Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory.

 

- Anything Antony Loewenstein writes on Israel is a must-read in my humble opinion.

- His new book is a detailed, enlightening, and very persuasive critique of Israel and its subjugation of the Palestinian people through its encouragement of the armaments industry in every way. I was stunned by its shocking revelations. 

- Israeli companies are world leaders in CCTV systems, drones, threat detection technologies, and data exploitation and manipulation. All Palestinians are aggressively monitored regardless of age, location, or intent.

- Israel sells to regimes regardless of their intent. In 2021 it sold its surveillance systems to 130 countries, including repressive ethnocentric autocracies. European democracies such as Greece are also eager purchasers, particularly of drones used for locating refugees in the Mediterranean. India under Modi has adopted anti-Muslim, Israeli-developed, strategies in Kashmir, as has China in its treatment of the Uighurs. The border control systems being used along the US-Mexico border are dominated by Israel corporates and their technology. 

- In the 1960s and 1970s South Africa’s apartheid state strongly supported Israel. According to the South African Government Yearbook in 1976 ‘Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples…a surrounding majority…of unwanted populations’. Using South African apartheid-era rhetoric to defend the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories remains alive to this day. 

- Israeli companies ('Private Mossads') create sophisticated, state-sponsored surveillance technology that allows spyware to target its victims. Sophisticated hacking technologies are attractive to authoritarian regimes who also use the tools to target the gay community. 

- In the world of social media Israel is ruthless in cracking down. Palestinian posts suddenly disappear on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and Twitter. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze contain a minimal amount of data about Palestinian precincts. 

- The book has received high praise from well respected critics and publications:

A sad and sordid record of how 'the light unto the nations' became the purveyor of the means of violence and brutal repression from Guatemala to Myanmar and wherever else the opportunity arose. (Noam Chomsky)

 

A sharp expose of how Israel's suppression of Palestine has translated into lucrative anti-terrorist systems that the Israeli government exports globally...As the author shows, the Israelis have sent weapons and technology to Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s as well as to disreputable regimes in Burma, Sri Lanka, Rhodesia, and Rwanda, among others....An eye-opening delineation of the alarming ramifications of Israel's status as an 'ethnonationalist state'.  (Kirkus Reviews)

This interview with Antony is well worth watching:

  https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/23/the_palestine_laboratory_author_antony_loewenstein

Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

 

- I've been a long time fan of American crime writer Dennis Lehane. I wrote this about his Joe Coughlin series of three gangster books in 2015:  The series is well worth your time. All the novels are exquisitely plotted, gripping and absorbing on every level, and with all the tension and atmospherics you hope for in a quality read. 

- In his latest novel we're taken back to Boston and its lower class Irish and Black communities in the mid-seventies. The focus this time is on racial tensions, but gangsters still prevail. In 1974 a US district court Judge ruled that busing white and black school students was needed to desegregate Boston’s public schools. The Irish-American community in particular was outraged and protested loudly and violently. They hated 'niggers'. 

- Mary Pat Fennessy is our main character and she's feisty and angry as hell, and everybody knows not to mess with her. Her teenage son died from a drug overdose, and her teenage daughter has gone missing. She lives in the project, part of Southie (South Boston), and works as a hospital aide in a Catholic old folks home. 

- She’s imprisoned in the ugly racism of the time, and she's from an ugly, dumb, always-fighting large family. ‘She can’t blame the coloreds for wanting to escape their shithole, but trading it for her shithole makes no sense’. 

- A young black man is found dead on the subway tracks, and four young whites are suspected, including Mary Pat's daughter. The police get involved, but it's almost impossible for them to get to the truth of what happened. No-one talks. Mary Pat, however, is determined to find out what happened and why her daughter has disappeared. 

- Lehane takes time to build a deeper narrative framework and it pays off in spades, adding richness to a very gritty story. We're immersed in the lives of unlikeable and ugly characters and their vigorous, boisterous conversations. But unfortunately a distinctive tone dominates and to me it becomes a real negative. American goodies and baddies who talk like comic stereotypes. And it’s preachy, as if Lehane can't help himself. 

