THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

Author: Salman Rushdie
Year: 1999
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

Not long ago I found myself in a conversation with a friend on the subject of Salman Rushdie. She confessed with the charming candour which is the privilege of the truly well-read, that although she had cultivated a respectable level of acquaintance with post-colonial literature, she had not as much as brushed against a single page of Rushdie’s writing. My own first encounter with the author’s name was in 1989 when ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, a bitter old fart with a singularly unamused temperament, issued a fatwa, a vengeful prize on Rushdie’s head, thinly veiled as a religious obligation.

I was then thirteen years old and recall* that Sweden’s indignation, apart from condemning the cleric’s barbarous decree, was triggered by the meek response by the Swedish Academy, which is the college of intellectuals who, among other duties, elect the yearly Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Some years later, at the questionable intellectual maturity expected from an Upper Secondary School student, I finally came across the book that had vexed the ayatollah to the point where he reduced himself to a petulant child: The Satanic Verses. I bought it, read it, and I loved it.

Those acquainted with my reading habits, will be aware that I am a most unfaithful reader. Even with the authors I profess to adore, I rarely commit to more than one or two titles before curiosity of new ideas and new minds fling me onto the hunting path for the next name. Rushdie, however, is one of the rare exceptions of writers that I gladly read again and again. After conversing with my friend on the subject, I was overcome by a craving for Rushdie’s writing. I reached for “Marken under hennes fötter” (“The Ground Beneath her Feet”) which had been collecting dust in by bookcase long enough and merely a few pages in concluded, that it was bound to meet with all of my expectations.

Rushdie is one of the most erudite writers in the post-war era who comfortably commands the particulars of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, music, literature, and art among many other fields. To imbibe his prose is to experience that rare sensation of learning while one admires, and admiring while one rejoices. Not merely a man of infinite knowledge, but equally importantly of a magical ability to craft his characters and tell his story.

“Marken under hennes fötter” dramatises the instability of identity in a postcolonial world where the ground beneath the self is perpetually shifting. Through the intertwined lives of the introvert artist Ormus Cama, the extrovert diva Vina Apsara, and the melancholic observer Rai, the novel stages how colonial histories and global cultural flows fracture, hybridise, and creolise personal identities.

Ormus Cama embodies the diasporic artist who cannot be contained by national or cultural boundaries. Born in Bombay yet perpetually oriented toward elsewhere, he channels songs from a parallel world, suggesting that his creativity itself is transnational and borderless. His identity is never rooted in one cultural context but always fluid and in motion, making him emblematic of the postcolonial subject who finds both possibility and alienation in cosmopolitanism.

Vina Apsara is constructed as both a person and a mythic icon. Her fame and sexual charisma transform her into a commodity of global culture, consumed through images and stories. For her, identity is a performance staged across multiple audiences, from India across Europe to the Americas, each demanding a different version of her. She epitomises the postcolonial predicament of being seen not as a coherent self but as a projection of the desires of others, whether they stem from colonial fantasies, mythic archetypes, or pedestrian clickbait journalism.

Rai, the narrator-photographer, wrestles with identity through mediation. As a Parsi in India and later as an exile in the West, he experiences marginality and unbelonging, which he manages by constructing narratives and images. His photographs reveal that identity in the postcolonial context is always framed, never raw, captured through lenses shaped by history, politics, and personal longing, personalised, although not necessarily internalised.

Together, these three figures show that in Rushdie’s postcolonial universe, identity is not essence but fabrication: a shifting collage of myths, histories, and performances, precariously balanced on unstable ground. Rushdie’s depiction of fluid, fabricated identities resonates with Anthony Giddens’ account of identity in late modernity. For Giddens, the self is no longer grounded in tradition but must be “reflexively” constructed through ongoing choices, narratives, and relationships. Similarly, Rushdie’s characters live without essentialist anchors, improvising selves from fractured cultural inheritances and unstable geographies. Where Giddens emphasizes the individual’s responsibility to “keep a coherent story going,” Rushdie complicates this with myth and tragedy, suggesting that personal identity, though fabricated, is also subject to forces—earthquakes, media spectacles, colonial legacies—that resist individual control.

By bowing to Rushdie’s compelling argument and acknowledging the malleability of the terrain wherein we so desperately try to set our roots and feign stability, we must realise that the ground is moving not only under her feet, but also under our own.

