Thomas Piketty, Time For Socialism

 

- I've been an enthusiastic fan of French economist Thomas Piketty ever since his bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century was released in 2013. It was a remarkable tome, a totally absorbing 700 pages read. It galvanised global debate about inequality. He followed that blockbuster up with another one, Capital and Ideology in 2020. That was a far more difficult and rather tiresome read, mainly for academic economists. 

- His newest release however, Time For Socialism, is much more accessible. It is a collection of his articles published over the last five years in the French newspaper Le Monde. Its subtitle is Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021.

- The blurb inside the dust jacket summarises it well: Piketty argues that the time has come to support an inclusive and expansive conception of socialism as a counterweight against the hyper-capitalism that defines our current economic ideology. 

- What I found refreshing was his critique of the radical path capitalism has taken over the last fifty years in America and throughout the West, including Australia - the removal of government power and control from the marketplace; the massive lowering of personal and corporate tax rates thus requiring substantial cutbacks in government spending; the abolition of property and inheritance taxes, and more. The result has been a huge increase in inequality and poverty, and government services that are starved of sufficient funding. (Our current Australian government's fetish for maintaining a taxing and spending ratio to GDP of 24% is a case in point. It's infantile.)

- I skimmed quite a few of the pieces that concentrated on French issues, and Macron's failures in particular. But the majority are focussed on the US economy under Trump, and the issues surrounding the 2020 election. Piketty is not so much a fan of Biden. He's a Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren enthusiast.

- There are tables and charts littered throughout and they're very enlightening. 

- He's a clear thinker, an excellent communicator, and this book, like his others, is well translated into English.

- Highly recommended if you're at all interested in our current economic and social challenges.

- (By the way, Australia would be a far more prosperous and egalitarian nation if our tax/spend ratio was 30%).  

 

Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

- This is a delightful book and such a pleasure to read. Lucy Barton, an author, is telling the story of her former husband William, who she is still very fond of. Lucy was William’s first wife and they had two daughters. They divorced after twenty years and William married twice more. Lucy also remarried but her new husband David died after seven years. It's a drama of parenthood, childhood and marriage.

- Lucy’s writing style is quirky and light. She has a certain flavour which is always on show. …is what I mean is common, as is so there was that. 

- Catherine was William’s mother. She was a lovely person but with a complicated past. She had a daughter, Lois, from a prior marriage, which she never disclosed because, shamefully, she deserted her after just twelve months. She later married a former Nazi soldier now a US citizen. Their son William became an academic microbiologist and has a rather cold and restrained personality. He was never told about Lois, his stepsister. 

- Halfway through this short novel I wondered whether it is was all a little trite. Every person on earth has dramas in their lives - marriage issues, kids and wider family issues, wrong decisions made, ambitions unfulfilled, careers gone nowhere, etc, etc. There is no big stuff in this story - no crime, no rape, no sexual abuse, no drugs, no school expulsions, no sackings, or anything extra significant.

- According to Lucy William had 'authority', and that's what attracted her. ‘We crave authority’ she writes. 

-The story of Lois is eventually told. Lucy and William travel to the small town to meet her, but she will only talk to Lucy. She's turned out to be a lovely and generous person.

- Lucy's meanderings go on and on but her final realisation is important to her: …in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves...We are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

 

- I have to say this - I'm so sick of thick, brick-like books. Why are so many novels these days over 600 pages? The problem is unless the prose is captivating or the narrative exhilarating you're wasting days of your life.

- After thoroughly enjoying Amor Towles' last novel A Gentleman in Moscow I was really looking forward to this one. It would surely be a perfect January read. 

- Well it wasn't. Towles has written a classic American story in the tradition of Mark Twain. It's a bit The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, a very modern YA trope. The hero, Billy, is a very likeable and sympathetic boy, as is his older brother Emmett. They embark on a road trip across America in search of their missing mother and father. Odd characters are met along the way. 

- As a narrative style road trips are generally a pain in the arse. New characters keep popping up, unconnected things keep happening, etc. All the characters are wanderers and lost souls, or innocents who've been wronged. They're seeking connection or they're seeking retribution. Every bit of evidence would suggest that the will to be moving is as old as mankind.