Max Porter, Shy

 

- Max Porter's previous novel Lanny was brilliant. (See my review here).

- Shy, his new one, is equally as good. Like Lanny, it's short (122 pages), and shimmers with dazzling prose. Over the course of a few hours during the night a young teen walks to a pond and reflects on all his memories, nightmares and fantasies that have characterised his broken life. He wants to end it. His voice is sparkling, jazzy, punchy and crude, and often whacky and confusing. I had to read this short book twice to clarify where it was going and what it was doing. But it well and truly paid off. ‘The night is a shattered flicker-drag of these sense-jumbled memories, like he’s dropped, but he’s stone-cold not, he’s just traipsing along..’ The typefaces change for the different times and voices he recalls.

- For a year or so he's been a resident at a reform school called the Last Chance, along with ‘…some of the most disturbed and violent young offenders in the country…he’s living in this shite old mansion converted into a school for badly behaved boys in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere.’ 

 - He stormed out of regular school after throwing a violent fit. He lived with his perplexed mother (her ‘snotty repetitive questions’) and his stepdad (‘fucking self-important twat’). He always felt isolated, alone and angry, and was rather obsessed with loud drum and bass music, metal and rap. ‘It promises and delivers’. That comforts him. One drunken night he smashed the furniture, glassware and windows of his godmother’s house. 

- The teachers and counselors at Last Chance are sympathetic and caring, and Shy, despite his often robust conversations with them, knows that. Now, as he's trudging through the night he reflects on his bad behaviour, and it pains him.

- At the end he wades into the muddy pond he was headed for, weighed down by a heavy backpack full of flintstones. But he re-thinks. 

- The novel's ending is emotional and hopeful and very satisfying.  

Serhii Plokhy, The Russo-Ukrainian War.

                                               

- If you want to dig deep into the Ukraine-Russia war then this just published book is a must read. It is exceptionally good. The author is a Ukrainian-American professor of history at Harvard University and widely regarded as the world's foremost historian of Ukraine. 

- Written between March 2022 and February 2023, it is comprehensive and full of detail, and delves into the centuries-long history of the often turbulent, often peaceful, relationship between the two countries. 

- Generally speaking it is pro-Ukraine, pro-Zelensky, and pro-West, but it is also sympathetic to Russia's grievances when justified. It places the current confrontation in a deep historical context, making Zelensky's and Putin's positions clear and rational. 

- During the long cold war period of the USSR the relationship between the two largest and most important republics, Russia and Ukraine, were critical to the economies and social cohesion of both. But when the USSR and the Communist Party collapsed under Gorbachev, and Russia's brief experiment with democracy ended under Yeltsin, the tensions with Ukraine were inflamed. It was clear that the Ukrainian people were passionate about preserving their independent democratic state. It began pushing for NATO membership from the early 2000’s on, and Putin continually expressed concern. 'Moscow considered Ukrainian membership in NATO a breach of good relations with Russia...while it would not dare attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants (like Georgia and Ukraine) and it did so’. 

- The book delves deep into the Minsk Agreements. Zelensky and Putin remained fundamentally at odds. Zelensky ‘vacillated on the issue of the implementation of the constitutional reforms envisioned by Putin. The reforms would have given the Donbas special status and turned it into a Russian enclave if the Russians had been allowed to take charge of the elections. Zelensky faced…difficulties when in October he agreed to the formula endorsed by Russia, Germany and France for the reintegration of Donbas. Almost immediately, mass protests erupted all over Ukraine under the slogan ‘No to the capitulation’. Looking for a way out of a difficult situation Zelensky said ‘no’ to Putin in Paris. Now he had nowhere to go but west and no door to knock on but that of NATO’. 

- There was huge support (93%) by the people of Ukraine for Zelensky’s resistance.

- Putin, on the other hand, 'was the victim of his own delusions, historical and otherwise, and his troops became victims of his propaganda efforts’. 

- The massive sanctions enacted by the US, the EU, and many Asian states, particularly against its substantial gas exports, began to bring serious economic destruction to the Russian economy. Merkel’s contrasting view - encouraging economic cooperation with Russia - was seen as appeasement of an aggressor, and the new Chancellor Scholz reversed it. 