It is my humble proposition, that the sole reason that the Nobel Prize in Literature has not yet found its way into Salman Rushdie’s prize cabinet, which already contains the Booker Prize, The PEN Golden Award, The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, several honorary doctorates, and a knighthood, is the Swedish Academy’s embarrassing history with the author. It is not unreasonable to suspect, that bestowing this honour on him now would bring back to the limelight the obeisance to the Iranian ayatollah as unbecoming to men of taste as their silence was to men of wit. The Academy’s recent scandals surely reinforce their hesitation. How much more splendid then, to seize the occasion to right an unfortunate wrong and to save itself from the eternal disgrace of having ignored one of the finest writers of our age.

 

* I furthermore recall Margaret Thatcher saying in an interview that she did not even find the book particularly well-written.

BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY

Author: Helen Fielding
Year: 1998 (1996)
Publisher: Egmont Richter AB
Language: Swedish (translator Carla Wiberg)

Within the rich treasure trove of Polish cinema, there exists one movie* that has reached cult status in Poland yet is little known beyond its borders, owing most probably to the language barrier. Its hapless hero is a gentleman of forty-nine, a scholar of linguistics whose exquisite sensitivity would, in our present age of classifications, doubtless be catalogued under the autism spectrum. Change is to him unbearable, grammar a battlefield he is prepared to die on, interaction with others an infernal struggle, and the world as a whole a chaotic performance to which he seems to have tragically misplaced the script.

The Polish public, whose sense of humour I flatter myself to understand, has seen fit to classify this movie as a comedy, and indeed it was under that cheerful pretext that I was persuaded to watch it some years ago. To me, however, it was a dark manifestation of a deeply troubled person’s hysterical attempts to stay afloat in a social environment that he perceives as intrusive, incomprehensible, and intolerably cruel. Where others discovered wit, I saw only torment. The protagonist’s suffering was so absolute, so relentless, that it banished comedy much like thunderclouds banish the sun.

My encounter with Helen Fielding’s widely acclaimed novel “Bridget Jones dagbok” (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) summoned a very similar sensation. Although, according to the book cover, Nick Hornby touted it as the product of “a comedy genius,” and Salman Rushdie assured us it was of such brilliance that “even men will laugh”, I found myself reading not with amusement but with a lump of lead lodged in the pit of my being.

This novel follows the form of the private diary of Bridget Jones, a single, professional woman in her thirties, navigating the perils of her London existence. She struggles with extremely low self-esteem, unhealthy body ideals, elevated consumption of nicotine and alcohol, and a destructive attitude to relationships with her family, but first and foremost, with men. The diary itself is sometimes confessional, sometimes incoherent, mostly emotional. She writes when drunk, she scribbles when under stress, and occasionally her notes are inexplicably absent altogether.

Bridget’s angst bleeds through every page, and even the misunderstandings, antics, and pitfalls, that most promise comic relief are blackened by Bridget’s palpable misery and obvious need for urgent help. One begins to wonder, not about Bridget, who is after all a fictional character, but about the curious cruelty of those who find amusement in her despair. To laugh at such anguish, however prettily disguised as comedy, seems less a tribute to wit than an indictment of empathy. As for me, the laughs were few and far between.

As a piece of literature, “Bridget Jones dagbok” also has some notable shortcomings. Born as a newspaper serial in The Independent before assuming the costume of a novel in 1996, it still bears the marks of its episodic parentage. One suspects that Bridget herself was created to critique the hysterical hunt for social conformity that many women in London seem to experience. Bridget is pressured to desperately chase careers, collect lovers, and amass party invitations, all the while betraying her own natural lazy self. This critique, if indeed it was at all intended, might have gleamed with sharper irony, had Fielding bestowed upon Bridget some genuine passion incompatible in its absurdity or even nobility with society’s demands.

And so, all things considered, the novel is not particularly well-written. The diary form, though not in itself problematic, demands a rigour of execution that Fielding too often falls short of. In the hands of a master, such intimacy can strike with devastating force as titles such as “The Color Purple” (see my review of April 2020) or “Doctor Glas” (see my review of August 2023) testify to, but here the illusion falters. Whether from the remnants of its serial inception, the imperfections of translation, or the author’s ineptitude, the pact with the reader is repeatedly broken. A drunk woman may well stumble in speech, but she does not misspell her diary to mimic her slurred diction. Long conversational meanderings are rarely transcribed in full, in particular if the writer is trying to make a completely unrelated point. And when the dinner collapses into the drain, and one is scrambling to rescue whatever can still be salvaged, one does not pause mid-calamity to jot it down.

