phespirit.now:   words

Year 2009 reading matter

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
"The Cairo Trilogy, Volume 2 - Palace Of Desire"

Volume two of three is a little darker and more melancholy than volume one. Having moved on five years since the end of the first book, this sequel concentrates mainly on the affairs of the remaining men of the Abd al-Jawad family: Al-Sayyid Ahmad, the dominant father now struggling to maintain control of his children and his lovers; Yasin, the eldest son doomed to ruin through unwillingness to subdue his most basest instincts; and Kamal, the idealistic youngest son who sees the tragic illusions of his youth stripped away one after another. This novel does not quite achieve the perfect balance of the first but it develops the characters in interesting and unexpected ways, and leaves matters dramatically poised for a final installment.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
"Tragic Sense Of Life"

The blurb on the back says: Tragic Sense of Life is a "direct expression of the strife between the truth thought and the truth felt." A complex business, and this work of Spanish philosophy is a complex read. Very hard going in places, but just about accessible enough to give pause for thought to an atheist turned from all spirituality by the excesses and inconsistencies of organised religion.

"If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able to look - that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which all things have traced their painful impression - you will arrive at the abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities. And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal love.
  In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity - that is to say, we only love - that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim, which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness of death and suffering.
  Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness."

"Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant cycle of illusions and disillusions. And continually it transforms its frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes. ..... Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who hopes in God shall live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life."

"Religion is a trascendental economy and hedonistic. That which man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science, nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor art, nor by ethics. What necessitates God is religion. And with an insight that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our salvation. Business - yes, business; something belonging to the economic, hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order that he may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that he may not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing of each and every normal man - those who are abnormal by reason of their barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning - it is universal and normative."

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
"The Cairo Trilogy, Volume 1 - Palace Walk"

Volume one of three, the pinnacle of a wider body of work that quite rightly earned the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Superbly crafted, full of national, historical, social and humanistic insights, it follows the fortunes of the Abd al-Jawad family from the 1917 period of British and Australian occupation during the Great War, through to the nationalist revolution of 1919. Brilliant, enjoyable, eye-opening.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
"The Sorrows Of Young Werther"

"I have often determined not to see her so frequently. But who could abide by such a decision? Every day I give in to the temptation, and take my sacred oath that I shall stay away on the morrow. And once the next day comes I hit upon some irresistible reason again, and in no time at all I am at her side. The evening before she may have said: 'You will come tomorrow, won't you?' - And who could stay away then? Or she gives me some errand to run, and I think it proper to take her the answer myself; or else it is a fine day and I walk to Wahlheim, and once I am there it is only another half an hour to Lotte's! - I am too close to her magic realm - snap your fingers! and there I am. My grandmother used to tell a story about a magnetic mountain: ships that sailed too close were suddenly stripped of all their ironwork, the nails flew to the mountain and the wretched travellers perished in the falling timbers."

Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", like Fielding's "An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews", is a debut work, slender in volume, and witten in the form of compiled letters. There the similarity ends as Fielding exposes cynicism with bawdiness, while Goethe describes the tender and tragic decline of a young lover who can never obtain his object of desire. This effort is perhaps a tad too melodramatic, whether intentional or otherwise, for modern tastes. An interesting introduction, though.

STANISŁAW LIKIERNIK
"By Devil's Luck"

"In Warsaw it was business as usual, at least at first sight. In a resounding speech our Foreign Minister, Colonel Beck, rejected the Nazi request for a corridor through Polish territory between Germany and East Prussia: 'There will be no concessions.' Using a border incident staged by Germans dressed in polish uniform as casus belli, the German army invaded Poland at dawn on Friday, 1 September 1939.
  I woke that morning to the roar of a low flying silver plane, clearly outlined in the window of my room. A few seconds later an explosion shook the house. For a few moments I failed to connect the two, the plane and the explosion. Then ... a bomb? The first bomb of my life."

The scene is set for an account of the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising that took place between 1st August and 2nd October 1944, presented by a surviving member of the Polish Home Army that tried in vain to liberate its occupied capital. No matter how familiar some passages of history may seem, there's nothing like a first-hand narrative to reveal that much more. This book is tells an important story very well. Recommended.

HENRY FIELDING
"An Apology For The Life Of Mrs Shamela Andrews / The History And Adventures Of Joseph Andrews And Of His Friend Mr Abraham Adams"

It was a mistake to read the little parody that is Shamela without first reading Samuel Richardson's "Pamela". Joseph Andrews, however, is entertainment on its own merit, a forerunner of Tom Jones and very much in the same style: a cast of bizarre characters out on the road, where they encounter a further cast of bizarre characters. And the best thing about these characters is that whilst these seem absurd, they are so well observed that their types still ring familiar in the twenty-first century.

