Birth, Suffering and Decline

Review: Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 by Orlando Figes.

Rating:  Top marks for conciseness; a century of history in about 300 pages!

This is how I want to read history, getting the big picture without too much effort, leaving me to decide where I want to use a microscope.  I’ll accept the pitfalls that go with leaving out the details.

The book splits into three parts: the gestation and execution of the Revolution, the Stalin years and the decline of the regime. I would say that the first section was pitched at about the right level for me but that the writer overindulged himself somewhat in spelling out the horror of the Stalin years, very much at the expense of the final section which, insofar as it went, I found newest and most appealing. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin all get crammed into a few (very interesting) pages where I’d have like to have heard more. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville (1856):

“the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform … Patiently enduring so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance becomes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.”

A philosophical final chapter discusses guilt and blame, truth and reconciliation and I would have enjoyed some expansion of these matters.

Whether Figes is that right person to do this expansion is moot as his distaste for the regime is an obvious if reasonably well contained feature of the book.

Ripping Yarn

Review: Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler

[ File Alongside: The Wreck of the Mary Deare, The African Queen ]

Not really a review, just a quick mention.  Eric Ambler was one of John Le Carré‘s influences. As well as quite well-written spy-thrillers, he made a decent career writing screenplays for Hollywood.  I was amused to note that his screenplay credits include The Wreck of the Mary Deare, based on the novel by Hammond Innes recently loaned to me by Eugene (and a ripping good yarn it is too).

Ambler’s work is very British, but to his credit, it is very European too.  One feels he would be a Remainer in the Brexit debate. His characters are suave cosmopolitan people, usually with some mastery of a European language or two. Their conversation is the stuff of black-and-white B-movies, quite a delight on the written page; you can easily picture a Robert Donat or Cary Grant in the rôle. I must be getting nostalgic – I also clocked up C.S. Forrester’s The African Queen this year!

Cause for Alarm was written in 1938, and anticipates WWII. It is nice to read about the years leading up to the war in a book written before the war was a fact. Just writing this reminds me of The Riddle of the Sands, another book anticipating a world war, written by our own Erskine Childers and surely one of my all-time favourite thrillers.

This is easy old-fashioned summer reading.

Bread for all: the origins of the welfare state by Chris Renwick

This is book that “does what it says on the tin” for the British Welfare State. I had assumed that the creation of the Welfare State in 1948 was largely a response to the challenges coming from the communist revolution and the development of state planning, equality of treatment for all i.e.delivery of health services determined by need rather than ability to pay.
This book starts in the 18th century and shows the slow evolution of thought and developments that finally lead us to the launching of the NHS in 1948, from initial views of poverty being assumed to be character related (the indigent for the poorhouse)to a gradual understanding of (some) of the complexities that are inherent in poverty and associated health issues.
I liked the book but maybe that’s because I like reading about history. I was certainly better informed and my initial assumptions were shown to be totally inadequate. I am sure the communist revolution had some influence but the story has a much longer pedigree than I assumed.

Moon Palace

This is a book by Paul Auster, an American author. It is a story of the travails of an American young man. He is he only child of a single mother and she dies when he is quite young. By and large, life seems to happen to him and when he does make decisions to give life more direction he usually succeeds in making things worse rather than better. Slightly dysfunctional, in “the catcher in the rye” sort of way but not from a psychological problem but rather from poor decision-making (not assisted in decision-making by an experienced adult?). There are a number of coincidences that seem to me a little unbelievable, the storyline isn’t “a gripping page-turner” but I really enjoyed the book – so it must be the quality of the writing that I enjoyed. I suspect that it is the kind of book Don might like.

Noir is a French Word, After All

As previously noted, I’m re-reading old favourites. Here are two:

Fiction: First up is The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Can’t remember exactly when I read this.  My copy is dated 1987 and that seems about right. At the time I read about six of his novels, one after the other (and in English as I had no French to speak of then).

Les Gommes (1968)

Robbe-Grillet was the most famous of the French nouvelle-vague (new-wave) writers who appeared shortly after the war. His style includes repetition, very detailed descriptions, confusion of dreams and reality and an asynchronous time line. He was an original who, I’m told, has been much copied since. Trying to think of an example, this book reminds me in many ways of Paul Auster‘s New York Trilogy, another book I greatly appreciated.

This is a detective noir like none before it. All the style elements are employed to leave you confused. In that sense, I would say it is closer to great Art than a conventional linear novel.  You have to keep thinking about it, spotting nuances you missed, separating dream from reality and reordering events.

I’m really pleased I’ve re-read it and I’ll take time this winter to read again Djinn, my favourite of his books.

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More fiction: briefly, Vanishing Point by Antonio Tabucchi is Italian Noir. On my bookshelf but don’t recall it at all. The chapters are short stylised set pieces, rather smart with a very European voice but I was disappointed by the ending.