I understand that these inconsistencies were committed in the name of comedy, yet they betray the cruel truth that the epistolary novel is a treacherous form, mastered by few and mishandled by many. Indeed, I hazard the heresy that this is one of those rare occasions when the movie, at least in the sense of a comedy, eclipses the book.

 

 * ”Dzień świra” from 2002, directed by Marek Koterski.

SOKRATES

Author: Louis-André Dorion
Year: 2006 (2005)
Publisher: Alhambras Pocketencyklopedi
Language: Swedish (translator Jan Stolpe)

It was one of those golden late Friday afternoons in spring, when the very air seems to dictate idleness, that my supervisor and I were walking hurriedly through the corridors of the Department of Social Anthropology at Free School Lane hoping to not be late for the weekly senior seminar. We arrived just in time to spare ourselves the indignity of bursting in on the introductory remarks of the usually highly regarded external guest and mumbling our apologies while trying to hunt down some empty seats, which would invariably be located in the very centre of the room. As I was still catching my breath after the brisk walk, my supervisor leaned over to me and said “Listen carefully to this man. I don’t agree with a word he says, but given the assumptions he makes, his conclusions are absolutely brilliant.”

Now, almost two decades later, his words come back to me as I read Louis-André Dorion’s short but useful introduction to one of the ancient world’s most famous thinkers: Socrates.

In a famous event in Socrates’ life, a friend of his asks the Oracle of Delphi who the wisest man in Greece is. The Oracle, with that mischievous cruelty peculiar to divinities, indicates Socrates. On hearing this, Socrates, knowing very well that men parading their wisdom usually possess little more than gilded ignorance, concludes that the single thing that makes his wisdom superior to theirs is that he is aware of his lack thereof. “I know that I know nothing”*. Armed with this paradox, he sets off to enlighten his fellow Athenians by convincing them that they, too, know very little.

His foremost instrument was the dialogue, famously reproduced (and undoubtedly embellished) by his student Plato, and he is generally credited with establishing the most inconvenient of arts: critical thinking. This process of dialectic reasoning, whereby questions and answers in concert lead to the truth, demands above all else, definitions; for if words are not universalised they remain woefully parochial, and no philosophy can thrive in a provincial setting. This type of truth-seeking by dialogue is known as “elenchus” or simply The Socratic Method. A century later, Aristotle distilled this principle down to his famous syllogism** “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”

The ability to disentangle opinion from reason was in essence the whole of Socrates’ mission. And the lesson my supervisor wanted me to learn from the guest lecturer at Cambridge. Socrates is sometimes thought of as a midwife, possibly inspired by his mother’s profession, who helps to deliver other men’s logical conclusions that they may not have been able to reach without him, but which had dwelled unrecognised inside of them all the time. By this analogy, Socrates would never place his own thoughts in the heads of others, but merely help them clarify their own. This would be consistent with three important points Socrates is claimed to have made about himself:

1.      His famous declaration that he knows nothing. If you have no thoughts of your own, you have nothing to put inside someone else’s head;

2.      His insistence that he never tutored or lectured anyone. If you know nothing, you will be hard pressed to deposit any knowledge into someone else’s mind;

3.      His claim that his activity was commanded by the gods. Since the Oracle had proclaimed him the wisest of all men, it is implied that keeping this wisdom to oneself would be inconsistent with the will of the gods.

Dorion makes the interesting observation that Socrates seems to have played both midwife and prosecutor depending on the level of vanity in his victim. The modest man he offered gentle assistance, coaxing from him thoughts he scarcely suspected himself capable of possessing. To the self-satisfied loudmouth he administered a more invigorating treatment puncturing his inflated ego with surgical precision. Curiously, the tender midwife-inspired Socrates does not appear until comparatively late in Plato’s writing, which leads Dorion to the conclusion that the Athenians during Socrates’ lifetime may not have perceived him quite as noble and benevolent as the idealised image that posterity has created of him might suggest.  

Few writers could be more qualified than Louis-André Dorion to write an introduction to Socrates. He is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Montreal specialising in Socrates’ dialectic refutation and the Socratic writings of Xenofon, second only to Plato in recording Socrates’ life and deeds. Normally pocket-sized introductions to ideas or celebrities offer little more than the most conventional and uninspired basics. Yet Dorion being the enthusiast incapable of mediocrity, cannot help putting some well-needed meat on the bones, turning this modestly dimensioned volume into something as refreshingly surprising as a digest that actually requires digesting.  