"Aurora now began to shew her blooming Cheeks over the Hills, whilst ten Millions of feathered Songsters, in jocund Chorus, repeated Odes a thousand times sweeter than those of our Laureate, and sung both the Day and the Song, when the Master of the Inn, Mr Tow-wouse, arose, and learning from his Maid an account of the Robbery, and the Situation of his poor naked Guest, he shook his head, and cried, Good-lack-a-day! and then ordered the Girl to carry him one of his own Shirts.
  Mrs Tow-wouse was just awake, and had stretched out her Arms in vain to fold her departed Husband, when the Maid entered the Room. 'Who's there, Betty?' 'Yes Madam.' 'Where's your Master?' 'He's without, Madam; he hath sent me for a Shirt to lend to a poor naked Man, who hath been robbed and murdered.' 'Touch one, if you dare, you Slut,' said Mrs Tow-wouse, 'your Master is a pretty sort of Man to take in naked Vagabonds, and clothe them with his own Clothes. I shall have no such Doings. - If you offer to touch any thing, I will throw the Chamber-Pot at your Head. Go, send your Master to me.' 'Yes Madam,' answered Betty. As soon as he came in, she thus began: 'What the Devil do you mean by this, Mr Tow-wouse? Am I to buy Shirts to lend to a sett of scabby Rascals?' 'My Dear,' said Mr Tow-wouse, 'this is a poor Wretch.' 'Yes,' says she, 'I know it is a poor Wretch, but what the Devil have we to do with poor Wretches?' The Law makes us provide for too many already. We shall have thirty or forty poor Wretches in red Coats shortly.' 'My Dear,' cries Tow-wouse, 'this man hath been robbed of all he hath.' 'Well then,' says she, 'where's his Money to pay his Reckoning?' Why doth not such a fellow go to an Ale-house? I shall send him packing as soon as I am up, I assure you.' 'My Dear,' says he, 'common Charity won't suffer you to do that.' 'Common Charity, a F--t!' says she, 'Common Charity teaches us to provide for ourselves, and our Families; and I and Mine won't be ruined by your Charity, I assure you.' 'Well,' says he, 'my Dear, do as you will when you are up, you know I never contradict you.' 'No,' says she, 'if the Devil was to contradict me, I would make the house too hot to hold him.'"

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
"Midaq Alley"

This is the highly readable tale of peoples' lives in a small Cairo alley, set during the Second World War. In not too many pages it builds a central narrative and weaves around it numerous almost-irrelevant sub-tales to add colour and breadth, crafting some fine characters along the way. There's Hamida, the whore-by-instinct; Zaita the cripple-maker; Salim Alwan, the business with his filthy bowl of green wheat; Kirsha, the debauched café owner; Husniya, the brutal bakeress; and so on. Top stuff.

FARIDEH HEYAT
"Azeri Women In Transition"

"Over the past few years women's public presence in Baku has undergone some dramatic changes. This is especially the case with the dress and comportment of young Azeri women, which would seem quite shocking from the Soviet Azerbaijani perspective of only a decade ago. No longer is the sight of a woman in trousers or a short skirt an oddity, an object of scorn. Even the girls in skin-tight jeans and ultra-short skirts, thought frowned upon, do not evoke overt reactions from passers-by as they may in many other Muslim cities. Similarly, women smoking in public is no longer the preserve of ladies' toilets in theatres, or beauty or sauna parlours. As Western-style restaurants, cafes, bars and night-clubs have mushroomed in Baku, driving out traditional restaurants and tea houses, the presence of women in such establishments and in male company, some smoking freely, has become increasingly common. At the same time there is a small minority of young women who appear in Islamic dress and an increase, both in numbers and activities, or mosques and Muslim charities. Religious programmes are broadcast during Ramazan, and Shiite rituals and festivals are officially condoned and publicly commemorated during the month of Muharram."
An unlikely souvenir purchase from Baku, where the selection of English-language works is not wide. This is an interesting read, though, as it very well written and touches on many topical themes of global relevance. Gender inequalities blight all societies, but in Azerbaijan they are against a backdrop of old traditions, Westernisation that accompanied the late nineteenth century / early twentieth century oil boom, the Soviet years that turned freedom into prescription, and the emergence of a post-Soviet society that must accommodate nationalist, traditionalist, modernist and Islamist interests. Each step forward for women seems to be accompanied by much shuffling from side to side and the occasional step back. This book does well in identifying the complexities but wisely makes no attempt to suggest a solution.

