ON LIBERTY

Author: John Stuart Mill
Year: 1975 (1859)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co
Language:  English

Some social philosophers have had a particularly decisive impact on the way we have structured our society in the 20^th and 21^st centuries in various parts of Europe. Thomas Hobbes, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx are but a few examples of intellectuals who became instrumental to our ongoing discourse on what sort of community we wish to be part of, what the meaning of state and government should be, how we distribute political power and economic wealth, and what rights and obligations are understood by citizenship.

One of the most influential voices for most of western European political theory was John Stuart Mill and in particular his short, but groundbreaking and immensely popular work, “On Liberty”. This was initially intended by Mill, and his wife and co-author Harriet Taylor, to be an article or pamphlet but over time expanded to the point where it became a proper book. In it, Mill elaborates on his main concern; what is individual freedom and what stands in its way?

He does this by breaking the question up in two parts. Primo, he discusses the relationship between liberty of thought and the liberty of action. Secundo, he proceeds to investigate individualism and the development of the individual, all the time matching against the collective, be it the state, society, or organised religion. In fact, Mill often equates state with society, which is quite useful for much of his argument and a reminder to the many among us who consider the state and government of a democratic society as something detached from the people who finance and elect them.

What is interesting about Mill’s argument about the freedom of thought and action is that he is not proposing them from the perspective of the privileges of the individual, but rather from the point of view of society itself and the benefits free-thinking individuals can have for the progress of a whole community. He submits that society is best served if all ideas are brought to the fore and tested against each other. If a new idea proves superior to an old idea, it will replace the old one and society will be better off. If the new idea proves inferior to an existing idea, the existing idea will have been strengthened and society will be better off knowing that it is in the right. Ideas that are not challenged, no matter how correct or accurate, will with time become old and weak.

His argument about the individualism is very much related to his argument about freedom of thought but seems less substantiated. Mill categorically argues for the individual agency as the antidote to pacification. In his view, all trades should be performed by private entrepreneurs regardless of their efficiency. His idea is that the mere fact that society is powered by the activity and initiative of private individuals fosters a culture of innovation and forward-thinking that benefits the whole community even where individual businesses or particular branches of the economy are not running optimally. His point is that the state may never repress human individualism at any time. “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Mill’s conclusions are that the state must have no jurisdiction in matters that involve only the agent himself. All actions should be permissible, that only affect the person who commits them or the person or persons who have made a conscious and free choice to accept the consequences of said action. Mill calls these actions “self-regarding”. Only if an individual’s actions threaten to harm society, does the state have a right to limit that individual’s liberty. For example, society has an obligation to punish and imprison a thief, not because of the individual crime, but because theft as such, if allowed to go unchecked, may hollow the foundation of the way we recognise and organise ownership and wealth, and therefore becomes a danger to society. Laws by their very nature are bound to limit the liberty of the individual and may therefore only be forged in order to defend society, not to control or pacify the individual.

The greatest enemy of individualism however, according to Mill, is not laws and regulations but the collective opinions of society. Many things that are not illegal are still not done because of the observing eyes of the general public. The “what will people say”-argument, as it were. In this part of the book, Mill discusses genius and eccentricity and decries the general public’s inability to understand genius. At best, the man on the Clapham omnibus considers it mildly entertaining and at worst outright threatening. But eccentrics should be revered and not scorned, says Mill. He who acts according to established social rules rather than his own convictions, does not act according to his free will and is, therefore, a prisoner.

There is a lot to unpack in Mill’s book and others have done it a lot better than I will ever be able to, especially in as short a text as this blog post, but I hope that whoever reads these words will endure my own primitive thoughts all the same.

A feeling that recurred to me while reading “On Liberty” was that I perceived it as somewhat naïve. Mill’s proposal that the right opinion will prevail if tested against wrong ones is not compatible with the state of things in the world today. In our era of post-truth, where personal opinion and proven fact are interchangeable, Mill’s ongoing debate between ideas becomes impossible to sustain. One of Mill’s fiercest critics, James Fitzjames Stephen writes that “The great defect of Mr Mill’s later writings seems to me to be that he has formed too favourable an estimate of human nature.” I tend to lean toward Stephen’s assessment. I think that Mill would agree with me when I say that he assumes that people who engage in a debate do so in a common pursuit of truth and an interest in facts and evidence. He writes “the source of everything respectable in a man, either as an intellectual or moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible”.

Unfortunately, Mill failed to see, that the true purpose of most individuals is far less sophisticated. For most who engage in a public debate, the goal is to win the argument (or as it is better known “own” their adversary), not to get closer to the truth. He failed to recognise that it may be perfectly acceptable in some circles to manufacture evidence in support of an argument if no established facts support it.

As a consequence, despite his hardy defence of the liberty of every man and woman (he was a staunch feminist), Mill by necessity comes across as an elitist. He wants society to be an academic seminar where learned intellectuals weigh evidence against evidence without passion or prestige and he, therefore, must agree to exclude the portions of society that are unqualified to participate in such a discourse. Society after all, in Mill's own words, is nothing but "that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals".

PARIS

Author:  Émile Zola

Year: 1963 (1898)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translator Eligia Bakowska)

“It suffices not, to be charitable. Henceforth, one must be just. Indeed, where justice prevails gruesome misery disappears and charity shall be made redundant”, Émile Zola concludes in his third and final instalment of his Three Cities-suite, “Paryz” (“Paris”) from 1898. The novel opens with Father Pierre Froment’s, the Catholic priest who has lost faith in everything except mercy, trying to deliver a handout to an impoverished house painter who is withering away in a putrid flat in one of the many disadvantaged areas of the city. Deeply moved by the dying man’s squalor, Father Pierre tries to solicit help from his connections in the higher spheres of society. He is met with an abundance of passionate assurances of goodwill but a stupefying shortage of action. By the time, the rich and wealthy have made room in their agenda to admit him to a charity-funded asylum, the old man has perished. In one powerful scene, Zola destroys libertarianism and holds up socialism as the only viable solution to acute poverty. No one should have to beg to survive. Everyone has the right to survive. Socialism will do in a hundred years, what the church failed to do in a thousand.

In effect, Zola takes the opportunity to broaden the picture, pushing back the anti-Catholicism theme in favour of a critique of the political and economic elite of Paris at the time. In the first book of the series, “Lourdes”, Father Pierre looks for a miracle and finds simony. In the second book, “Rome”, he looks for Christian mercy and finds papal despotism. In Paris, he finds himself in a world of political intrigues, family feuds, terrorist attacks, love, and desire and ends up challenging society as a whole. The final battle is between the old and corrupt on the one hand, and the new and just on the other. The old is represented by tradition, nobility, political elite, and the church. The future holds liberty, technology, atheism, and love.

Liberty, to Zola, is the liberty from social form and conventions; what John Stuart Mill calls “the despotism of custom”, where individual freedom is curtailed by the invisible shackles of social expectations. Zola illustrates this social prison by the use of all the ways the nobility was entangled in all kinds of outré convention breeches and shocking promiscuity while all the time parading a crumbling facade of piety and moral superiority in order to safeguard their privileges.