- France's Macron and Italy's Mario Draghi, favouring diplomacy, tried to broker a deal between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022, but Zelensky, expressing the mindset and committment of the Ukrainian people, rejected that notion as favouring Russia. Washington welcomed the plan but Russia mocked it. It wasn't long before the European leaders backtracked. 

- The Afterword at the end of the book is a superb reflection of how this war will end:

The Russo-Ukrainian War has become the latest military conflict in the long history of wars of national liberation, which can be traced back to the American Revolution. It also belongs in the long list of wars that accompanied the decline and disintegration of world empires from the Spanish to the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, and then from the British and French to the Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese. We know how those wars ended - with the sovereignty of former colonies and dependencies and the concomitant devolution of former empires into post-imperial nation-states.  

 

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead.

 

- This magnificent novel won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, along wth Hernan Diaz's Trust (which I reviewed here). Two magnificent achievements. 

- Kingsolver was inspired by Charles Dickens’s classic David Copperfield when she holidayed in the UK in 2018 and stayed in a Victorian guesthouse that had once been Dickens's seaside residence. She became inspired by ‘…his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.’

- Her setting is the US states of Kentucky and Virginia. Demon, the young narrator, is a mixed-race Melungeon, with dark skin, light-green eyes, and red hair. His father died the summer before he was born, and his mother is now a junky living in a dilapidated trailer - 'trailer trash' by definition. Demon tells his story - from the day he was born - in sharp, punchy, robust prose which is a pleasure to read. 

- Foster parents and cruel abusive men are front and centre. And the experience is ugly in the extreme. Kids are treated as slaves and Kingsolver does not spare us any details. She is relentless. 

- Demon is sent from one foster home to another, some good most bad, but one saving grace is the other kids he meets and the lasting friendships they make. These become the core of the novel. 

- In Middle School he gets very good at football but suffers a bad knee injury which ends a promising future. His treatments include strong pain-killing drugs, and their common availability results in opioid addiction. Many of his friends become victims. He refers at one point to Charles Dickens and the ‘kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass’. 

- His art teacher at school knows he has real creative talent, and tries hard to get him to resume lessons and develop his craft. A local librarian helps him set up a website and brand for his popular comics. There are adults in this unsavoury journey that do care. And they end up making a real difference. Some kids grow up to be mature adults, but so many others fall away, and die. 'A whole generation of kids were coming up without families'. 

- Kingsolver has written a long book - 550 pages - and one that buries you in an ugliness that is often overwhelming. But there are saviours and survivors, and they lift you up. And you will be immersed in the beauty of her writing. 

For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you. (Acknowledgments) 

Han Kang, Greek Lessons

 

- This new novel from the Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang is very unlike her winning novel The Vegetarian, which was a superb and savage critique of South Korea’s abusive political, social and cultural conservatism. Greek Lessons is more a drama of personal fragilities and social isolation. 

- An unnamed Korean woman in her mid thirties, living in Seoul, suddenly loses her ability to speak. She suffered this condition as a child but recovered. She is referred to throughout as 'the woman'. She has an eight year old son who was brutally taken away from her by the family court to be raised by her former unsympathetic husband. 

- The other main character is an unnamed language teacher. He went to Germany with his parents when he was fifteen and spent seventeen years there. Now in his thirties he has returned to Seoul and taken up an academic position as a teacher of ancient Greek. In the first person tense he reflects about when he fell in love with a young deaf woman in Germany. She was the daughter of his ophthalmologist and totally rejected his advances. His eyesight was seriously deteriorating. 

- The 'woman' has been seeing a therapist for her speech issue but after five months there has been no change. What she found most intolerable was his claim that he understood her. She decides not to see him again and just live with her condition. She does enrol however in an ancient Greek course at a local academy. 

- The man's letters to his younger sister Ran, who is still in Germany, are very engaging. He details how he is coping with his increasing blindness. But we also learn of their distance from their abusive father who was 'a heartless man'. His brilliant friend Joachim died at the age of thirty six. He had long suffered from serious ailments, but he was a deep philosophical thinker with profound and beautiful thoughts and ideas that challenged the man on all levels. Sensual frailties never got in the way of the important sources of vitality and meaning. 