HENRY FIELDING
"The History Of Tom Jones, A Foundling"

A joyous romp around eighteenth century England, meeting all classes and characters of people along the way. The manners and style are very much of the day, but the observations on human nature are as true now as they will ever be. Great fun. Squire Western is surely one of the most magnificent anti-heroes in English literary history.

THE NEXT morning Tom Jones hunted with Mr. Western, and was at his return invited by that gentleman to dinner.
  The lovely Sophia shone forth that day with more gaiety and sprightliness than usual. Her battery was certainly levelled at our heroe; though, I believe, she herself scarce yet knew her own intention; but if she had any design of charming him, she now succeeded.
  Mr. Supple, the curate of Mr. Allworthy's parish, made one of the company. He was a good-natured worthy man; but chiefly remarkable for his great taciturnity at table, though his mouth was never shut at it. In short, he had one of the best appetites in the world. However, the cloth was no sooner taken away, than he always made sufficient amends for his silence: for he was a very hearty fellow; and his conversation was often entertaining, never offensive.
  At his first arrival, which was immediately before the entrance of the roast-beef, he had given an intimation that he had brought some news with him, and was beginning to tell, that he came that moment from Mr. Allworthy's, when the sight of the roast-beef struck him dumb, permitting him only to say grace, and to declare he must pay his respect to the baronet, for so he called the sirloin.
  When dinner was over, being reminded by Sophia of his news, he began as follows: "I believe, lady, your ladyship observed a young woman at church yesterday at even-song, who was drest in one of your outlandish garments; I think I have seen your ladyship in such a one. However, in the country, such dresses are
            Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno.
That is, madam, as much as to say, 'A rare bird upon the earth, and very like a black swan.' The verse is in Juvenal. But to return to what I was relating. I was saying such garments are rare sights in the country; and perchance, too, it was thought the more rare, respect being had to the person who wore it, who, they tell me, is the daughter of Black George, your worship's gamekeeper, whose sufferings, I should have opined, might have more wit, than to dress forth his wenches in such gaudy apparel. She created so much confusion in the congregation, that if Squire Allworthy had not silenced it, it would have interrupted the service: for I was once about to stop in the middle of the first lesson.
  "Howbeit, nevertheless, after prayer was over, and I was departed home, this occasioned a battle in the churchyard, where amongst other mischief, the head of a travelling fidler was very much broken. This morning the fidler came to Squire Allworthy for a warrant, and the wench was brought before him. The squire was inclined to have compounded matters; when, lo! on a sudden the wench appeared (I ask your ladyship's pardon) to be, as it were, at the eve of bringing forth a bastard. The squire demanded of her who was the father? But she pertinaciously refused to make any response. So that he was about to make her mittimus to Bridewell when I departed."
  "And is a wench having a bastard all your news, doctor?" cries Western; "I thought it might have been some public matter, something about the nation."
  "I am afraid it is too common, indeed," answered the parson; "but I thought the whole story altogether deserved commemorating. As to national matters, your worship knows them best. My concerns extend no farther than my own parish."
  "Why, ay," says the squire, "I believe I do know a little of that matter, as you say. But, come, Tommy, drink about; the bottle stands with you."
  Tom begged to be excused, for that he had particular business; and getting up from table, escaped the clutches of the squire, who was rising to stop him, and went off with very little ceremony.
  The squire gave him a good curse at his departure; and then turning to the parson, he cried out, "I smoke it: I smoke it. Tom is certainly the father of this bastard. Zooks, parson, you remember how he recommended the veather o' her to me. D--n un, what a sly b--ch 'tis. Ay, ay, as sure as two-pence, Tom is the veather of the bastard."
  "I should be very sorry for that," says the parson.
  "Why sorry," cries the squire: "Where is the mighty matter o't? What, I suppose dost pretend that thee hast never got a bastard? Pox! more good luck's thine? for I warrant hast a done a therefore many's the good time and often."

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
"All Quiet On The Western Front"

"I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world - my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? What do they expect from us when a time comes in which there is no more war? For years our occupation has been killing - that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?"
Not so much a novel about war as a novel about the dehumanising predicament of ordinary soldiers in times of war. Short and beautifully written, its great strength is the simple economy of words used to convey so much that is unfathomable and complicated.