* The correct quote from Plato is actually “For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”
** Not to be confused with Hegelian dialectics

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Year: 2004 (2001)
Publisher: Phoenix
Language: English (translator Lucia Graves)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel “The Shadow of the Wind” is by any definition a wonderous and pleasant read. The writer takes the reader gently by the hand and carefully leads them into the world of intrigue, wonder, love, and friendship. But more than a novel, it is an elegant instrument in the disciplinary order of memory, literature, and identity. It is not simply a narrative about forgotten books and troubled writers, but a study of the circulation of power through language, bodies, and historical discourse. “The archive” as Michel Foucault would put it. Beneath its seductive aesthetics lies a matrix of panopticon and confession, wherein the subject is formed not through autonomy but through the interiorisation of surveillance and the repetition of fate as the narrative form.

The story is set in Barcelona shortly after the war as Francisco Franco’s falangist regime is still reeling from the post-war isolation and responding, as dictators do, with tightened control and brutal oppression. The protagonist Daniel Sempere follows his father to a place in Barcelona which even to the Barcelonians is mostly unknown: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Daniel is encouraged to pick out a book and become its guardian. He picks “The Shadow of the Wind” by Julian Carax, a name of whom he had thitherto been completely oblivious. Or rather, it picks him. Daniel’s relationship with the book, and his relentless search for its elusive author, will come to define his fate.  

At the centre of Zafón’s novel is the relationship triangle between Daniel Sempere, Julian Carax, and Inspector Fumero within a closed system of power. The narrative traces Daniel’s gradual descent into the life of Carax, but it is not simply the tale of a reader discovering a writer. It is the slow process by which Daniel is made intelligible as a subject through pursuit, confession, and surveillance under the persistent gaze of Fumero, the novel’s repressive figure of formal authority and informal malice.

Carax’ role in the novel less that of a living being as that of a dossier to be reconstructed through fragments, testimonies, and deduction. His life is retrieved through the operations of the archive, and his identity is constituted through gossip, rumours, letters, and third-party accounts

I could not help but read this novel through the lens of Michel Foucault’s power analysis, particularly as outlined in his groundbreaking book “Discipline and Punish”. Foucault names the shift from act to document as a crucial feature of disciplinary power, and Carax is the prototype: not a man, but a readable subject whose every gesture is translated into signs of deviance or resistance. For a relentless oppressor, every liberal act will look like insubordination. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Daniel, in seeking to uncover Carax, gradually assumes his narrative coordinates, becoming an object of observation himself. First for the reader. Then for Inspector Fumero.

The sadistic Inspector Fumero functions as the visible face of disciplinary violence. He is not merely a villain, but the embodiment of sovereign and bureaucratic power entwined—a fusion of spectacle and surveillance. Like the Foucaultian executioner-turned-warden, Fumero is a relic of an older, bloodier regime of control who nevertheless adapts seamlessly to the more modern modes of tracking and silencing dissidence. His obsession with Carax and, by extension, with Daniel, is not driven by personal vendetta alone, but by the imperative to restore narrative closure, to erase anomaly, to close the gap between deviance and punishment.

In this respect, Fumero finds a soulmate in Victor Hugo’s Javert from “Les Misérables” (see review from September 2022), who puts all original thinking and feelings aside in favour of becoming a dispassionate tool in the service of the system. Unlike Javert however, who submitted completely to the system and equated his personal value with it, Fumero makes the system a tool for his own personal campaign of vengeance and hatred.

In this triangular structure, Daniel becomes the hinge on which the door between the past grievance that pits Julian Carax and Inspector Fumero against each other, and the final showdown in the post-war present swings. Through his pursuit of Carax, he does not merely learn a hidden history; he is inserted into a chain of substitution. His desire to know becomes indistinguishable from the mechanisms of control that produced Carax’s erasure. That Fumero begins to pursue Daniel with the same fervour once reserved for Carax is no accident. Penelope Aldaya and Beatriz Aguilar, the love interests of Julian Carax and Daniel Sempere respectively, embody the parallelism between the two men, separated by generations yet united by discursive and biographical repetition.

