Allah n'est pas obligé - Ahmadou Kourouma

 Un livre par un auteur du Côte d'Ivoire.  Il raconte l'histoire d'un jeune enfant qui se joigne aux armées privées en tant qu'enfant soldat.  C'est un récit des événements de sa vie, mais il y a très peu de batailles.  C'est surtout une présentation des croyances, du zeitgeist, des gens qui habitent dans la région, et de ce point de vue, c'est très intéressant.  Ils vivent dans un monde ou la raison compte pour rien.  Tout est expliqué par la magie, par les croyances traditionnelles, par une sorte de folie collective.  Et ce n'est point un portrait romantique ou nostalgique de cette mentalité - cela ne mène qu'au désastre.  

J'aimerais explorer un peu plus cette littérature africaine en français.

The Myth of Capitalism - Jonathan Tepper

 A book that take down the myth of the American capitalist system as a system of competition and constant renewal.  He outlines how the actual American economy has become both monopolistic and monopsonistic with a small number of companies controlling huge areas of the economy, setting prices, wages and even what suppliers will be paid.  Innovation and new company creation are steadily slowing.  Smaller firms are more and more swallowed up by a few big ones.  The end result is lower wages for everyone, the disappearance of family farms and businesses and higher prices for everyone too.  This is actually the driving force behind growing income inequality:  wages shrink, prices go up, large corporations and big share holders grab more and more of the wealth. 

Since slavery the basic American economic model has been highly exploitative.  Then came colonialism/imperialism on the world stage.  Now they are back consuming their own people to get rich.  

Nothing is done because money runs politics.  Congress works for the wealthy shareholders and corporations by granting monopolies, increasing regulation that makes it harder for small companies to get started and changing laws that benefit large companies and the wealthy.  He underlines the importance of how government advisors and top administrators move back and forth between the private and public sector.  

This problem is particularly important in the U.S.  Canada and Europe are far more stringent in applying anti-trust and anti-monopoly rules.  The U. S. has given up on this.  

This book explains why Google and other large tech companies have been having legal problems and being fined large sums of money in Europe whereas nothing is happening in the U.S.  

Worth rereading for the details,

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

 A reread from long ago.  A portrait of a lost era that quickly disappeared into the maw of commercialization of everything.  Kesey was a strange character - a bit of a prophet with a vision of a society with a freer, more open mind.  It is interesting that his later message was to move beyond acid and the other drugs, to find that open mind state without the drugs.  Of course, this message fell flat.  For most the attraction was the thrill.  

Also, always the same old things:  leader worship, in crowd and out crowd, conformity pressure.  The alternative vision that mirrors the same old same old....

Sadly, ultimately, the whole thing ended rather seedily - hiding from the law, seamy Mexico, in-fighting, even a bit of megalomania and paranoia.  A failed prophecy and a failed prophet.  

I racconti di Nene - Andrea Camilleri

 Un libro di ricordi di Camilleri.  Divertente.  Da uno sguardo a diversi lati della vita di ogni giorni, alla politica e anche al mondo artistico dell'Italia della sua epoca.

The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire - Robert Bickers

 An account of the humiliation and exploitation of China in the late 1800s by England and America.

Goes a long way to explaining the current determination of the Chinese government to build a strong system of central control, project a strong presence in the world and to build a system of links and allies, and to remain at the crest of new technology, both civilian and military.  The current leaders have learned their lessons from history...

