could never have. Agnes’s nurturing care and herbs are favourably contrasted to the cool, distant, and ineffective male plague doctor, for example. But underneath, there is nothing liberatory about it. Agnes achieves material wealth through the literary successes of the husband she chose based on her magical visions. This provides her a degree of emancipation, but it is granted by a man, and denied to other women. Reverence of the magic of reproduction does not challenge a system that (often violently) controls how women reproduce.

The novel foils Agnes’s intuition against masculine rationality. The author is, of course, limited by historical fact: women were overwhelmingly denied access to literacy and education. There are examples of female characters learning their letters; Agnes’s eldest daughter learns accounting and writing and takes over the running of the household. But it is not shown as liberatory, or really even useful beyond the domestic sphere. Indeed, this example serves only to show how cycles of teenage rebellion repeat, as the daughter despairs of ever being able to escape her home, just as Agnes once did. Agnes’s intuition is ultimately as useful as anything that can be taught in books. Her plant knowledge appears similarly innate — there are allusions to mentors who taught her falconing and bee-keeping and other such skills, but they happen off-page; to struggle with systematizing knowledge, or to portray trial and failure of such witchy skills might dampen the fantasy.

We could contrast this with Virginia Woolf’s thought experiment about the importance of education and training in A Room of One’s Own. Conveniently, she picks a near-identical character: William Shakespeare’s sister. Woolf emphasizes the lack of education that makes up women’s oppression:

She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.

Indeed in Woolf’s view, motherhood is a source of oppression, not power.

So is Hamnet rooted in the past? A pre-Woolf vision of feminine empowerment? Not at all. Indeed the book ought to be read in the context of modern debates over motherhood: natural versus medicated births, the trauma arising from one’s “birth plan” not being followed, the way caring for a special needs kid shapes your decision-making. Agnes, it goes without saying, is on the side of natural births and at-home births (or, at-forest births, as it were). She fits in with the spirituality of the “wellness industry”. 

In place of character growth, the author focuses on lushly painting intense emotions. She wields language unusually to do so; the entire novel is told in the present tense. She leans heavily on lists of three — a pattern so distracting that the reader should try her best to put it out of mind and simply allow the redundant adjectives to wash over her. Her unique style is very effective for those dreamlike moments of life, like the depths of grief, where even the smallest experiences feel sharp yet disconnected from ordinary life. It is also effective when the narrative shifts from following Agnes to following inanimate things: some of the most memorable passages trace the journey of a plague-carrying flea and a news-laden letter. Her choice of style is less effective when narrating the more routine aspects of life, like business negotiations. In these scenes, the prose heightens the importance of everything yet weighs it down in its excess of lush detail. It is sensuous prose, relishing in being and feeling.

And so we have a novel that emphasizes intuition and feeling. We have a superhuman, who inherits her elevated sensitivity from her mother, and passes it on to her children. We have a book that revels in the magic and beauty of motherhood. It is a heady combination. It is also a familiar combination. The name that we gave to that 20th century movement that celebrated irrationality over reason, Übermenschen, naturalism and a fantastical version of maternity is, of course, fascism.

Review: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Reading other reviews of The Metamorphosis, I am struck by how impressions of this book seems to reveal more about the reader than the author's intent. How do you approach subtext, metaphor, and unreliable narration? How do you interpret interpersonal tensions, familial relationships, and introspection?

In my reading, this is a book about a crisis of self, and of how this impacts a family. Gregor is a young man who is the sole income earner for his aging parents and younger sister, working a dreary and arduous job that brings him little social recognition. Famously, he wakes up one morning having been transformed into a bug.

Or rather, in my reading, one may as well describe what has happened as a metamorphosis into an insect. In an existential crisis, how else can he describe the way questioning his place in the world and his possible futures makes him completely change his sense of self?

This crisis could be brought on by anything: coming out of the closet, suicidal ideation, loss of faith. From a Doylist perspective, this monstrous metamorphosis is a convenient narrative device. To discuss any one of these challenges is to need to speak of their particulars. The absurd and unexplained transformation into a bug allows you to discuss their similarities.