Technology is a central point in Zola’s vision of the future. In “Paryz” it is personified by Father Pierre’s elder brother Guillaume and his three sons who all in their own way contribute to considerable (and altogether unlikely) advances in mechanics,  handicraft, and chemistry, no doubt inspired by the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel three decades earlier. Technological development, in Zola’s world, not only guarantees the continued security of a people but represents the only true profession to which a person of intellectual means should remain devoted.

Atheism is the ultimate liberation of the citizen from the medieval darkness of history, and sine qua non for the modern man to take on the challenges of the coming age. Zola envisaged a future where Christianity would be relegated to the realm of mythology alongside pagan deities and cosmologies and which people of the future would look to as curious but nonsensical part of history. A rejection of a superior, omnipresent, and omnipotent power is bound to afford a twofold stimulus to individual action: 1. by doing away with the pacifying fear of punishment, and 2. by nullifying the passive hope for divine intervention.

Love, finally, is given as the goal of every person. Love for the fellow human beings, love for family, and love between man and woman. All these three types of love come together for Father Pierre Froment and challenge him to his final battle on the border of antiquity and future, sacrifice, and happiness.

Paryz is the most interesting, fast-paced, and accessible volume of the whole series. In contrast to the previous two books, the side plots are absorbing and coherent, and considerably more relevant to a modern reader which in a way would probably be disappointing to Zola. It seems in terms of social justice, despite massive strides, we have made less progress since 1898 than Zola would have anticipated.

My copies of "Lourde, "Rzym, and "Paryz" in Polish translation were handed down to me by my mom who in turn inherited them from my grandmother. Translations into English are my own from the Polish source. 

MORT

Author: Terry Pratchett
Year: 1988 (1987)
Publisher: Corgi Books
Language: English

Arguably the most decisive parameter in anthropological research is perspective. It is the one constant that governs the objective, the method, and the conclusions of the ethnography and it delimits the framework for the level as well as the vantage point of interpretation provided through the resulting narrative. Drawing on linguistic scholarship from the 1950s and 1960s, social anthropologists differentiate between two types of perspective: emic (the point of view of a member of the observed community) and etic (the point of view of an outsider to the observed community).

What is emic and what is etic is often contested as the original idea of the terms is for them to be mutually exclusive yet in practice, most of the time they turn out to be contextual, circumstantial, overlapping, and interchangeable. There is always some characteristic that the observer shares with the observed that makes the fieldwork partly emic and always something that disconnects the observer from the group that makes the perspective etic.

One would think that the most impervious bulwark against a purely etic perspective would be life itself. Surely, life always unites the observer with the observed. Even if we were to be observed by aliens from a different planet, they and we both would share the experience of being alive.

Terry Pratchett, of course, has a different opinion. In “Mort”, the fourth book of his highly successful Discworld series, Death, which by most accounts is a seven-foot-tall skeleton with a voice that sounds like “two slabs of granite being rubbed together”, embarks on fieldwork to learn what it is like to be human. He eats, drinks, gambles, and dances (for some reason neither war, work, nor sex appear on his list of human behaviour) and interviews his informants like a true field anthropologist about the expected sensations from each social phenomenon and about the meaning of their activity. For Death, anything human is exotic. Death’s response, as always in all caps, to Mort’s attempts to understand him is telling.

“'My granny says that dying is like going to sleep’, Mort added, a shade hopefully.
‘I WOULDN’T KNOW. I HAVE DONE NEITHER.’”

While Death is preoccupied with his research, his business of uncoupling the spiritual existence from its worldly shell in the moment of expiration is managed by his dreadfully unqualified apprentice, Mortimer, or Mort for short. Here is the interesting twist of the idea for this book. While Death is trying to live and a living person is administering death, they begin to interchange. Mort gradually begins to turn into Death, and Death shows increasing signs of life.

In his own inimitable style, Pratchett ensures that the ineptitude of his characters both gets them in trouble and provides the solution to their predicaments. The book is just as hilarious and witty as can be expected. In fact, it is the Discworld instalment that was voted the most popular of all Pratchett’s books in a 2003 BBC poll. Pratchett himself has spoken very warmly of “Mort” saying in an interview that it was the first Discworld novel with which he was truly pleased. The preceding books, according to him, had been a series of jokes held together by a makeshift plot whereas in "Mort", the plot was in and of itself a purpose.

Surprisingly, unlike the Discworld books I had read thus far (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal rights (yes, I am reading them in the order Pratchett published them)), “Mort” does not end on the jocose tone one has learned to expect from Pratchett. Instead, the ending is imbued with affection, forgiveness, mutual understanding, and respect. As I pressed on through the last pages, I realised that I was shielding myself from acknowledging the emotions for fear of being tricked by Pratchett. I was waiting for the romantic scenes to be overturned at any time and I was afraid that when they were, I would feel embarrassed by allowing myself to be fooled by this well-known prankster of a writer. But that moment never came. The ending was in a sense elevated, and not at all parodic.

By any standard, “Mort” is an intelligent and highly entertaining novel. My only advice to the presumptive reader would be to familiarise themselves with the Discworld in general and the Death character in particular before they plunge into this story. I contend that a well-rooted love for and curiosity about Death greatly enhances the joy of following his awkward efforts to understand humanity and Mort’s struggle to clean up the mess he caused.

ROME

Author:  Émile Zola

Year: 1959 (1896)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translators Hanna Szumanska-Grossowa & Irena Wieczorkiewicz)

A few months ago, I posted a review of Émile Zola’s novel “Lourdes” which was the first book of the “Three Cities”-trilogy. In it, Zola introduces us to Pierre Froment, a Roman Catholic priest who hopes to regain his dwindling faith by a miracle of the sacred well of Saint Bernadette. In the second book “Rzym” (“Rome”), we meet Father Pierre again a few years after his return from Lourdes. His faith in God has hardly evolved but he has found a way to justify his activity within Christianity through social work. By the time we re-connect with him, his commitment to the poor has consumed him completely, and with the support of a radical and highly criticised French cardinal, he embarks on a mission to reform all of Catholicism and shift its focus from struggling for worldly power to aiding the disadvantaged.

The vantage point for his activism is his book “New Rome” which is rewarded with instant success among the broad masses of Paris and makes him something of a local celebrity in the French capital. In the meantime, it also attracts the rather less favourable attention of the Holy See. When he learns that the Vatican is about to ban his work by adding it to the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Pierre travels to Rome, hoping to be received by the Holy Father himself to defend his writing directly before him.

In Rome, Pierre’s naiveté and ideology clash with the crushing forces of history, nationalism, vanity, and the struggle for power within the Catholic Church itself. We follow him as he scurries from one meeting to another between cardinals, monsignors, noblemen, and generals, in a confusing web of ambitious power players who say one thing and do another, or often nothing at all.