On Pandemics - David Walther-Toews

 A book about the current Covid Virus "pandemic" and how we ended up here.  Lightly written, easy read book with some wit.  There is an undercurrent of mockery or poking fun throughout the book for several reasons.  First, because scientists have been warning about the next pandemic for over a decade now and no one in positions of power was listening.  Second, many of the factors leading to modern pandemics are related to over-exploitation and destruction of natural environments, another problem that scientists have been warning us about for decades without much success.  Third, third world poverty, another much discussed but short on action problem, also encourages the kind  of human-animal interactions that lead to viruses jumping species.  Fourth, this cycle of viruses jumping species is an old cycle, repeated many times throughout history, often resulting from new modes of interaction between humans and the natural environment.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire - Kurt Andersen

 A great analysis of the roots of the current crazy political, social and ideological climate in the U. S., tracing it all the way back to the founding of the colony in Virginia as a 10 year long gold rush scam designed to attract immigrant suckers.  

The introduction alone is full of astonishing facts about beliefs and mental habits of Americans at large - left my mouth hanging.  One that sticks - by the author's estimation, at best 1/3 of Americans live in a rational, fact-based universe...

The chapters dealing with the 19th and 20th centuries are the most interesting in terms of explaining key moments on the road to the current state of society and critical thinking.  Too many things to discuss...

Worth a reread, especially the second half.

Twice a Stranger - Bruce Clark

Subtitled:  How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.

An excellent account of this whole historical episode.  It gives the background and the historical information in detail, but not too much.  It also includes many personal reminiscences of the experience from older people on both sides of the divide, as well as acute observations from the author made during his travels in both countries.
The end result is a complex picture of a complex set of experiences which tends to counter the more absolute mythology around the expulsions and the events leading up to them. 

One interesting passage can be found on pp. 193 - 195, recounting the political moves of the CHP around the opposition that was critical of the government's corruption and inefficiency in dealing with the population exchange.  In the end, the leaders of the opposition were accused of being disloyal and imprisoned and eventually executed during the aftermath of the Kurdish uprising shortly after the population exchange.  The press was also so suppressed.  The ruling party even maintained they had aborted an assassination attempt on Atatürk   This is, of course, the identical playbook that Erdoğan has used - the Ergenkon case, as well as the whole Fetah Gülen story.  Various aspects of the Turkish managing of the population exchange make it clear that this collusion between the ruling party and the big business elite is built into the DNA of the Turkish Republic.  In a way, it is a continuation of the relationship between the Sultan and the non-Muslim elites of the late Ottoman Empire - a favoured business elite with special rapport with the government and which is allowed to enrich itself in exchange for money and favours...   As usual, nations have a very hard time changing their political DNA;  they just swap round the power brokers and the business elite groups.

The Success and Failure of Picasso - John Berger

   An interesting analysis of the work of Picasso through the course of his life.
   He makes a number of points around certain ideas.
   He sees Picasso as having been shaped by the feudalistic political and economic system still operating in Spain during his youth with a very different system of values and view of poverty than the one current in industrialized France at the time.  In Spain, there was poverty but one still had dignity, like that of the peasants in Pig Earth.  In industrialized France, poverty was simply a kind of desperation without dignity, a failure.  Berger sees this behind both the subjects and the style of Picasso's Blue period when he first moved to Paris. 
   Berger sees this sense of being an outsider, a "primitive", as critical to Picasso's overall career - a self-image as anarchistic social critic, as a noble savage, as an iconoclast.  Berger sees this as the driving force in much of Picasso's work, rather than the influence of an artist attempting to rework, rethink, expand the form and language of painting (outside the Cubist period, where he worked collaboratively with others on a formalized problem or new conception of the relation between painter/painting and subject).  As Berger puts it, Picasso became focused on the act of painting and creating as a confirmation of his noble savage status, of his social critic status, rather than on the paintings themselves and the more formal or conceptual side of the work.
    I tend to agree with his overall analyses.  Picasso did produce some important, focused, almost revolutionary pieces - Demoiselles, Guernica, post-cubist works too - but while much of his work, especially later in his career, exhibits a great deal of energy in terms of both style and sheer output, the works themselves are not so distinct or noteworthy.

   A victim of his own legend, and also of the one built around him by friends and society. 