Gregor's family responds at first in revulsion. His sister starts to treat him with sympathy, but never real closeness; she does not speak to him, does not recognize his humanity. For a while, his parents ignore him, hoping he will return to his old self. His family members deal with their own self identity crises, as they deal with their shame of him. Having relied on his income, they find themselves in financial difficulties, and resort to unglamorous work, selling their valuables, and taking in borders. Throughout, Gregor’s affection for his family is shown through his longing for the days they would gather around the dining table and his worries about their financial difficulties and health. But he is unable to be in company with them or to help them through their difficulties, because he is a bug.

In a climactic moment, Gregor’s mother’s attempt to bridge the chasm between her and Gregor hits a stumbling block, and is misinterpreted by Gregor’s father, who begins bombarding him with household items before being stopped by his mother.

No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury. He had suffered it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated as an enemy. On the contrary, as a family there was a duty to swallow any revulsion for him and to be patient, just to be patient.

The result is both a recognition of Gregor as family (albeit still not human recognition or emotional closeness), but also a fatal wound. Gregor ceases to eat, and slowly wastes away. A financial setback is the sister’s last straw, and she breaks down, asking her father to “try to get rid of it” — “it” being Gregor. Already near death, Gregor drags himself away to die. 

He thought back of his family with emotion and love. If it was possible, he felt that he must go away even more strongly than his sister.

It is a bleak story. For all his love for his family, his transformation prevents him from expressing it and prevents them from seeing him for who he is. In the end, he becomes only a burden to them, his passing nothing but relief. There is little suggestion that things could have gone another way, that such a metamorphosis could be handled better in the future.

Review: Ducks by Kate Beaton

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is Kate Beaton’s 2023 autobiographical comic book relaying the her experience graduating university in 2005 and working in the oil sands for two years. Anna Wiener blurbed the book, and I thought it was an appropriate choice: both Wiener and Beaton wrote memoirs detailing their experience as women in the male-dominated gold rushes of their particular eras and locations — Wiener in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and Beaton in Alberta in the 2000s.

Both memoirs resonated with me personally. I graduated university not too long after Beaton. I considered the oil sands — many of my classmates were pulled into its gravitational orbit — but I couldn’t bring myself to so directly be part of the environmental devastation they wreck (a realization Beaton describes coming to in the novel). Unlike Beaton, I was fortunate to not have student debt, and so I had more of a choice. Instead, I left home for a different black hole: 2010s Silicon Valley.

A troubling question woven throughout the book is how working at the oil sands changes people. Beaton describes her experiences with sexual harassment and rape. Many of the men around her dehumanize her, treat each other with callousness and cruelty, and turn to drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. Would the men she knows and loves back home turn into these hateful men too, if they were here? I remember coming to a similar realization in my early 20s. On the social media platforms built by 2010s Silicon Valley, I discovered the manosphere and its denizens' dehumanizing and transactional perspective of women and relationships. A similar troubling question writhed through my mind: which of the men around me were secretly retreating to the anonymity of the internet to post such hateful things? 

Both the Alberta oil sands and the Silicon Valley tech scene were places people went to make money. For both places, these workers — mostly men — left their homes to be somewhere where they had no community, to work long hours. That uprooting is hard. Its concentration in an area produces a culture that supports this form of sacrifice — often a toxic one. Beaton skillfully portrays this with empathy, without condoning or shrugging off the horrors. We see the difficulty of being separated from your wife and kids, and the small actions of recognition — like sharing cookies during the Christmas Eve night shift — that can make all the difference in such wrenching times.

Beaton also beautifully builds the tension arising between the desire to stay home and the desire to leave. It is familiarly Canadian: I have family in Cape Breton, and relatives who also left the Maritimes for Atlantic Canada. Her portrayal of the growing, gnawing sense of bleakness and isolation leading up to her sexual assault and the numb confusion afterwards were so moving that I put the book down for a while.