With “Rzym”, Zola continues the assault on the Catholic Church which he launched in the first instalment of the trilogy. It is vile, potent, and consistent but also inevitably outdated. The issues he raises have long since been lost to history. To a secular audience more than 120 years after the book first appeared, much of his criticism seems irrelevant. In his time and place, in Catholic France which Zola repeatedly calls “the eldest daughter of the Church”, it constituted a significant and bold statement which was widely read and fiercely debated. The book came at a time shortly after the Italian unification and its annexation of the Vatican into the new kingdom. The Church State, which had once been a superpower in Europe, found itself grappling with the reality of having no formal political power on Earth. Pierre Froment is caught up in the war between the white royalists and the black clergy. In Zola’s time, this was the era of the new and forward-looking secular state’s triumph over the old and reactionary backward empire of theocracy.

Much like “Lourdes”, “Rzym” is told at a slow pace with the narrative heavily encumbered by lengthy and detailed descriptions of buildings, people, vehicles, and attire, as should be expected from a celebrated realist such as Zola. Father Pierre appears to get very little done throughout the whole novel and as he leaves yet another fruitless meeting with yet another high-ranking church official sporting yet another proud nose and aristocratic chin, one begins to wonder what the purpose of this book really is. In an apparent attempt to spice things up a bit, Zola throws in a rather cheesy love story into the mix which does little to accelerate the course of events or explain the underlying anguish of Pierre’s vain undertaking. The main story keeps grinding down the reader the same way it relentlessly grinds down Father Pierre. The circular movement toward the inevitable becomes more and more pronounced.

I am particularly fascinated by Zola’s choice to make most of the named characters, Cardinal Boccanera being the splendid exception, with whom Father Pierre interacts implicitly promise him their support and help in defending his book, giving him hope that he may still win the battle against the Index, only to deflect and evade all calls for action. Pierre, however, maintains his optimism until the very end.

Admittedly, there is a lot to unpack in this novel that will by nature fly over the 21^st century reader’s head. Watching the complete demise of the once so powerful Papal state to an existence at the mercy of a young monarchy (the geopolitical independence of the Holy See was not restored until some 30 years later) must have been a quashing experience. Also, I suspect that the memories of the Risorgimento that led to the Italian unification, bear limited gravitas in current Italian politics whereas 120 years ago they were still the foundation of the new state’s budding raison d’etre.

My lasting impression of Émile Zola’s writing, however, is that I cannot quite be impressed by it. Granted, the “Three Cities” is not considered to be the best representation of his genius, but “Rzym” unveiled some unexpected weaknesses of this literary giant’s. Particularly the somewhat failed love story made me reflect on the way a skilful writer builds drama and releases the climax. In this case, it was almost as if the main story was written first and the love story was glued onto it at a later point without being fully integrated. A bit like the “Welcome to the House of Fun” chorus in the Madness song from the 1980s. For comparison, I find the pathos and emotional potency in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s writing to be vastly superior.

Similarly, Zola’s realistic environmental accounts also tend to be just a tad bit to tedious to quite hit the mark. It is by all means fascinating to imagine what Rome must have looked like, sounded like, and smelled like in the end of the 19^th century but it does after a while become repetitive. Voltaire’s words “the secret of being a bore is to tell everything” come to mind. Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” is an example of realism that I find crisper and more vigorous.

Check back for my review of the third and final part of the trilogy, "Paris", shortly.

THERE ARE NO WITCHES

Author: Arne Jarrick
Year: 2017
Publisher: Svante Weylers Bokförlag
Language: Swedish

We are all wrong sometimes even when we are sure we are right. We all make assumptions that turn out to be baseless or draw conclusions that prove inaccurate. Being able to tell right from wrong means being able (and willing) to process and adhere to facts. Unfortunately, I have in recent years, by close observation of the public space, been inevitably guided to the conclusion that the ability (or willingness) to recognise facts as an essential part of an argument is greatly underdeveloped in large portions of our community. More regrettably still, fact resistance has moved from populace to policy.

The rejection of truth is not a new phenomenon. It has been a defining element of postmodern philosophy for decades. In recent years, more and more detailed accounts on how wilful and militant ignorance has permeated the public space have appeared, most notably “Bob Woodward’s “Fear” about the ongoing intellectual collapse of the Trump administration. Swedish writers, scholars, and journalists have, too, produced several volumes on the topic of fact resistance. I have read “Det finns inga häxor” (not available in English but a translation might be “There Are No Witches”) by history professor Arne Jarrick.

Professor Jarrick sets out to examine if Sweden is still a knowledge-based society and if so, what can be done to preserve it. He discusses the role of politics and the importance of a modern educational system, but also popular culture, media, and social sciences.

The book raises many crucial issues and gives a number of interesting references to psychological and social research in the area, such as Brendan Nyhan’s and Jason Reifler’s 2016 experiment that showed a clear correlation between self-esteem and openness to facts. Another interesting study indicated that fighting opinion with facts might be counter-productive as it often triggers an aggressive reaction from the person in the wrong, thus shutting tight any opening to a balanced dialogue. Twitter is extant proof that this observation is accurate.

Despite his noble intentions and plentiful nuggets of valuable information, unfortunately “Det finns inga häxor” is not a particularly well-composed piece of writing. It is obvious that it was written in a hurry and in a state of emotional turmoil. Jarrick is understandably exasperated and appalled. And it shows. He makes sweeping statements and claims, employs truisms, and invokes emotional argumentation. To me, the book sounded more like an uncommonly long letter to the editor than a coherent argument.  

There are several striking weaknesses. For a book that claims to be written in the defence of knowledge, and sets out to discuss the knowledge-based society, it is mind-boggling that it contains only a vague definition of the concept of knowledge, which by the way is placed in the very end of the book. In fact, there is no reference to the large body of epistemological research that predates this book and with which Jarrick has to be at least aware of. The closest to a definition that Jarrick takes us is his statement of fact that “a knife either is or is not sharp” not accounting for the fact that sharpness is very much subjective and thus a poor proxy for an objectively binary relationship and offering no explanation of how knowledge of this fact can be obtained.

Moreover, he seems to possess a remarkably poor understanding of social sciences. In my ears as an anthropologist the whole concept of “cultural evolution” rings off-tune but I will forgive him. He is merely a historian, after all.

Far more problematic is his proposal that knowledge needs to be based on natural observations. In Jarrick’s example, people who claimed knowledge about witches in the past had no actual knowledge because witches did and do not exist. Knowledge about birds, on the other hand, is knowledge because birds exist. I understand what Jarrick is aiming for here and will not discuss this from an existentialist point of view. I will still disagree with his point. If knowledge about manmade cultural phenomena does not constitute knowledge, then theology, linguistics, archaeology, and musicology cannot qualify as knowledge either. I cannot accept that as being a useful slicing of the term.

Further evidence of Jarricks poor understanding of social studies and humanities is found in his complete misunderstanding of Bruno Latour. Jarrick fleetingly, without providing a reference, responds to Latour's article “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects” published in 2000 where Latour provocatively proposes that Ramses II could not have died from tuberculosis because tuberculosis was not discovered until 1882. Jarrick goes as far as saying that he would have called Latour an idiot if he hadn’t promised himself never to call someone an idiot. Incidentally, the idiot here is not Latour. His paper is an exercise in connecting historical events with their own social epoch. Jarrick should have observed that Latour has no problem with saying that “Ramses II died from what we today would call ‘tuberculosis’” and he does not challenge that the germ that killed Ramses II was the organism we now know as Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or in Latours text ‘Koch’s bacillus’). What Latour submits for consideration is that the social construct of tuberculosis that allows us to incorporate it in our cosmos and connect it with the death of the Pharaoh had not taken place in ancient Egypt. One could say that while Robert Koch ‘discovered’ the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, he ‘invented’ the concept of tuberculosis. Jarrick completely fails to see the difference as his vision is clouded by his own whiggish understanding of “cultural evolution”. He is, after all, merely a historian. 