Le piccole virtù - Natalia Ginzburg

Piccola collezione di saggi in due parti.  La prima parte, che preferisco io, è una collezione di memorie - il suo esilio durante l'epoca fascista, la vita povera a Torino dopo la guerra - e di ritratti di persone importante nella sua vita.   Si trova un ritratto molto toccante di suo amico Cesare Pavese.  Spiega l'importanza di Pavese per i giovani autori, e anche nel ritratto molto personale si vede il carattero e i problemi che l'hanno spinto ad uccidersi.  Per me, è una spiegazione più verosimile di quelli che sono normalmente offerte.
La seconda parte, che non trovò così interessante, è fatto di qualche saggi critici sulla società contemporanea.  Li trovo un po' troppo didattici e moralisti.  Forse sarebbero più interessanti se fossero più brevi e più concentrati. 

Adua- Igiaba Scego

A novel by a Somali-Italian author, translated from the Italian. 
It portrays the life of a Somali woman who moves to Rome to become a film star, but ends up working in the porn field.
What is interesting is the portrait of Italy's engagement with Somalia and the Horn of Africa in the course of the 20th century.  There is a lot of exploitative history there, and historical ugly racism that is explored in the book.  Somalia was Italy's exotic East, same role as the Levant and North Africa played for France and Britain.

Le Chagrin et la pitié - Marcel Ophuls

   Un film sur la France sous l'occupation.  Un film très controversé à sa sortie dans les années '60.   Il paraît que la France a la mythologie qu'en général elle n'a pas trop collaborée avec les Nazis au cours de cette occupation, tandis qu'il semble que la vérité est tout à fait l'opposée.  La collaboration était la politique officielle du gouvernement de Vichy.  Au commencement des hostilités,  le film donne les sens d'une élite française complètement démodée et hors de contact avec la réalité de la situation - perdue dans des illusions d'héroisme et gloire.

   Plein de personnages fascinants, surtout les anciens membres de la Résistance qui s'y sont mis au début du conflit.  Il y a aussi un noble très intéressant qui raconte franchement sa guerre en tant que membre de la Brigade Charlemagne, une brigade française qui faisait partie du Waffen S.S.   Quand on voit tous ces personnages, toutes ces expériences et perspectives diverses, c'est un miracle que la France n'est pas tombée dans un désordre social absolu après la guerre.  C'est peut-être l'accomplissement le plus important de De Gaulle à la fin.

   L'autre chose qui fait rire c'est les cigarettes.  Tout le monde est tout le temps en train de fumer....

The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

While Hemingway's revolutionary narrative style is still evident today, I find his stories tedious and predictable.  There is a similar maudlin quality to the ones I read (before I couldn't take any more....)  Always the damaged hero disappointed in love in some way.  Weird combination of 20th c style with 19th c dramatic heroine plot structures.

Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills - Latife Tekin

A fascinating social portrait of a time and place - the period of mass migration from Anatolian villages to Istanbul and Ankara, and the creation of massive overnight slum neighbourhoods.  A portrait of the village mind in confrontation with capitalism and the effects of untrammelled industrialization.  Also a portrait of capital at work in the neoliberal post 60s military coup in Turkey.  Dovetails nicely with another book I read recently - Why Turkey is Authoritarian:  From Atatürk to Erdoğan, by Halil Karaveli.  The novel puts some flesh and bones onto the political situation of the time - government unquestioning support of capital, ignored corruption, links between politics and organized crime, suppression of worker rights.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible - Peter Pomerantsev