Beaton explores community and identity well. Her connection to Cape Breton is strong, and she finds other Cape Bretoners to form a community-away-from-home, who share some of her experiences. An interesting reflection comes towards the end where she is interviewed by a Globe and Mail reporter about her experience in the oil sands, and feels that the reporter is looking for salacious quotes about the awful men who work the oil sands. She is indignant: these people were her people too, in a way; the Toronto office worker hasn’t grappled with the fact that the men in her community would also be transformed by the oil sands.

The book touches on many political topics: environmental destruction, theft of land from indigenous people, illiteracy, sexism, the back-breaking and carcinogenic nature of manual labour, social inequality, and how the profit motive exacerbates all these problems. They don’t quite all tie together right, their linkages remain murky. In part, the genre of memoir acts as a limit: the author is constrained by their own slow-growing awareness of these issues. Still, it is a touching story with some memorable illustrations, and a time capsule of a very Canadian experience.

Review: Lenin, A Study on the Unity of His Thought by György Lukács

This work is of interest for two reasons. The first is for providing a snapshot of how Lenin and the USSR were received by Marxists of other countries in the early 1920s. As Lukacs himself writes in his 1967 postscript, "As a document of how a not inconsiderable group of Marxists saw Lenin's personality and mission, his place in the course of world events, it is therefore certainly not without interest." The October Revolution changed the course of history, and it is interesting to see how socialists interpreted it at the time. 

The second is for the Postscript itself, which is a candid reflection of how the author viewed his influential work, the hits and misses. I find it valuable to see how admirable thinkers reflect on their work and mature over time.

As a work that outlined the unity of Lenin's thinking, I found it lacking. I would have liked to see more of an intellectual development traced out, and maybe a critical balance sheet tallied up, while this work represented more of a snapshot of his final positions, and was so laudatory that I had to roll my eyes a few times. Overall, the work seems more aimed at criticism of the failures of other parties to bring about a revolution, than of really presenting the unity of Lenin's thought. Lukacs targets the opportunists (and sometimes the revolutionary utopians) of the West, pointing to Lenin's "thinking through each question radically to its very end: in radically transforming his theoretical insight into practice." (Then again, it is often more meaningful to define something in opposition to something else, as opposed to as an abstract thing. This is probably even more true of Lenin, whose writing was particularly polemical against strains of thought he identified as incorrect.)

There were some concepts defined concisely and clearly (revisionism and labor aristocracy, for example). But these exist elsewhere too. Your time on this earth is scarce, and there are probably other books you would get more out of. Like Lenin himself, Lih's Lenin Rediscovered (for understanding Lenin as a theoretician and practitioner of Marxism contra opportunists and ultras), or Losurdo's Class Struggle (for a dialectical approach to the challenges of constructing socialism in an underdeveloped country).

Review: Collapse by Vladislav Zubok

This was a disappointing read. The author gives little of the context necessary to understand the economic difficulties and political situation at the start of Gorbachev’s leadership (see, instead, Socialism Betrayed). The narrative centres on the personalities involved in the USSR’s collapse instead: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and US President Bush Sr (there was a surprising focus on the reactions of the United States — at times we got a near hourly breakdown of White House activity. Countries outside the West were nearly entirely absent from the book, perhaps due to Zubok's choice of sources.).

For all the author’s insistence that Gorbachev was a “neo-leninist” with strong sympathies with the intelligentsia, there was little intellectual curiosity about the philosophical debates and philosophical influences undergirding the USSR’s 1980s reforms (contrast again with Socialism Betrayed). Indeed, the author makes the USSR appear like a one-man show, when CPSU debate and governance was far more distributed.

When the narrative wasn’t honed in on the relative charisma of the key political players or regaling colourful gossip, it detailed nationalist sentiment and account balances. These aspects I found to be informative: separatism ended up being the final mode of collapse — if not the root cause of the collapse — and nationalism continues to drive geopolitics in Eastern Europe. Utopian socialists often insist upon the possibility of non-capitalist reforms, but the hard currency problems Gorbachev had to deal with, particularly in the wake of crashing oil prices, drove decision-making and concessions. While I remain persuaded that the USSR’s collapse was not inevitable (a position Zubok also takes), through Zubok’s book I gained a better appreciation for just how difficult the economy was to keep going (due in no small part to the catastrophic reforms implemented). However, it is also notable what Zubok chooses to exclude: the "second economy" that was so crucial of a factor in the USSR's collapse in Keeran and Kelly's account was nearly absent from Zubok's telling. 