- The final part of the novel explores the developing relationship between the woman and her lecturer, and the ways each deal with their fragility. They’re both very aware of nature, the seasons, and the bustling streets, lights, and traffic of the city. And, alone, they walk around a lot. They seem to be celebrating the senses they still have and the joy they give them. The man doesn't recognise colour, only different shades of black. 

- Entering the academy one evening he trips and falls, cutting himself and breaking his glasses. She sees the incident and rushes to his aid. She takes him home, a small apartment, where over the course of the night he opens up to her about his anxious uptight mother and his brusque father. As Asians they experienced constant racism in Germany. 

- Hang has given us a novel that explores so many levels of personal travail and sorrow. Alongside profound reflections on Plato, Socrates and Greek philosophy in general, we're immersed in very different shades of darkness, whether deep family wounds or failed aspirations and dreams. In contrast to beauty.

- The novel ends with a loving embrace between the man and the woman. It is very tender and emotional. Beauty is deep within us and around us and will never be extinguished. 

- The novel is so well written and flawlessly translated it is a real joy to read. Sheer poetry. 

Shaun Prescott, Bon and Lesley.

 

- There's absolutely no doubt that Shaun Prescott is a brilliant, inventive writer. His first novel The Town blew me away. Absurdist in style and focus it conveyed the meaninglessness and emptiness of provincial lives in typical small towns in Australia. It's a common theme in Australian literature. The darkness underneath, the dead heart, and the desperate escape to the edge, the coastal cities, for community and salvation. 

- Prescott's new novel Bon and Lesley continues this focus, but with deeper meaning and richness. 

- Bon gets off the train at the desolate town of Newnes, adjacent to a forest in mid-Western NSW. He wanders around and meets Steven Grady and his younger brother Jack who are holed up in an abandoned weatherboard on the town's edge. The garrulous Steven tells stories, and Jack is very strange and quiet, absorbed in the surreal world of the dark internet. ‘He only ate chips, he only drank Coke or beer. He was rake thin and sallow’. 'He thinks he knows everything', according to Steven.

 - Another stranger, Lesley, enters their lives. She is also lost and searching. The conversations are stilted but another layer of poetic and ethereal strangeness is added. As Steven says 'You know how we’ve quietly passed into a new real? I’m not an idiot, Bon. I know there’s something sinister about the mood around town’. 

- The walk every day into the town to buy stuff, mainly beer, chips and junk food. And rum, which they get drunk on every night. They live abysmally meaningless, nihilistic lives. No religious beliefs, no political allegiances, no societal critiques, no current affairs awareness, no news watched or read, no serious relationships, no careers. They are excruciatingly boring. But Lesley does have dreams and aspirations. She yearns to discover a portal to the small town of her dreams, Sofala, 'because once we're there, none of us will have any problems'. And she will have two children, a boy and a girl, and lead a satisfying and happy life. 

- There are many things dotted throughout the novel that add to its rich existential texture, and we're treated constantly to Prescott's insights and thrilling prose: ‘most truths were best left tangled in ambiguities’. 

- I hope I'm not giving away a spoiler here but towards the end of the novel, in 'Part 3', Lesley and her mother and Lesley’s two young sons called, ironically, Stephen and Jack, are living in a regular industrial suburb of a larger thriving town. She loves her children and is very protective of them. Pubs and drunks are a common feature of the town of course but the more mature Lesley is warm and wise and happy and a delightful conversationalist. ‘…so we allowed the tide to carry us wherever it saw fit’. 

- And in the last few pages Bon finally leaves Newnes and walks back to the large town, his home. He peers in through a window. ‘His children were inside and so was she’, his wife. A hint that Bon and Lesley married and had two kids. And perhaps the quick sexual episode when they shared a bed in Newnes was the most productive thing they ever did. 

- Prescott has written a difficult book that demands you stay with it. You will not be disappointed. His writing is on another level altogether.