  A very interesting book about how the modern Russian mafia state works, and how Russia has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin.  What makes this book interesting is who's stories the author tells.  This is not an analytical book, a theoretical book, nor a look at well-known key figures.  The author tells the stories of regular, everyday people that he meets in the course of his ten years of working for Russian media. (His difference as a reporter is that he actually grew up in London but kept up his Russian with his dissident parents who had moved there.)
   Some salient points:
   The historical progression goes something like this:  The fall of the Soviet Union leads to the rise of two groups; mega-entrepreneurs who quickly become very rich, and a well-organized criminal mafia with roots in the Gulag system.  This leads to chaos.  The rise of Putin follows, and he uses the KGB structure to rein in/destroy/subsume the independent criminal mafia.  Putin uses his new KGB mafia alliance to destroy or rein in the mega-entrepreneur class.  Slowly the mega-entrepreneurs transfer their wealth to London and leave the country.  Huge amounts of money are extorted, profitable business are taken over, whole areas of the economy are taken over, and the resulting spoils are distributed amongst Putin's underlings.  Slowly the mega-entrepreneurs transfer their wealth to London and leave the country.  The government/mafia inserts itself into most of the economy.
    It becomes clear in the book that Putin controls all levers of power in the country - government, military, criminal organizations, media, the courts, the economy.  It would seem the only crack in the structure is when Putin is no longer, but the result will probably resemble a civil war amongst various underlings to capture the top position - which won't help the country at all; in fact, make everything worse.

   Like China, it would be very interesting to study this phenomenon of countries where revolutionaries have tried to destroy the organically rooted culture and replace it with an entirely new imposed ideologically based culture.  These types of radical breaks do something strange to the society.  It would be interesting to look at this from a sociological point of view.  I wonder if there are parallels to be made with various personal psychological issues and pathologies...

La luna e i Falò - Cesare Pavese

    Otttimo romanzo.  Molto bello, complicato e sottile.  Racconta il ritorno di un uomo alla sua paese de gioventù e l'impossibilità di ritornare al passato.  È un romanzo chi raconta l'alienazione culturale della vita moderne industriale.  Come nel libro 'A Mind at Peace' da Tanpinar, racconta i costi emozionali e sociali del confronto con l'Occidente industriale, ma in questo romanzo la cultura et la vita tradizionali sono quella dei paesani europei - interessante quello perché, esattamente come la cultura turca, benché questo qui sia una società europea, è nonostante straniera alla modernità.

    L'immagine dei falò ritorna nel libro, e ogni volta prende nuovi significazioni, nuove sottigliezze.  Il libro è pieno di belle immagini del paese e del ciclo dei stagioni - e anche di immagine orrendi.

How Fascism Works - Jason Stanley

A well-written concise book looking at the way fascism/autocratic forms of government establish themselves in a democratic context.  Step by step, technique by technique analysis.  Reads like a "how to" manual for would-be dictators.
Each critical step draws examples from history, mostly Mussolini and Hitler, and then looks at these same steps being taken currently in various countries around the world from the U.S. to Turkey to Russia to many others.
It is both interesting and useful to look at these steps and ask which ones you see currently operating within your own society.  Kind of a social health check-up. 
Worth reading several times.
Also worth reading in tandem with Ece Temelkuran's recent book, "How to Lose a Country".

Madonna in a Fur Coat - Sabahattin Ali

Turkish writer born in southern Bulgaria, not too far from Smolyan during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.  This book was published shortly before his death/murder in '48.  Interesting in the same way that Tanpınar is interesting.  It is interesting to the see the early writers of the new Turkish literature confronting and working with the genres and styles of Western literature.  This novel reminds me of some of the romantic work published in France and Germany in the late 18th and early 19th century - tortured souls who feel alone and alienated, doomed romantic love.  In this particular novel, with what is almost a reversal of traditional male and female roles, also represents some kind of a social revolution or challenge to traditional Turkish society of the time.  Ali had some seminal experiences in Berlin apparently, some time before the war, that shaped his politics and social views.  Seems he was a socialist and must have had very liberated social views around men's  and women's roles in society.
Not a particularly enjoyable read for me, as I don't really like that "tortured soul" Western tradition or genre, but a very interesting read when place in its historical and social context.

Also found an article about him in the Guardian - seems this book is one of the most popular in Turkey right now.  Interesting discussion of why.