Somewhat by chance, I read this work back-to-back with Isabella Weber’s book on China’s economic reforms, and the comparison between the two approaches is illuminating. The CPSU liberalized the finance industry and media before most of the rest of the economy, and as a result, quickly lost control of both the economy and of political legitimacy. The CPC retained control over media apparatus, banks, and key sectors of the economy, and as a result, was able to steer the economy through their desired reforms without lasting threat to their leadership. This exercise is, however, left to the reader. Zubok is more interested in ensuring that, counter to some Western narratives (including the Nobel Peace Prize committee), the reader understands Gorbachev to be a bumbling idiot.

Zubok's work leaves something to be desired as a reference. He is often too credulous of works that should be suspected of having clear bias, like memoirs by American politicians. Several citations I tried to follow lead to a chain of "as quoted in" references. He is sometimes sloppy when it comes to economics. In one egregious example, he writes that "the tax on alcohol procured one-third of Soviet GDP", which is nearly mathematically impossible.

Zubok tends to lose the forest for the trees. I was hoping for a political and economic analysis, but found myself having to construct this for myself from the very extensive material Zubok relays. Still, his beat-by-beat recounting of the last three or four years of the USSR's existence did give me a better understanding of the overall shape of that era of history.

Review: How China Escaped Shock Therapy by Isabella Weber

This ended up being perhaps my favourite book of the year. Weber’s argument is clearly organized and based on extensive interviews with dozens of key figures involved in China’s 1970s-1980s reform period. I’ll summarize briefly some of the key conclusions I drew from her research and presentation:

(1) China’s reform should be thought of as indigenous, not “westernization.” In charting a path forward, the CPC and their advisors looked to ancient philosophy and liberation era (1930s-1940s) policy, and rejected the “Washington Consensus” that ended up wreaking havoc on Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

(2) The question was never whether or not to reform, but how to reform. There were clear failures of the existing system to address the new stage of development China had entered. Furthermore, the modern industrial system had become increasingly high tech, and China needed to catch up and keep up with this rapidly changing system.

(3) The two approaches to reform can be grouped into idealist “package reform” and pragmatist “experimental gradualism.” The package reform position, which aligned with the Washington Consensus, was idealist because it formulated an ideal market state, and believed that implementing the required infrastructure would be sufficient to achieve it, all in one step (“shock therapy”). The pragmatist approach, on the other hand, adapted to changing conditions, recognizing the interconnectedness of the economy, and made use of the dual-track price system to raise production in key areas without increasing prices. These two modes of thought (idealist package reformers versus experimental gradualists) had echoes in ancient Chinese debates.

(4) When trying to understand the impacts of price control liberalization, it is important to study not only Socialist Bloc countries; liberal capitalist democracies also resorted to price controls in times of war, and provide valuable case studies for understanding typical economic patterns. For example, post WW2, the USA followed rapid price liberalization and experienced high inflation and unemployment. In contrast, the UK followed slow, incremental reform, and avoided these catastrophes. These same results followed, respectively, in the wake of Eastern Europe’s rapid price liberalization and China’s slow price liberalization.

(5) The CPC’s success in economic reform stems from their careful study of economic policy from multiple schools of thought, as well as interviews with bureaucrats from nations that also conducted economics reforms in the late 20th century (Eastern Europe and Latin America). Surprisingly, economists and those with actual hands-on experience diverged wildly. Economists promoted policies more aligned with the Washington Consensus while those in charge of implementing these policies were far more critical of their successfulness. CPC policy was informed by their analysis of neoliberal, Keynesian, and Marxist economic thought and economic tools.

(6) Despite price liberalization and increased reliance on market forces, the CPC retained control over large parts of the economy. Unlike the CPSU, the CPC did not relinquish political control over banks, allowing them to direct capital flows via market means. State owned enterprises continued to play a large role in the economy. New growth, particularly in non-essentials and consumer products, was privately owned while crucial but slower growing heavy industry and energy sectors remained under state control.