Despite these lacunae in his knowledge of anthropology and metaphysics, he left me with one astonishing insight about knowledge, for which I will be forever in his debt. There is good evidence that the collective accumulation of knowledge about the natural state of things in our surrounding has increased and continues to increase exponentially since the 17^th century. But chances are that the distribution of knowledge has barely increased linearly. If this is true, it would be fair to assume that the gap between the apex of our knowledge as a society and its base is expanding rapidly. What we have created is in effect a tremendous knowledge inequality. It appeared to me, that the difference between what Leonardo da Vinci knew and what an average farmhand knew was smaller than the difference between what Neil deGrasse Tyson knows and what I know.

This makes for a huge imbalance in the access to knowledge but also the ability to assess the level of knowledge. I submit that it was easier for the Duke of Milan to understand the scope of da Vinci’s knowledge than it is for the President of the United States to understand the current research boundaries of modern physics. Look at it this way, if I speak a little Russian, it is easier for me to appreciate the language skills of someone who claims they speak Russian than if I had not spoken any Russian at all. The knowledge gap would have been too wide for me to bridge. When people can no longer properly appreciate the scope of our collective knowledge and grasp the magnitude of their own relative ignorance, they will by necessity overestimate their abilities. To paraphrase Socrates, one has to know a lot to be able to comprehend how little one knows.

A YouGov poll in July this year, asked men whether they thought that they could win a point against Serena Williams. It turned out that the less the respondents knew about tennis, the more confident they were that they would be able to win a point against the best female tennis player in history.

And this, I think is the key to our failure as a knowledge-based society. Our liberal democracy has focused on the *right* to know, but we failed to enforce the *obligation* to know. We have made knowledge available, but we have allowed it to remain optional. We can all claim to be geniuses and none of us needs to accept being called out as ignoramuses.

Sadly, all the self-proclaimed geniuses out there seem to forget Goethe’s famous words “Das erste und letzte was vom Genie gefordert wird ist Wahrheitsliebe”. Consequently, it may very well be so that I am the one who has been wrong throughout this whole review.

LOURDES

Author: Émile Zola

Year: 1962 (1894)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translator Eligia Bakowska)

“In faith, there is enough light for those who believe, and enough shadows to blind those who don’t”, French mathematician Blaise Pascal resigned. How many of the army of priests, pastors, and preachers that populate our churches, shrines, and temples really believe in the God that they purportedly serve? Their mission is to strengthen the commitment of others to God, but what about their own convictions? And to what extent is the love for God their primary concern?

French realist Émile Zola, toward the end of his life, launched a fierce attack on the Roman Catholic Church across three books, collectively known as the Three Cities Trilogy, each titled after the city in which the story takes place. In the opening volume, “Lourdes” which first saw the light of day in 1894, Zola introduces us to Father Pierre Froment, a reluctant priest struggling with his faith, and his childhood friend and one true love, Marie de Guersaint, who suffers from paralysis. We follow them as two of a multitude of travellers over a five day pilgrimage to the sacred water well in Lourdes, by the vicinity of which the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared before Bernadette Soubirous, and where Marie now hopes for a miracle that will return to her her ability to walk and to Pierre his ability to believe.

On their pilgrimage, Pierre and Marie encounter a diverse universe of people, all more or less loosely connected with the holy site of Lourdes. There is the nobleman who invests all his social prestige into guarding the well, the physician who proudly protests to make independent and objective assessments and documentations of each miracle while failing to notice or pretending not to notice his nonsensical use of evidence, the mother who carries around the remains of her dead infant in her arms refusing to accept that the Holy Mother of God would not hear her prayers, just to mention a few.

Most fascinating of all these characters is perhaps Dr Chaussaigne who is the complete anti-figure of Pierre. While Pierre is a priest who has lost his faith in God in favour of science, Dr Chaussaigne is a physician who, following the death of his wife and children in an epidemic, has lost faith in medicine and attached his hope to seeing his beloved ones again in the afterlife.

Zola based this novel on his own observations during his two visits to Lourdes in 1891 and 1892. His is a crowded, corrupt, putrid, and filthy Lourdes drawing its energy from the naïve beliefs of the infantile and simple minds which have access to no other hope for help or comfort than the possible intervention of an imagined being which embodies all the powers they themselves lack. It is a realist’s study of despair, ignorance, and misery.

It is no secret that Émile Zola was a staunch atheist, and his attempt to expose, as it were, the Catholic Church for the swindle that he perceived it to be is a thing of beauty, elegance, and pathos crafted by the daedal pen of a genius. But it is also a work of anger, animosity, and blind resistance of a warrior. The holy site in Zola’s eyes is not a place of worship but profit maximising enterprise. Traders, handymen, and innkeepers all constitute the industry that the legend has brought to the poor village. But the main beneficiary of the economic activity around the well, however, seems to be the Church itself, through the local monastery dedicated to angrily watching over the cash flow generated by the holy site, much like a modern corporation would furiously protect their trademark brands. “No one can serve two masters” - Matt 6:24. There is no doubt in Zola’s mind that the clergymen in Lourdes have made their choice whom to serve, and it is it not Christ.

Spoiler alert!

So what about the miracles? What about poor devout Marie de Guersaint and miserably sceptical Father Pierre Froment?

St Augustine allegedly said that “faith is to believe what you do not see. The reward of faith is to see what you believe”. There have been many modern examples where faith has expelled seemingly incurable diseases. Psychosomatic physical ailments, handicaps, and diseases are well documented in medical journals (there is even a peer-reviewed journal, “Psychosomatic Medicine”, dedicated to this branch of medicine). There have also been examples of miracles which modern science has until now not been able to explain (Grenholm, “Documenterade mirakler”).

Indeed, Marie de Guersaint is healed. She stands up to walk and dance again. Her legs are strong and her body nimble. As a demonstration of strength, she pushes her wheelchair all the way to the Virgin Mary’s grotto to make a sacrifice of gratitude. Father Pierre’s ailment is of a different kind. His condition does not improve. If anything, he sinks deeper into doubt.

Whether there is a God or not, Zola thus concedes that faith, by any definition, can move mountains. "Go, said Jesus. Your faith has made you whole." - Mark 10:52

SWEDISH HATRED

Author: Gellert Tamas
Year: 2016
Publisher: Natur & Kultur
Language:  Swedish


There is something rotten in the state of Sweden. In fact, there is something rotten in most kingdoms, princedoms, priestdoms, trumpdoms, and other more or less established kakistocracies in the western world. It is eroding democracy, rule of law, and human rights, and ultimately our freedom, prosperity, and way of life.