Free Holiday

Review: Adiós Hemingway by Leonardo Padura

I travelled to Cuba some years ago.  Later, I discovered Padura and he’s become one of my favourite writers.  The amazing thing is that when you open one of his novels, within two pages you are transported to Havana and it is the Havana you recognise.  It’s like a free holiday!

Most of his books, including this one, concern a (retired) detective, Mario Conde. He’s one of the great cops of fiction. He loves food, cheap rum, women and his friends. (When we do that Christmas party invite previously mentioned, they’re all top of my invitation list … pure Cuba!). Above all, he’s a rampant bibliophile and that’s when you realise he must be the author’s alter ego.

Sadly, Adiós Hemingway will lie near the bottom of my Padura list. Conde fell out of love with Hemingway (I’m guessing Padura did too) and I don’t admire him either and it weakened the book for me. Let me recommend Havana Fever if you want to try him out.

Alternatively, if you can pass on Conde, the very best book Padura has written is The Man Who Loved Dogs, a history of the Trotsky assassination disguised as a novel.

Final warning:  Netflix have brought out a Spanish series covering the early novels.  For me, it entirely misses the point.

The Socratic Method

Review: The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits

Over the years I’ve encountered the Socratic Method in quite a number of texts. A case is made and defended using dialogues. I would say the dialogues are often corny but amusing and very effective at drawing out ideas and answering objections to them.

I like the method. I’ve met dialogues in books on mathematical logic (1), programming in Scheme (2), philosophy (3), and science (4) to name a few.

Right now, two of my current reads are in dialogue form. The second one probably won’t make it to this blog as the going is heavy, but the Grasshopper is surprisingly good fun and might please some of you as an example of the genre.

Apparently, Wittgenstein claimed that games as a category cannot be defined as they have nothing in common so the author decided to show that indeed they can. He proposes a surprisingly simple definition

playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles

and proceeds to defend it against an array of objections, usually posed in the form of silly, funny parables involving a mad cast (see image). Further, he argues convincingly that games are the only worthwhile occupation!

The introduction justly describes this as laugh-out-loud philosophy.

I enjoyed it as a very original and intelligent kind of book requiring no specialist knowledge.

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(1) Gödel, Escher, Bach (again!)

(2) The Little Schemer by Friedman

(3) Two New Sciences by Galileo

(4) Great Dialogues by Plato (naturally)

Golden Globe

In 1967, (Sir) Francis Chichester Clark sailed single-handedly around the world in Gypsy Moth IV taking 226 days excluding stopovers.  In 1968, the Sunday Times sponsored the first single-handed-non-stop-round-the-world yacht race. This turned out to be quite a catastrophic affair.  Of 9 starters, 4 abandoned before leaving the Atlantic, one sank, one skipper committed suicide, another renounced commercialism and sailed on without crossing the finish line to complete a tour and a half of the planet in Joshua and only (Sir) Robin Knox-Johnson completed the tour in Suhaili taking 310 days.

Gypsy Moth IV

Suhaili

2018 sees a repeat of the race to mark its 50th anniversary.  In my view, this is a great event which beats the Vendée Globe hands down for adventure and sport.  The latter has become a glorified computer game with control rooms pulling all the strings (intentional pun) in a technological race.  What I really like about the Golden Globe is that it’s an adventure first and a race last. Just finishing (some 300 days hence) will be a triumph.

The Golden Globe will be run with a ban on all technology not available in 1968.  Competitors will have no phones, GPS or other electronic aids (except a sealed security pack which will disqualify them if opened). Even their cameras, video recorders, radios are vintage.  They carry charts and sextants.  What a lark!  Sailing as it used to be.  In short, fun!!! Competitors range in age from 29 (Susie Goodall, the only female entrant) to 73 (frenchman Jean-Luc van d’en Heede). Ireland is represented by Gregor McGuckin.

Yesterday I admired each of the boats on the pontoon at Les Sables d’Olonne. Here they are:

Métier Intérim (France)

007 (Italy)

Mary Luck (Ireland)

Mary Luck (Ireland again)

Esmeralda (Russia)

Laaland (France)

Laaland (France)

Coconut (Australia)

Asteria (Finland)

Lazy Otter (UK/Turkey)

Thuriya (India)

Starlight (UK)

PRB (France)

Maverick (Australia)

Matmut (France)

One and All (Estonia)

Olleanna (Norway)

Sugarmatha (UK)

Elle May representing the USA/Lebanon didn’t appear at the pontoon (hence no photo) but she did join the race on time.

Today, we headed out to the start line to see them off and followed them for about two hours.  It’s not exciting to watch but it is certainly to be admired.