This is why the novel’s long expository chapters, usually delivered through rather verbose confessions, feel less like storytelling and more like processing. The characters recount their pasts not as memory but as evidence. Structured, ordered, and precise. These passages resemble info-dumps more than literary flow, and to me manifest the transition from personal fate to archive. Zafón's narrative, as Foucault predicts, for all its emotional resonance, cannot escape the form of the report or the disciplinary file.

“The Shadow of the Wind” can, or maybe even must, be read in light of these mechanisms.

VOLOMARI VOLOTINEN'S FIRST WIFE AND ASSORTED OTHER OLD ITEMS

Author: Arto Paasilinna
Year: 2013 (1994)
Publisher: Brombergs förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Camilla Frostell)

A 2018 report by British researcher and educator Stephen Follows reveals that around 52% of all movies produced in the US and Europe so far in the 21^st century were categorised as drama, with comedy ringing in at 28% in second place, well ahead of other genres such as thrillers (12%), romance and action (11% each), and horror (10%).*

In literature a similar pattern emerges. Drama, thrillers and crime, and romance dominate the lists of bestsellers. Yet comedy is nowhere to be found.**

Why are there so few funny novels?

One possible explanation is that, unlike suspense and romance, which are largely propelled by plot, comedy, much like erotica, depends more heavily on the mode of narration. In this genre, the ‘how’ often matters more than the ‘what’. The effect lies not in events themselves but in their delivery. As a result, some might argue that such writing places fewer demands on events, relying instead on tone, timing, and voice to achieve its impact, making it infinitely more demanding to write.

Arto Paasilinna is frequently cited as a master of comic fiction and his books are hugely popular all over the Nordics and beyond. The title of one of his novels, “Volotinens första fru och annat gammalt” (“Volomari Volotinen's First Wife and Assorted Other Old Items”), is perfectly hilarious. While, as will become evident, accurately capturing the contents of the book, it nods playfully to an old, albeit arguably misogynistic, adage about women and ageing. I was understandably brimming with anticipation when I began reading, eagerly expecting to snort-laugh my way through it. After all, I have laughed out loud more than once at other books by other authors, though few and far between.

Set during the height of the Cold War, the story follows Volomari Volotinen, a Finnish insurance investigator, and eccentric collector of historical oddities. His pursuits, ostensibly harmless, soon entangle him in a series of situations, some of which will even have political ramifications for Finland’s delicately balanced relationship with the USSR. His wife Laura, twenty years his senior, ever so loyal and at times unexpectedly resourceful, sometimes needs to step in and assist when Volomari goes overboard in his enthusiasm.

Though presented as a novel, the book reads more like a series of loosely connected short stories, unified by recurring protagonists rather than a continuous narrative arc. Each chapter typically centres on a single object of interest, Volomari’s latest fixation, serving as both its title and narrative anchor. The episodes are largely self-contained, with storylines that begin and conclude within the bounds of each chapter.

Unfortunately, I was forced to conclude that the book falls short for precisely the reasons outlined earlier. While Paasilinna scrambles to construct humorous scenarios for his protagonist, he lacks the esprit and comic precision necessary to render them genuinely amusing. The episodes themselves, while potentially entertaining as anecdotes shared over a family dinner, are held back by a delivery that feels mundane and uninspired. The result is a collection of stories that rarely transcend their artificiality, leaving the reader more aware of the author’s hand than immersed in the humour.

What begins as an endearing portrayal of Volomari gradually gives way to something more unsettling. As the narrative progresses, his enthusiasm for collecting turns into obsession, and his antics shift from amusing to awkward. Far from the goofy but likeable nerd, Volomari emerges as a calculating and opportunistic manipulator, willing to exploit both his professional position and the trust of others to acquire objects that would otherwise remain out of his reach. His transformation bears an eerie similarity to that of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey.

On the whole, the reading experience proved underwhelming. The situations in which Volomari finds himself lack the absurdity required to elicit genuine farce, while the narration falls short of the wit and precision needed to provoke sustained amusement. The spontaneous, laugh-out-loud moments brilliantly delivered by comic masters like Jaroslav Hašek, Sir Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and to a certain extent Mikael Niemi, Tom Sharpe, P.G. Wodehouse, and Jerome K. Jerome, in “Volotinens första fru och annat gammalt” are, regrettably, entirely absent.

 

* Some movies have more than one label, which is why the percentages do not amount to 100.