The rot has many faces. Racism is one and it is the subject chosen by Swedish journalist and writer Gellert Tamas for his book “Det svenska hatet” (not available in English but a simple translation would be “Swedish Hatred”). Tamas has previously written about racism and migration, e.g. “Lasermannen” (“The Laser Man”); an account of a would-be serial killer who shot at people of foreign heritage in the early 90s using a hunting rifle equipped with a laser sight.

By “Det svenska hatet”, Tamas sets out to turn the spotlight to the various movements in modern day Sweden that promote anger and violence. He does this by following the political career of Kent Ekeroth, one of the better known far-right Sweden Democrat party members. Ekeroth, is no doubt an interesting person, and a lot of his activities coincide with - and help to promote - the growth of extremist ideas in Sweden in the past decade. By outlining Ekeroth’s career and putting it in context, Tamas seeks to give us a comprehensive history of neo-Nazi movement in Sweden which he, in turn, helps us locate in the web of global anti-Semitism, fascism, and white supremacy. Ekeroth is portrayed as being the embodiment of the far-right irrationalism, inconsistency and self-depreciation. Born of a Jewish immigrant and growing up with a single mother he joined an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist political party. We learn about his childhood, fascination with role-playing games, shyness around girls, and temper tantrums. We learn about his contributions to the internationalisation of the Sweden Democrat party, his agitation techniques and his infamous “night out with the lads” when three of them arm themselves with steel pipes that they find at a construction site in the middle of the night as makeshift melee weapons in order to punish an elderly drunkard that insulted them at a bar hours earlier while barely being able to stand up straight, and later blame him for attacking them. In the process, we learn about how the Sweden Democrats rise from the ashes of the openly xenophobic Bevara Sverige Svenskt-movement, how it communicates with, and accepts advice, funding, and inspiration from international Nazi sympathisers, how they create disinformation campaigns and use the internet to willingly and knowingly disseminate untruth and propaganda.

Tamas is an exquisite journalist and writer, and his research is solid and comprehensive. His writing is sharp and engaging and constitutes a potent amalgam of logos and pathos. The language used is journalistic rather than literary and some chapters read like columns in a newspaper. 

Even still, it does not take long to realise that he will fail with his ambition. This book is not about Swedish hatred as a whole. It is about a particular kind of hatred: racism. Issues, which are advertised on the book cover, such as Islamic fundamentalism, are reduced to anecdotes and serve as trigger points for the continued narrative of Ekeroth’s life. By focusing on the Sweden Democrats, Tamas seems to argue that the “Swedish” hatred is concentrated to the far-right. In so doing, Tamas inadvertently supports the notion that Islam does not belong to the Swedish society and that Islamic terrorism does not make up part of Sweden of today. As if Islamist haters were not Swedish enough to count as contributors to Swedish hatred. Violence born from class struggle, misogyny, and homophobia is also largely ignored by Tamas.

Furthermore, Tamas falls into the trap that many skilled researchers have fallen into before him: he wants to share ALL his findings. As a consequence, the book is filled with tangents, rabbit holes, and side quests which give no additional value to the investigation of the rise of extremist views. By turning the book into a biography on an individual whom Tamas has appointed the figurehead of Swedish far-right extremism, his research sometimes veers from the declared intention of the book and steers into the territory of the personal and individual, which can by no stretch of the imagination be extended to becoming a universal truth about hatred and racism at large.

It has been clear to me for some time that the world is currently witnessing the end of the straight, white man’s hegemony. The populist upswing in recent years is a reaction to the challenges against a world order that has prevailed for hundreds of years. Patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and European cultural centrism have been unquestionable anchor points of Western civilisation which in turn has forced its values on the rest of the world. As the world order is inevitably and irreversibly changing, there is bound to be a reaction. From this perspective, the snowballing disdain for the rule of law, human rights, and equality makes sense. Democracy, voting rights, feminism, and equality were never inherent values of the Western dominion. European world domination was not based on general elections, free press, independent courts and equality between the sexes. These are not accomplishments of the white man. They are rights that had to be conquered and won in conflict with the white man. It follows logic therefore that when the Sweden Democrats and their ilk fight for the ancient world order, these institutions have little to no value. And this is far more dangerous than a band of bibulous bozos armed with steel pipes in the middle of the night.

“Det svenska hatet”, will not convince anybody who is not already aware of the dangers of the far-right wave. By tying his narrative so tightly with the biography of one person, Tamas has also ensured that his book will soon become outdated and irrelevant. Ekeroth is already fading from memory after having been ousted from the party and settled in Hungary. It is quite possible that this book will be banned in Sweden in ten or twenty years. Unless Ekeroth returns to the stage it will not matter much. No one will read it anyway.

NOCTURNES - FIVE STORIES OF MUSIC AND NIGHTFALL

Author: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
Year: 2010 (2009)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (Translator Rose-Marie Nielsen)

For those of you, if indeed there are any, who choose to waste portions of your lives reading my reviews, it may have become apparent that I have somewhat engulfed myself in short stories and novellas in recent times, starting with Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Wall”, through Nicolai Gogol and Thomas Mann only a short while ago. I only recently discovered this format and am finding it increasingly rewarding. It poses a particular challenge to the writers, as it forces them to distil the narrative down to one plot, one message, or one emotion. The subject of today’s review is again a collection of short stories. This time Nobel Prize-winning, British novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2009 collection ”Nocturner” (”Nocturnes – Five Stories of Music and Nightfall”).

This, my friends, is an unparalleled piece of story-telling magic! The collection of five exquisitely crafted stories (with the possible exception of “Malvern Hills” which is the least interesting of them) is a most supreme delight to read. The stories are wrought on the common theme of music. All but one are told from the first-person perspective of skilled but unsuccessful musicians. None of them is about the musicians themselves, but rather told through their observing eyes.

The first story “Schlagersångaren” (The Crooner”) is about an aging Frank Sinatra-like superstar at the dusk of his fame, who asks a young street musician in Venice to accompany him as he sets out to serenade his wife, Lindy, whom he is about to divorce. The second, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, follows a washed-up middle-aged English teacher who is invited to spend time with his vastly more successful friends from college only to realise that the purpose of his visit is for him to help them mend their dilapidated marriage. The third story, “Malvern Hills” is told by a talented but unrecognised singer-songwriter who reluctantly accepts to spend the summer as a helping hand at his sister’s hostel in the mountains. The fourth, “Nocturne” re-introduces us to Lindy from the first story, now freshly divorced and recovering from plastic surgery in a hospital, and recounts her brief friendship with a brilliant but little known saxophonist who is similarly recovering  in the room next to hers. The fifth, and perhaps the most interesting of them, “Cellister” (“The Cellists”), is told by a club musician about a young and ambitious cellist who encounters an elderly woman who claims to be a cello virtuoso and offers to help him polish his performance.