- Towles imbues this tale with a very patriotic, American tone. He takes every opportunity to celebrate America's heroes and founding principles. The boy Billy is captivated by American history, especially Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence. The fourth of July is of particular significance.   

- Of course there is a lot of charm in this novel. It's saccharine-like, piled on and on. Although there is violence and tragedy sprinkled throughout, the sentimentality rules supreme.

- Read something else. 

Colm Toibin, The Magician

 

- I've long been a great fan of Irish writer Colm Toibin. He never disappoints. His writing is subtle and sensitive, and his characters and their lives and times are brought vividly to life. He never shies away from exploring the sexual, social and political stresses and strains that matter in any person's universe. 

- His latest novel, The Magician, is quite simply one of his best. It is just magnificent. Its focus is the career of Nobel Prize winning German novelist Thomas Mann and his large and supremely talented family.

- Mann was born in Germany in 1875 and died in 1955. He lived through the First World War and the subsequent rise of fascism in Germany in the following decades, leading of course to Hitler's rise, his vicious Nazi regime, and the Second World War and its aftermath. 

- Mann was a scholar of German art, music, literature and culture, and highly lauded in Germany and around the world for his fairness, generosity and insights. He found himself torn however by what Germany was becoming between the wars and through his books, essays and speeches made many powerful enemies in the process.  

- Over the years he and his family were forced to flee to France, Switzerland, and eventually the United States. After Hitler's defeat and the establishment of East Germany ruled by communists, life in the US also became impossible because of his refusal to condemn the communist regime. He and his family were continually pestered by US officials, particularly the FBI.

- Mann's famous novella Death in Venice about an older gentleman's sexual attraction to a young man he encounters during a beach holiday, mirrored Mann's personal struggle with his sexuality, and Toibin very deftly describes this longing that tormented him throughout his life.

- Mann's wife and children were all passionate and well known anti-fascist writers, artists and celebrities all through their lives. Toibin's depiction of their dinners and debates is exhilarating. 

- This all makes for an engrossing read. Highly recommended. 

Hannah Kent, Devotion

 

- It pains me to say so, but the power of this beautifully written novel is undermined by a fatal narrative flaw. 

- Kent’s focus in her three novels to date has been small communities under immense stress, where goodness and truth are challenged but are eventually victorious. They are all set in the early 1800’s: Burial Rites in Iceland, The Good People in Ireland, and Devotion in Prussia and South Australia.

- Kent is a writer of enormous talent. Her prose is simply beautiful with a light, sensitive and poetic touch. She is also a gifted storyteller who brings her characters and settings vibrantly to life. The central focus of Devotion is the intensity of the love between two young women, something foreign and forbidden in those times and particularly in conservative religious communities. 

- I'm reluctant to disclose the flaw in the novel as it may be perceived as a spoiler. But I can't critique the novel without doing it. The narrator, the young teenager Hanna, actually dies on the disease ridden boat transporting her persecuted Lutheran community from their small village in Prussia to the new colony of South Australia. However, ghostlike, she continues to narrate, telling the story of all subsequent events, including her own burial at sea. By employing this device Kent has abused every genre of historical fiction. To me it was alienating in the extreme. 

- The ghost is invisible to everyone. People pass through her body, but she has all her senses. The wind blows her hair and she feels the cold. She refers to her former life as ‘…my living years’. By indulging in this device Kent is having it both ways. It enables her to explore the intensity of same-sex love and intimacy while forgoing engaging with the real world challenges it brings. She is quite capable of conveying the drama of that, but she refuses to do so.

- As an isolated spirit, surprised she's not at the right hand of God, Hanna has insights and asks questions that may not have occurred to her while living. She begins to doubt religious belief: My parents’ belief that my death was the will of God broke my heart. 

- And she recognises and embraces her sexual orientation, her obsessive love for Thea. At one point she sees through a window two beautiful men who…shared such an intense look of affection and desire that I was jealous.