** Instead, fantasy and sci-fi make up almost 25% of books published but seem to be far down the movie genre list.

THE SHACK

Author: William P. Young
Year: 2009 (2007)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Nowa Proza
Language: Polish (translator Anna Reszka)

William P. Young’s novel “Chata” (“The Shack”) has left a remarkable impression on countless readers around the world, offering a story of pain, hope, and reconciliation with God that resonates with the spiritual struggles of many Christians. Blending narrative fiction with theological reflection, Young’s book strives to explore the deepest wounds of the human heart while grappling with the mystery of divine love. Although its popularity is understandable, “Chata” raises serious questions about its theological vision, especially its portrayal of the Holy Trinity and its approach to the existence of evil. While it provides moments of comfort and emotional healing, its treatment of these profound mysteries may leave some readers with a distorted or overly sentimental view of Christian belief.

The story follows Mack, a husband and father whose family life is torn apart by a horrifying tragedy. Years later, still gripped by grief and bitterness, Mack receives a mysterious invitation to return to the scene of his deepest pain; a secluded shack in the Oregon wilderness. There, he encounters three mysterious figures who claim to be the three Persons of God, drawing Mack into a transformative, personal conversation about suffering, forgiveness, and the very nature of God. The novel unfolds as a journey of spiritual healing, in which Mack confronts his questions about God’s justice, the problem of evil, and his own ability to forgive.

Young’s central literary approach is to render the idea of the Trinity in vivid and surprising human form. God the Father is represented as an African American woman, the Holy Spirit as an ethereal Asian woman, and Jesus as a Middle Eastern carpenter in modern attire. This imaginative device is clearly meant to jolt the reader out of conventional images of God while at the same time making divine love more accessible to an everyday person like Mack. There is a legitimate pastoral aim here: to remind readers that God is not an old white man with a beard, and that divine compassion transcends cultural stereotypes.

However, this narrative strategy risks more confusion than clarity. Christian tradition, both in Catholicism and in many other denominations, carefully maintains that the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct, co-equal, consubstantial, and beyond human categories, even as they fully reveal themselves in Jesus Christ. The Father, strictly speaking, is not incarnate and does not take on a human form other than through the Son who became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Depicting the Father as a human woman, however well-intentioned, can mislead readers into thinking of God the Father as having a distinct incarnate identity apart from the Son, blurring fundamental Christian doctrines, and devaluing the great wonder and mystery of God taking on human form and walking among us as in the Person of Jesus Christ. Similarly, personifying the Holy Spirit as a visible, embodied woman may imply a separate incarnation, which goes beyond anything in Scripture or orthodox tradition. While these literary choices are meant to be symbolic, their impact can easily sow confusion about one of the deepest and most carefully articulated doctrines in Christian faith*.

In addition to its Trinitarian problems, the novel’s treatment of theodicy also deserves careful scrutiny. Mack’s personal suffering is horrific and deeply relatable: how can an all-powerful, all-loving God permit such overwhelming tragedy? In a pastoral sense, Young does well to allow Mack to voice anger and pain, refusing to trivialise the brutal reality of loss. That aspect of the book has truly resonated with people who have sought comfort in God in their own tragedies but felt abandoned.

Yet the book’s answers to the problem of evil remain, in the end, rather flat. Young’s God seems to explain away suffering in terms of human freedom and the necessity of love, but without acknowledging the truly terrifying weight of certain evils or the long history of theological wrestling over innocent suffering. The characters offer reassurances about divine love that are emotionally comforting, but they fall short of addressing the mystery of why a good God needs to permit suffering in the first place. The Church has developed a rigorous and sometimes painfully intricate theodicy that respects the tragedy of evil while clinging to hope. Much of that complexity is ignored in this book in favour of a warm, reassuring, cuddly message which, while consoling, may leave deeper questions frustratingly unexamined.

In fairness, “Chata” does succeed in reaching people who might never crack open a catechism or a theology text, which I suppose is the main purpose of the book. Its narrative has drawn many wounded souls into asking questions about God they might otherwise avoid. For that reason, from a churchly perspective it should not be dismissed entirely; there is genuine pastoral power in its language of intimacy, mercy, and healing. In particular, the novel’s consistent message of humility, unconditional love, inclusion, and boundless forgiveness stands as a great virtue. Many modern Christians, who often harbour bigotry, prejudice, and hard-heartedness in their faith lives, could learn a great deal by contemplating this element of Young’s story. The book’s passionate insistence on God’s universal love is a welcome antidote to the cold legalism, moralism, and tribalism that can creep into contemporary Christian practice.