(7) Economic reforms were rolled out gradually, responding to economic conditions and popular sentiment — more poetically summarized as “crossing the river by touching the stones.” The CPC advanced reforms only when they felt they were on solid, stable footing. At times, they rolled back reforms in response to public outcry or rapid inflation.

Economies are complex and dynamic: it can take a long time to change course, yet on the other hand, rapid change can lead to collapse and crisis in just a matter of months. China’s reforms should be considered a remarkable success regardless of one’s preference for free markets or absence thereof. The CPC achieved its goal of economic development without the devastation that swept across other former planned economies. I wished Weber had spent a little more time analyzing measures related to quality of life; economic development is not the whole picture of economic success, and all industrialized countries went through significant poverty and deprivation during their industrialization. Still, quality of life in China seems relatively high, and continues to improve. The world holds its breath to see how China will tackle future reforms: will it liberalize further, or return to more socialized ownership of the means of production? My hope (and hunch…) is for the latter, but regardless of the path they choose, I feel confident it will be charted via thorough study, careful analysis of changing conditions, and long-term thinking.

Review: Socialism Betrayed by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny

Why did the USSR collapse? The question is of major political importance. If the problem is inherent to socialism, socialism cannot be the solution to the ills of capitalism. If the cause lies somewhere else, it must be understood and avoided if a socialist project is to succeed. The book’s authors, who are Marxists, argue that although the USSR was in need of reforms, these were far from fatal flaws; instead, its demise was due to right-deviation policies adopted by Gorbachev in 1986.

Philosophically, the authors trace two threads of Soviet thinking. The first thread, to which the authors are most sympathetic, connects Lenin, Stalin, and Andropov. This strain placed the proletarian class at the forefront while hoping to eliminate class devisions through the building of socialism. Had Andropov’s reforms continued past his untimely death, the USSR would likely have continued (the authors point to remaining socialist states as illustrative proof). The second strain is represented by Bukharin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and reflects petite bourgeois ideology that favours compromise with capitalism and downplays the importance of the proletariate in favour of a unified mass.

The strengths of the book are the authors' familiarity with socialist debates and their ability to situate policy decisions in this context, as well as their detailed presentation of the problems facing the Soviet Union by the 1980s. The discussion of the “second economy” — extralegal or illicit trade outside the planned economy — was particularly thorough and convincing as a contributing factor. The authors also provide clear, compelling rebuttals of several typical alternative explanations for the USSR’s collapse. The work is well-organized and strikes a good balance between historical detail and general themes such that their arguments are generally well-supported without getting lost in minutiae. 

The weakness of the book is that it remains unclear how the USSR should have navigated their difficulties. Although the second economy is elevated as one of the most important points of failure, I am not convinced that the relatively small and measured reforms the authors advocate would have solved this problem. Closer comparison with China, Vietnam and Cuba’s economic policies would have done much to strengthen their case. In particular, to what extent can capitalist relations be re-introduced into a socialist system to address certain economic problems without causing instability or unwanted excesses and crises? However, I did appreciate the authors' point that the goal is not only to develop the productive forces but also to "perfect the relations of production." The authors overly lean on the word "revisionism" to build their case for Gorbachev’s missteps, and I think scrubbing their argument of this bit of Marxist jargon would have led to a sharper critique. Additionally, the question of national identity remains murky. Although the authors show how national differences led to fracturing and although they emphasize the importance of understanding nationalism, it remains unclear what specific actions could have ameliorated the situation, or why it arose when and where it did. The solution appears to be to simply not allow nationalism to develop — but this is easier said than done. Quelling nationalism is not so dissimilar to chauvinistic oppression, and oppression can provoke its own destructive reaction. Similarly, self-determination and democracy are closely related, and a socialism that does not also strive to perfect democracy—rule by the people—is just as bad as one that does not strive to perfect the relations of production. Finally, while the authors engage with Western scholarship on the USSR's collapse, there was little treatment of Eastern — particularly Chinese —scholarship, possibly due to a language barrier.

Overall, this is an essential read, if not quite complete. The definitive study on this crucial question remains to be written.