- She also celebrates Thea's mother, Anna Maria, accused of being a witch by some fervent Christian believers, as a woman of science and nature, not religious superstition. Anna Maria is the first to welcome the Indigenous peoples on the land (the Peramangk people) as friends. She learns about food sources from them - grubs, yabbies, ant larvae, bird eggs, nectar. The new white arrivals, at first starving, are fed and saved. 

- Thea, rendered so desperately unhappy by Hanna's death, is forced by tradition to marry the young Hans and they have a son. But she still yearns for her real love Hanna to be an intimate part of her life. 

- Of course, as Hanna has always known, the only way that can happen is if Thea dies and joins her in the spirit world. 

- So, guess what, after Thea is bitten by a snake, of all things, that happens. Felicitous resolution for sure. 

Christos Tsiolkas, 7 1/2

- Tsiolkas has written in 7 1/2 a confronting but ultimately unsatisfying mishmash of genres: memoir, realistic fiction, essayistic reflections, nature writing, childhood memories and movie critiques.

- I am writing a book about beauty. I want it to be simple, almost straightforward in its intent. If I were a poet it would be easier. Or if I were a musician. It’s harder to distill beauty into prose. The novel is treacherous.

- Fundamentally it's a celebration of the body in all its sensuality, pungent extrusions, youth and ageing. It’s also very gay. Tsiolkas is obsessed with the look and smell of sweaty armpits and beautiful male bodies. His uncle Nikos and his father’s friend Stavros inspired and attracted him while growing up. They were working class, with rough hands and sublime bodies. His wider focus is the beauty of nature in all its dazzling colours, and its birds, insects, animals, flowers, beaches, mountains and storms. 

- Though he briefly refers to the bushfires in early 2020 there is no reference to the harshness and loneliness of the interior; no reference to regional towns and their challenges and provincialism, and no reference to Indigenous lands. Disappointingly European visitors seem to want to see people, to drink coffee or wine or beer in a promenade cafe. They want motion and movement: they fear, and are made anxious by, this wondrous remoteness. It affirms that they are indeed outsiders, strangers. Whereas I return here again and again.

- This novel is far removed from the earthy, angry, realism we're come to love and expect from Tsiolkas. In fact he criticises that genre mercilessly here, effectively condemning his own oeuvre. 

 I am nauseated by their arrogance and their naivety...I have been agreeing to it for a generation now, and increment by increment and timid sentence by timid sentence I have been substituting moralism for imagination...How more tedious can the contemporary novel become?…I go into a bookshop these days and it is as if the shelves are filled with the agonised and narcissistic rantings of teenagers...I’m tired of being angry all the time...Our literature of the last half century has been the babblings from the university. There is so much I love in that chatter: incisiveness, interrogation, the engagement with reckoning. But not its arrogance, not its moral certitude, not its self-righteousness, not its smugness and not its masochism...I shed Justice, Society, Love, Equality, Liberty and Revolution...Shit on the censors of the Church and state, urinate on the puritans of the left and right. Pursue beauty.....I need to dive into the sensuous, bestial and amoral splendour of this world.

- Tsiolkas always incites a visceral reaction, and this book is no exception. He never shies away from celebrating bodily functions including sweating, reeking, pissing and shitting. And the Gothic character of much of his prose, honouring his Greek and Christian origins, elevates to mythic status the often quotidian realities he’s describing. I write in English, but I speak it with a Greek tongue.

- In fact the thickness of his prose often becomes tiresome. He himself calls it ‘baroque’. Everyday events and weather patterns are subjected to an arch, heavy handed style.

- His friend Andrea’s critique of him is spot on. You have a particular skill….that emotional and unrepentant honesty…..that rawness doesn’t feel diluted. As she implies, this book is a surrender, a capitulation to self-indulgence, a shameless retreat. 

- Ironically, given his rants noted above, there is a realist subplot in the novel - the story of the former gay porn star Paul. Apparently this has been long simmering in his creative brain. Whether it ended up a novel, a play or a film, it was going to be called Sweet Thing, named after Van Morrison's classic song. We're introduced to Paul, an American, and his wife Jenna (also a former porn star) via an extraordinary sex scene between them. It's lusciously described in erotic detail. Tsiolkas is so obsessed with sex in this novel that it strikes me as immature and it typifies his self-indulgence. 