With his trademark low-key but by no means tardy narration technique, Ishiguro gently ushers the reader into the tender haze between the real and the pretended. His five Nocturnes lay bare the impotence of the everyday pretention and charade we deploy in our desperate pursuit to connect with a universe which we have long ceased to understand. By an intricate patchwork of manufactured masks, coatings, coulisses, and smoke screens, Ishiguro’s characters effectively ensnare themselves in a web of vanity they convince themselves is the inescapable reality of life when in fact, it is entirely of their own making. Artists and performers, who make up a category of people who actively seek the attention and accolade of the many, are particularly useful subjects for a study of this sort and Ishiguro, known to be somewhat of an archaeologist into the ruins of the human psyche, certainly makes the most of it. The result is sad, hilarious, and absorbing.

Ishiguro’s choice to make music the centrepiece of his collection is not entirely unexpected. A great lover of jazz music and an accomplished guitarist himself, he must have found the struggles of a musician to be the perfect backdrop for his somewhat melancholic stories. As artists who seek the limelight, his protagonists provide the ideal fusion of act and reality. By their very nature, they embody the conflict that Ishiguro seeks to highlight in this literary quintet. 

"Nocturnes" is hands down the best piece of literature I have read this year and the first book ever that I re-read directly after having finished it the first time. This is how I would aspire to write if I were a writer! I add Ishiguro’s name to Thomas Mann's, Agneta Pleijel's, and José Saramago's in the pantheon of my literary house gods.    

DEATH IN VENICE AND OTHER STORIES

Author: Thomas Mann

Year: 1962 (1902, 1903, 1905, 1912, 1940, 1944)

Publisher: Fischer Bücherei KG

Language: German

My first encounter with Thomas Mann coincided with Gustav von Aschenbach’s first encounter with Tadzio. This was 1998. I was an exchange student in Göttingen and the novella “Der Tod in Venedig” (”Death in Venice”) in its original language was put in front of me by one of my flatmates. I was immediately dazzled by the intensity of Mann’s storytelling genius and his sparse but precise narration technique. Still, the plot provoked consternation in me, in the beginning. What kind of man writes a romanticised story about an elderly artist who falls in love with a teenage boy? But it did not take long before I realised there was something more to the story. Twenty years later, I find it easier albeit far from effortless to penetrate some of the layers of this remarkable and troubling story.

”Der Tod in Venedig” is an account of the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach and his imminent descent from the pedestal of puritan honour and dignity into the morass of carnal lust and debauchery from which he is barely saved only through his death. The story is certainly partly autobiographic as Aschenbach’s crisis must have been all too familiar to Mann who grew up in the strict social environment of northern Germany and most of his life wrestled with his own homosexuality. But more importantly, at least in my opinion, is Mann’s brush with art in itself. In the guise of the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann portrays an artist who has been completely subdued by moral expectations and the narrow path to social acceptance, to the point of having stopped producing any new output for fear of jeopardising the good name he earned by his existing pieces.

The whole story is filled with symbols of death, long before Aschenbach finally perishes. The first thing that happens in the story is that Aschenbach visits a cemetery. When he arrives in Venice, the gondola that takes him to his hotel is unusual in its pitch black colour resembling a coffin. Also, his very name, Aschenbach meaning ash-brook in German, sounds like an allusion to death and the canals of Venice. Knowing Mann’s fascination with ancient mythology, I even like to think that the brook refers to the river Styx; another symbol of death in the novella.

Still, it is not the biological death of a man that is the main plot of the story. It is the death of an idea. The death of the puritan when confronted with emotions. The defeat of the artificially appropriate artistry when faced with pure and natural beauty. Aschenbach, who becomes increasingly and  irreversibly obsessed with the young boy, in whom he spots immaculate perfection, suddenly regains his creative power but prevented as he is by his moral shackles to harness it and, by necessity rather than by choice, finally crosses the river Styx and takes with him the art that he could have generated, had his pleasure not been forbidden. It is the price of truth. It is non-negotiable.

If in “Death in Venice”, Mann deals with the relationship between art and society, in another short story in the collection, he settles the score with the relationship between art and religion. In ”Gladius Dei”, he lets his protagonist Hieronymous, try to harass a gallery owner into taking down and ultimately burning a painting depicting the Madonna with child, which he finds blasphemous in the way Our Lady’s femininity is depicted. He argues that art should not aim at extolling beauty but that its purpose is only to glorify God. As the confrontation between Hieronymous and the gallery owner unfolds, what began as a modest request to take a certain painting down evolves into a belligerent demand that all the paintings in the gallery be burned. In the end, Hieronymous is unceremoniously tossed out of the gallery having accomplished nothing at all. Art does not take orders from religion.

Mann is careful not to make Hieronymous a formal representative of the Church. He is neither a monk nor a priest nor in any other way formally connected to churchly affairs. He is described as simply a layman zealot and as such represents not the direct challenge by the religious institutions, but by their proxies; society and its moral code. Very much like the challenge Gustav von Aschenbach was faced with.

There are four more novellas and short stories in this compilation: “Tristan”, “Die vertauschten Köpfe” (“The Transposed Heads”), “Schwere Stunde” (“A Weary Hour”), and “Das Gesetz” (“The Tables of the Law”)., all of which except the last I read with great interest and pleasure. “Das Gesetz” is Mann’s interpretation of the Book of Exodus, and I just hands down admit that I had a hard time to understand the purpose of this work. Granted, it paints a more personal and human picture of Moses and his deeds as he led the Israelites out of Egypt and let them conquer the Promised Land, but I was sadly unqualified to discern the deeper meaning of re-telling this well-known story in new words as, in my simple mind, it brought nothing new to my knowledge of the Scripture. I also tried to read it through the prism of art-vs.-society as that seems to be the theme that runs like a thread through all the stories in the book, but still failed. If you who read these words can help me understand, do share!

All in all, these novellas and short stories are for slow and focused reading

THE WORLD WAR

Author: Various
Year: 1938-1939
Publisher: Världskrigets förlag A.B.
Language: Swedish

Imagine that you are a tourist standing on one of the signal towers of the Great Wall of China and looking into the distance following the stretch of the seemingly endless structure as it whirls and turns across hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, forests and plains relentlessly pursuing the horizon. You see the trenches, turrets, gates, edges and fortifications and the further you try to see, the more you have to strain your eyes.

A few kilometres down the wall, a different viator is standing in a different tower but looking in the same direction as you are. His tower is on a different altitude, angle and relative distance from the sector of the wall you were trying to see. To this person, the tower is equally winding and equally endless, but he sees the items that you see from a different perspective. Maybe he can see something that is too far away for you to properly identify. Maybe you can see something that is blocked from his view. You are looking back to the same wall, and see the same portions of it, and yet your observations would differ.

Looking back into the history of mankind is no different. We know things today that those before us did not know. Our preferences and tastes change. Our expectations evolve. And when we are faced with accounts of events from eras that came and went, we are aghast to learn about developments that seemed so easily avoidable and yet crashed down on our forefathers without mercy or recourse. We see things they did not see, and they saw things that are out of view for us.

It is, therefore, a useful exercise to read historical accounts written before our era as seen by observers on a different point on the timeline. Voltaire’s book about Charles XII of Sweden is one such example. “Världskriget” (not available in English but the title translates to “The World War”) is another. In and by itself, it is already a fascinating read, but there is one fact in particular that makes this compilation particularly fascinating. The clue is in the title: it was published in 1938 and 1939, i.e. before they knew that there was going to be a second world war, even ghastlier than the previous one.