Even so, those strengths cannot erase the book’s real theological shortcomings. Its confusion about the Trinity, its oversimplified theodicy, and its romanticised spirituality all call for a prudent, critical reading, preferably supplemented with sound theological guidance. For all its emotional resonance, “Chata” remains, in the end, an oversimplified, romanticised, and somewhat naïve vision of God’s engagement with human tragedy. Readers who embrace its consolations should do so with discernment and an awareness of the rich, complex intellectual heritage that Christian tradition continues to offer beyond the walls of Young’s fictional shack.

*Although admittedly, this is no worse than the all-too-common depiction of God as an old white man with a beard.

DOCUMENTED MIRACLES

Author: Micael Grenholm
Year: 2018
Publisher: Sjöbergs förlag
Language: Swedish

When I was but a tender sapling of a lad, my parents bought two books for me which I read over and over again. One told of phantoms and haunted castles, the other of marvellous beasts and monsters. Though a dim candle of reason flickered within my youthful mind and deep down I knew that the stories were not true, I willingly surrendered to the tingling sensation of marvel and awe. Each chapter, each sighting, each ostensibly irrefutable testimony filled me with joy. I chose to believe so that each time I opened the books I could once more relive the sensation of wonder and amazement.

My sentiments were rather similar when I recently laid hands on Micael Grenholm’s “Dokumenterade mirakler” (not available in English but the title means “Documented Miracles”). I expected nothing more than a charming parade of more or less loosely connected coincidences, imaginative interpretations, far-fetched explanations, misunderstandings, and fabrications, all passed off as indisputable evidence of God’s existence. I was looking forward to an entertaining albeit inconsequential read.

Yet, once I began to peruse the pages, I discovered that the author’s aspirations were of a different order. The author sets forth to not only list miracles as he perceives them, but moreover to prove that they are a thing of the world of senses, and not stopping there, to establish a link to a specified miracle-worker.

Grenholm pays significant attention to defining the boundaries of his field, circumscribing the term ‘miracle’, and introducing concepts such as the Swedish acronyms VOTEB and VOTUB (Scientifically Inexplicable Health Recoveries After Prayer and Without Prayer respectively). With these terms planted into the reader’s mind, he proceeds to parading a succession of anecdotal yet curiously persuasive evidence in which the terminally ill rise from their beds, seemingly without any plausible medical explanation. Grenholm goes through remarkable pains to validate his material and cite his sources, and he manages to demonstrate that full restoration of health contrary to medical expectations indeed occurs and is perhaps less rare than one might think. Thus far, there is no controversy. Neither ancient nor modern medicine ever proclaimed itself infallible. Sometimes patients that are expected to get worse and even die, recover. Other times, patients who were expected to make a full recovery, perish. Medicine, like all sciences, is imperfect. That is why we continue to do research.

Grenholm’s enterprise becomes decidedly more obscure when he departs from the terra firma of facts and ventures forth into the mist-shrouded realm of philosophy. His chapters, to be sure, are nothing if not thorough, even admirably so, yet several of his arguments, upon closer scrutiny, warrant considerable doubt.

As but one example, Grenholm takes up arms against David Hume’s assertion that the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary must be the evidence that sustains it. Grenholm seems to disagree. To illustrate his criticism, he recounts the story of a famous actor who enrols at a high school to immerse himself into the role of a high school-student. When he tries to tell a classmate that he is indeed a Hollywood celebrity, she refuses to believe him. Nothing the actor says, can persuade her. Grenholm argues, that if the student had later wandered into a cinema and seen on the silver screen the very same actor play the part he claimed he would, it should suffice as proof of his claim. And as simple a thing as a movie, he says, can hardly be dignified with the title of “extraordinary evidence”.

In this argument, Grenholm unfortunately makes the mistake of conflating his aggregation levels. Despite having earlier exercised a scrupulous precision in defining his terms, here he treats the word “extraordinary” with a carelessness quite unworthy of his former diligence. “Extraordinary” in the philosophical sense, denotes that which lies outside the boundaries of a given system. In his example, all participants inhabit a world whose fundamental premise they share. They all agree on the existence of actors, movies, high school, and cinemas. They all operate within the same system. Thus, the actor’s confession, while unusual, cannot be called extraordinary in any rigorous sense and consequently requires no extraordinary evidence. Both claim and evidence are of the system.