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

A novel recounting the life of an upstanding Igbo man in his society just before the collapse of the traditional social structure.  In latter part of the book it also looks at the confrontation of traditional Igbo society and values with European colonizers in Niger during the very early years of the 20th century.
The story is told completely from Okonkwo's perspective.  Achebe develops a detailed picture of the society, its values, its structures and how different groups relate. Okonkwo, as a successful member, stands behind the values and norms of his society and strives to maintain a high socia position.  Part western style tragedy, things fall apart for him partially because of bad luck, partially because of his own unbending character.  And finally, because of European colonization and its effects - loss of status, loss of tribal strength and social cohesion.  Unlike the other theme I was thinking about, those who live between two cultural worlds, Okonkwo refuses to engage with that foreign system of values.  (I suppose, given that Achebe studied in Europe and is using essentially a western literature structure,  he would be the one living between two cultures....)

A Mind at Peace - Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

   Not an easy read - at times slow, at times too didactic,  at times at bit scattered - but never-the-less a very interesting book for many reasons.   Mostly due to Tanpınar's position as one of the first writers of the new Turkish Republic, and his position as a writer who crosses over between the old Ottoman (and Anatolian) culture and Western culture.
   (Aside from all of this, the book is a wonderful portrait of Istanbul in its last days as an Imperial, sophisticated city with a culture and life all its own.  A time when the Boğaz villages were true villages and people spoke of going into the city as a real trip.  Both a visual portrait of how that city was, and also a social portrait of a certain lifestyle.)

  From a stylistic perspective, the book shifts through several different ones.  At times it read like Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas (Huxley is actually referenced in the novel), at times like a long interior monologue of impressions and sensations, at the end even like a kind of Magic Realism with a long scene where the main character, Mümtaz,  interacts with his recently dead acquaintance.  I wonder if this comes with the the rush to confront and absorb the West at the time of the collapse of Ottoman culture with its ties to the traditions of the East - almost a rabid desire to know and absorb this new Other.
   Also, a social drama built around a love story, where you see the confrontation of old and new values imposed on the lovers by the various people in their social circle.  A subtle confrontation, however, which does not divide along the lines of youth and age - witness Nuran's uncle, Tevfik, who is wholly supportive of their relationship.  In fact, most of the objections come from their younger circle of friends.
   Ihsan, Mümtaz's uncle, is the source of much of the novel of ideas passages, where Tanpınar, overtly explores the many social issues and shifts that must take place, or are in fact taking place, in order to build a new society with a new unifying vision or mythology.   Interesting, as these shifts also form a major part of the plot line itself.
   Another side of the book explores the feelings of nostalgia for a lost culture, with its lost heroes and figures of cultural importance.   Also, for the very culture itself, especially Ottoman classical music, which plays an important part throughout the book.  Many classical pieces and makams are referenced, from within a perspective of the subtle culture around these pieces and makams - it is possible to find some of the references on Youtube and Turkish music sites (Neyzen).

   At one point Tanpınar points out the very "hüzün" condition of his generation and social class - they live within a culture whose supporting structure and political context has disappeared.  They are essentially an orphaned culture, destined to disappear - as it largely has, except for the rather broad brush stroke version that remains, having lost much of its subtleties.   In this, Tanpınar stands before his time in that, with the global expansion of Western culture, corporatism and Western consumerism, most of us now live in an orphaned or dying culture, or wholly within the post-national consumerist universe (not counting the cartoon versions of national culture so popular now with right wing nationalist political movements).

References:

Song in Mahur - Refik Talat Alpman?

Makams - key modes/moods in Ottoman music - Ferahfeza, Acemaşıran, Beyatı, Sultaniyegah, Nühüft, Mahur

Tab'i Mustafa Efendi - composer (nothin on Youtube - check Neyzen for his hicaz saz semaisi

Ismail Dede Efendi - composer