- Paul also has a brother, Andy, who is still living in their old family house in LA. He's a thin, scrawny, dying junkie, married to another junkie. The stoned Paul is disgusted with himself after he touches and kisses the stoned wife. He has been sucked back into the 'netherworld' and is desperate to escape by returning to Australia and its physical beauty. This is melodrama writ large. It's cliched and overwrought nonsense. 

- I guess one could argue that Tsiolkas is in fact satirising the contemporary and fashionable critique of realism in fiction, but there's little evidence that this is the case. 

- This novel just doesn't gel. It won't be popular, it won't sell, and it will quickly be forgotten.

Damon Galgut, The Promise

 

- This magnificent novel won the 2021 Booker Prize, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a fascinating read, set in South Africa in the three decades after the end of the Apartheid regime in the early 1990s to the present day.

- Although it's a seemingly simple story of a white family living on a farm near Pretoria, it develops into much more than that as conflict, struggle and tragedy define the individual lives of the two parents and their three children.  

- Galgut brings shifting perspectives and voices to his story. He darts from one consciousness to another, switching from the third person to the first person in the space of a sentence. And he’s not just a narrator but a commentator on what he's created too. It’s generous, sometimes folksy, prose, and is often delightful and funny. 

- Rather surprisingly, as if there wasn't enough intergenerational conflict in the family, there is also a Jewish versus Christian rift. Loyalty to these Western traditions, and reverence for their respective religious ministers, defines them. It takes a while to be introduced to all the extended family members and friends and clerics, but there is one thing in common - an ingrained racism. 

- The novel has a distinctly South African flavour. Differences dominate as the racist past still defines everything. The whites are masters, the blacks servants, the ugly arrogant overlords versus the lower classes. But the reckoning has begun, despite Nelson Mandela's breakthrough Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The fundamental social structure is in increasing decay. No lights, no water, lean times in the land of plenty. The whites' time is up. 

- Anton, Astrid and Amor are the offspring, the younger generation. Their perspectives on their privilege are more critical of it, but despite the promise they show only the youngest girl Amor comes close to fulfilling it. The oldest, the son Anton, Galgut's principal focus, is an aspiring novelist, aware of the social change underway and its attendant obligations, but in the end amounts to a dismal failure.

- As the years progress Ma, the Jewish mother, dies and ten years later, Pa the Christian. Both of these characters are cranky and unlikable. The extended family members all unite and reunite for the funerals. Galgut brings a charming comic tone to these rather ridiculous get-togethers. 

- There is a wonderful side story about the Rugby World Cup final between the Springboks (South Africa) and the All Blacks (NZ). It's on the same day as Ma's funeral. The whole country is watching, and amazingly South Africa wins. Mandela, released from jail a few weeks earlier, presents the cup. The nation is ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’ the media cries out. Everyone is gathering around their TVs. However the young daughter, Amor, who 'still holds herself aloof and apart' slips out. She knows. She just knows. There’s another side to South Africa - raw and vengeful violence.

- Troubles are always simmering. The clashes in the townships, the constant threats to Anton and the farm, it's all full of menace and there are always incidents. Astrid, the middle child is killed by a black thug in a carjacking.

- On a rare visit home for Pa's funeral, Amor wants to discuss with Anton the promise their parents made to Salome, their black maid for many years. They had promised to give her ownership of the small house on their farmlands that she and her son lived in. But they never delivered and now Anton also refuses to do it. The house has been neglected over the years: Amor looks around, at the cracking plaster. The broken cement floors. The missing planes of glass. Income from the farm is dwindling and land values falling. Anton's novel is not going anywhere. At 50 he realises he’s a failure. The decay of the old elite white structure in South Africa is self evident. 

- The novel ends in tragedy but also hope. A tribute to love, care, compassion and service. 

- All Booker prize winners are worth reading and this one is certainly no exception. And in the day of the long novel it's only 293 pages!