I have read the 14 volumes of Världskriget on and off over the course of the last five years and finally finished it in time to celebrate the centenary of the end of the war. It is a comprehensive collection of essays on the most diverse aspects of the First World War. The essays cover all sorts of perspectives on the Great War. They certainly cover the mandatory chapters on the political alliances, the shots in Sarajevo, the mobilisation across Europe and beyond, the diplomatic efforts to stave off the disaster, the troop movements and the battles, and the final capitulation of the defeated Central Powers. But apart from that, they also include more specialised titles such as “The Exploits of the German destroyer S.M.S.‘Emden’”, “Mines and the Use Thereof During the War”, “The Horse During the World War”, “The Irish Uprising of 1916”, “Sanitary Services”, “The Press and the War”, “German/French/British Marching Songs”, “The Rise and Success of National Socialism”, “The New Italy”, “Military Expenses”, “Russian Generals”, “Tetanus”, and “War humour”. Surprisingly, despite several articles on blimps, aviation, and individual feats of valour, not once was Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a. the Red Baron), the most celebrated fighter pilot of the era, mentioned.

It is, without a doubt, both chilling and awe-inspiring to read the accounts, thoughts, analyses, and arguments of people who had no way of knowing what horrors stood before them. The heroic introduction to the Nazi movement in Germany and the apotheosis of Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini are particularly horrifying.

What saddened me the most was how pundits, politicians, historians, and the general public until the night before the war refused to fully accept the impending calamity. The efforts to downplay, devalue, or ignore the threat and even ridicule those who called for attention to the matter sounds familiar to my 21st-century ears. I am reminded of the myopic misunderstanding that material wealth, trade, and economic development will trump pride and nationalism. I see the naïve hope that rational thought and education will conquer emotions and fear. I recognise the disastrous equation of justice with revenge. Our forefathers did it, and we are doing it again.

Which ultimately leaves me with the disturbing hunch that this is the hamartia that repeatedly prevents us from ever really saying ”farewell” to the past and compels us to repeatedly part with “until we meet again.” 

THE OVERCOAT

Author: Nicolai Gogol
Year: Various (1842)
Publisher: Various
Language: Swedish (Various translators)

Translators are the unsung heroes of literature. Thanks to their efforts and skill, works of literature, poetry, and drama that would remain unknown outside of their original language area, are made available to readers around the globe.  

In order to better understand the importance of translations on the accessibility and comprehensibility of a foreign work of fiction, I decided to look up all translations of Nicolai Gogol’s novella “The Overcoat” (“Шинель” in original) into Swedish. Hans Åkerström’s survey “Bibliografi över rysk skönlitteratur översatt till svenska”, Acta Bibliothecae Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2018, as well as the librarians at the Royal Library in Stockholm and Haninge Kommunbibliotek.

I managed to identify and hunt down seven full versions of the story by the following translators:
“Kappan”; Peterson, Karl Erik; 1889
“Kapprocken”; unknown translator; 1889
“Kappan”; Nilsson, Nils-Åke;  1946
“Kappan”; Andrae, Staffan; 1959
“Överrocken”; Nilsson, Sture; 1985
“Överrocken”; Fält, Erik; 1993
“Kappan”; Lindgren, Stefan; 2010

There seem to be two basic approaches to translations: source-oriented and target-oriented. Simply put, it is the difference between bringing the reader to the text or the text to the reader.

Notably, the two translations from 1889 are not from the Russian original but from German and French translations and seem to have been done independently as demonstrated by their completely different vocabulary and syntax. The first Swedish translation directly from Gogol’s Russian was Nils-Åke Nilsson’s work. After that, only Staffan Andrae seems to have reached for a non-Russian (German in his case) source as the vantage point for his work.

Most of the translations seem to gravitate toward target-orientation. Russian terms such as currency (копеечными/kopeechnymi), a well-known statue (Фальконетова монумента/Falkonetova monumenta), and civil servants’ titles (капитан-исправник/kapitan-ispravnik) are consistently modified by the translators to make sense to the foreign reader. Also, many sentences are routinely re-arranged in order to make them easier on the Swedish eye. Having said that, I observe that over time, the translations become increasingly accurate and increasingly source-oriented.

Two items stand out in this regard. Staffan Andrae’s translation effectively does away with all gogolian flavour and chops the text up to short and poignant phrases in contrast to Gogol’s winding phrases. Erik Fält’s, on the other hand, preserves the both the vocabulary and the idiosyncratic syntax of Nicolai Gogol and seems to be the most loyal to the source. As an example, a sentence in the Russian original, which contains 210 words separated by 37 commas, 3 hyphens, and 3 semi-colons, but only one period in the very end is offered in a similar single-sentence format by Fält (13 commas, 3 hyphens, and 3 semi-colons) and Lindgren (21 commas, 3 hyphens), but a whopping 15 sentences by Staffan Andrae (a mere 5 commas).  

What is interesting is that, although the post-1946 translations often differ significantly from one another, they all seem to connect to Nilsson’s. Unusual concepts that were first introduced by Nilsson routinely re-appear in at least one of the subsequent translations whereas virtually none have been carried over to the more modern translations from the 19^th century versions. Nilsson seems therefore to have set a standard for The Overcoat in the Swedish language. His is also the most widely reproduced translation in new editions issued by a number of publishers. Furthermore, a Swedish schoolbook (“Enhvar sin egen lärare”) from 1893 as well as a news article from 1926, mention the novella as “Kapprocken” without any further explanation which indicates to me that in this era the book was widely known to the general public under that title. Nilsson called his translation “Kappan” which today is the generally accepted name, despite some translators’ choice to apply the title “Överrocken”. This further strengthens my conclusion that Nilsson’s translation should be considered the benchmark for Gogol’s story in Sweden. 

THE PHILOSOPHER THAT WOULDN'T SPEAK

Author: Sten Andersson
Year: 2015
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that “if a lion could speak, we would not understand it”. By this, he suggests that speech as a means of sharing information is not dependent on words and grammar but on a shared understanding of reality. In order to understand the lion, you need to be a lion, even if it would speak to you in Queen’s English. This is one of the key criticisms of anthropological research.

Perhaps it is also why it is so difficult for us to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We are not Wittgenstein and we do not understand what it is like to be him. While his ideas have been dissected to protons over the years, fuelled by the regular portioning out previously unpublished texts carefully curated by the guardians of his legacy, proper full-size biographies of his entire life have remained scarce.

Enter Sten Andersson, Doctor of Sociology and the translator of a catalogue of philosophical and sociological books. He presents us with an alternative and rather irreverent view of the great thinker in the voluminous monograph “Filosofen som inte ville tala” (not available in English but a rough translation would read “The Philosopher That Wouldn’t Speak”).

Andersson portrays a deeply troubled man constantly on the run from his overbearing parents, his family wealth, his sexuality, his inability to forge friendships, from Vienna, Cambridge, and Norway, and, most of all, his own intellect. His acuity of mind coupled with his pathological inability to grasp social code, made him an insufferable figure to most around him. And yet, there was something about him that commanded respect and submission; even from scholars as great as Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore.

Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge at a most fortuitous time. The massive success and swift progress of natural science during the 19^th century had influenced many academic disciplines, including philosophy. Bertrand Russell had recently published his groundbreaking Principles of Mathematics which had laid the foundation to a new branch of philosophy; analytic philosophy. It posits that only conclusions that can be proven (logically or empirically) carry a satisfactory degree of universal truth. It was largely a reaction to the Hegelian world order that had dominated Western philosophy for the past century. Russell was the standard bearer of a fresh and snowballing movement in British academia.

All this made the ideal backdrop for a young and aweless Wittgenstein, who was a student of engineering in Manchester at the time. Impressed by Russell’s work, he went up to Cambridge and, uninvited and without an appointment, knocked on Russell’s door demanding to speak to the Professor. But not to learn from him. Oh no, that was not Ludwig’s way. He had come to inform the great master about why his approach was faulty and how Wittgenstein alone could fix it. His arrogance only got worse from there and as a reader, I sometimes laughed and felt shivers down my spine at the same time from his maladroit antics.  

So what about the biography per se? To be honest, it is not brilliant. It is obvious that Andersson has a sea of knowledge that he wants to fit into the book but it seems to me he still has not figured out how to organise it. The result is a 700 pages long monster that could easily have been reduced to 400 or 500 pages by doing away with repetitions, unnecessarily long descriptions, frequent rabbit holes, and tedious musings. Chapter titles often do not correspond to their content, and several chapters bring up the same episodes or arguments. Linguistically, I find it ironic that a book about a philosopher of language would be written in such uninspiring, messy and colloquial Swedish.  Norstedts, being one of the leading publishing houses in Sweden, should have been able to produce a better editor for an effort as important as Andersson’s. I was not altogether surprised to see that the book, which was first published in 2013, has not been translated into English. If it ever will be, it needs to see considerable improvements.

With all that said, “Filosofen som inte ville tala” remains an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most legendary thinkers in the history of philosophy and I enjoyed it thoroughly despite its weaknesses. I feel that I have obtained a significantly deeper understanding of the complexity of Wittgenstein’s person and his painful life struggle.

But most importantly, I learned that Wittgenstein, fond as he was of hot cocoa and foreign to alcoholic beverages, was not, as is famously claimed by Dr Bruce from Woolamaloo University, in fact a beery swine.

Reading in foreign languages

”Books should always be read in their original language” is something I often hear from book lovers who speak more than one language. Though I am not entirely convinced that this is true (I may return to this issue in a later post), I thought it might be helpful to dwell a moment on the art of reading texts in languages that are not one's mother tongue.

Whether you find that you need to read a book in a foreign language because it is not available in yours or you choose to voluntarily challenge yourself, there are a few things that I have found help me to not only work my way through foreign texts but moreover have a good time doing it. In this post, I focus on languages that one is not fluent in. To most of you who read this post, English will be a second language that you feel quite comfortable with. But if you took two years of Spanish in high school and have had no exposure to the language since, you may find some of the below thoughts relevant.

Before I get to my advice, I would like to share a little experiment I did the other day in preparation for this post. I gave my wife a simple text (212 words) in her native language but where I had replaced 25 words with native-sounding but completely nonsensical made-up words. I asked her to read the text and then tell me, in general terms, what it was about. She could not do it. The 25 words that she did not know trumped her understanding of the 187 words she did understand. I then changed the text to put blanks instead of the words I had made up. Now she understood the text perfectly well. My point here is that the brain will focus on what it does not understand first, and what it does understand later. It can easily fill in blanks (no information), but when the empty spaces are occupied (unintelligible information) it causes a tilt in the system.

So on that backdrop, here are five pieces of advice for readers of books in foreign languages.

1. Don’t be afraid! It is easy to be taken aback by a wall of words which at first glance seem impenetrable. Maybe you have sometimes read the first two or three sentences of a book and realised you have not understood anything so you put it away from you with a depressed conclusion that the text is beyond your reach. My advice is, do not fear. The text is not your enemy that you need to conquer or die trying. Try instead to see the text as a friend that gives you clues to the story. Approach it with curiosity and love instead of awe and suspicion.
2. Don’t stop! We commonly focus on what we do not understand and take what we do understand for granted. If you read a text and understand only half of the words, you are therefore likely to discard the whole text while in reality you have understood as much as you have not without noticing it, like my wife did. With some imagination and power of deduction you will soon realise that you can actually make out most of the message even though you do not understand all the words. My advice is, keep going. Sooner or later you will find that key word that explains the entire setting or plot. You will stumble upon a phrase that makes what you have just read make sense. Do not go back and re-read the same sentence one hundred times. Keep pushing forward and remind yourself that it is perfectly fine to understand only the main outlines of a chapter.
3. Don’t overuse the dictionary! If you are used to reading in your native language you will also be used to understanding practically every word you encounter. If you, like me, like to look things up in a dictionary or Wikipedia you will sometimes pause your reading to go down some rabbit hole triggered by a term, name, event, or concept that the author has mentioned and that you realise you do not know enough about. If you are reading a book in a different language you will have to stop doing this. If you try to look up every word you do not understand your reading will become unbearably tedious and spasmodic. My advice is, if a word you do not know appears more than twice on the same page, you must look it up. If a word appears more than twice in the same chapter, you may look it up. If a word does neither of the above, you never look it up. Of course, exceptions could be made for words that from context can be understood to be extremely important and which could be looked up despite not appearing very often. Speaking of context, understanding a word from context counts as understanding. Do not look up words you already understand just to reassure yourself. Trust your instincts!
4. Read out loud! When trying to take in complex information make use of as many of your senses as you can to help you. One way of doing this is to read portions of the text out loud. It will force you to pay attention to intonation and punctuation and it will give your brain the opportunity to learn more about the text by not only seeing it but also hearing it, which is the way the brain is used to normally processing language. Most of us speak/listen to language much more often than we read/write it. My advice is, read a paragraph here and there out loud to yourself. You might notice that even though you still do not know the meaning of any more words than you would reading it silently, there is a chance you will understand the general message of the sentences better. I have also noticed that when I feel stuck and re-read a paragraph or two that I have not understood an iota of out loud, I not only understand those paragraphs better but also the following ones after I have returned to reading in silence. Still, if after re-reading a paragraph out loud you still do not follow, advice #2 above applies.
5. Summarise! I have noticed that I sometimes concentrate on the words more than on the story. Especially when I follow my own advice to read out loud. It happens that I pay so much attention to my pronunciation that I forget what I am reading about. My advice is, take some time at regular intervals to recap what you have just read just to remind yourself of the story. The end of each chapter is a natural place for this exercise. Also, when you pick up the book after a break, begin by recapping the story so far before you start the next chapter. Try to evoke pictures, feelings, sounds, and smells. Everything is easier to understand if you are familiar with the context.

I hope that some of these points will prove valuable to you. My only claim to authority in the field is that I speak four languages fluently and can speak and read in another three which I from time to time try to do, as will be evident as this blog develops.

Good luck with your reading!