If we would narrow the system down to the high school only, and create a closed universe of students, classmates, and liars, then both actor and cinema would be outside the system and thus considered an extraordinary piece of evidence in favour of an extraordinary claim.

Translated to miracles, we are transported to a system governed by the laws of nature and the claim of divine intervention is nothing less than a declaration of the supranatural trespassing on the natural I am sure Grenholm would agree with this proposition. If miracles are indeed extraordinary and unnatural, it stands to reason that the evidence to support their existence need also be extraordinary.  

My reasoning above certainly does not disprove the existence of miracles. I maintain that Grenholm’s case for the existence of miracles is strong. But statistically and scientifically unlikely as they are, there is little evidence that they are external to our system, and the connection between miracles and the Christian God still remains to be demonstrated.

In a way, it is quite impossible to leaf through the pages of “Dokumenterade mirakler” without one’s thoughts irresistibly straying to Dr Bonamy from Emile Zola’s novel “Lourdes” (see review from July 2019). Here we encounter the good doctor, a man of education so confident in his image of the incorruptible scientist, perched loftily upon a pedestal of unimpeachable rationality, meticulously chronicling the supposed miracles unfolding before him, all in the noble name of knowledge. And yet, on closer examination we see how deeply involved he is in the belief system, functioning, with a naïveté bordering on the tragic, as an unwitting instrument for the advancement of superstition.

In my personal view, proving the divine armed with the frail minds and limited equipment of humans, calibrated merely to navigate the dull harmonies of the natural world, is a task fit for fools. The Mount Everest of apologetic history is littered with the remains of those who have tried and succumbed before Micael Grenholm. Anshelm of Canterbury, Averroës, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Kurt Gödel… all had their go, and failed.

And so, it appears to me that using human faculties to understand God is like stacking bricks to build a tower to heaven. In truth, I suspect these grand endeavours reveal far less about the nature of God than they do about the fathomless depths of our own conceit.

 

PÈRE GORIOT

Author: Honoré de Balzac
Year: 1976 (1835)
Publisher: Czytelnik
Language: Polish (translator Tadeusz Zelenski-Boy)

Honoré de Balzac’s “Ojciec Goriot” (“Père Goriot”) is a haunting study of human motives in a society driven by ambition, status, and material gain. Beneath its realist detail lies a profound meditation on the tension between altruism and egoism, a tension that plays out through its central characters and constitutes an important literary contribution to the philosophical scrutiny of the theme by many thinkers before and after. Balzac's Paris is not merely a backdrop but a moral melting pot where love, sacrifice, and ambition merge.

Goriot himself represents an extreme form of altruism: a man who gives his wealth, his dignity, and ultimately his life for the happiness of his two daughters. He expects nothing in return, finding joy in their comfort, even as they abandon and exploit him.

The figure of Eugène de Rastignac provides the moral counterpoint to Goriot’s doomed idealism. A young provincial law student, Rastignac arrives in Paris dazzled by the glamour of the aristocracy and hungry for success, yet not initially corrupted. He is seduced by wealth, elegance, and power, but he does not abandon his principles lightly.

SPOILER ALERT

His relationship with Father Goriot acts as a moral anchor; in the old man’s quiet suffering, Rastignac perceives a kind of nobility absent from the salons and ballrooms he increasingly frequents. He cares for Goriot with genuine compassion, tending to him in his final decline, moved by a mixture of pity, affection, and admiration. For as long as Goriot lives, Rastignac resists the full embrace of ambition. He stands, if uneasily, in the moral space between selflessness and self-advancement.

But with Goriot’s death, that space collapses. The man who represented disinterested love and unwavering devotion is buried without ceremony, abandoned by his daughters, unmourned by the world he gave everything to. At his grave, something in Rastignac shifts. The city’s glittering façade no longer conceals its cruelty. It reveals it. What was once temptation now becomes strategy; what was once aspiration becomes a challenge. It is only after Goriot dies, and with him the last human bond that had tied Rastignac to an ethic of care, that the young man’s heart hardens. His infamous declaration “À nous deux maintenant!”is not simply a cry of ambition; it is a renunciation of sentiment, the moment he steps fully into the logic of Hobbesian egoism. The social world, as Hobbes imagined, is a battleground, and Rastignac, no longer restrained by affection or idealism, enters it with icy resolve.

This moral transformation is as disturbing as it is understandable. In the world Balzac depicts, those who cling to ideals are destroyed, while those who embrace calculation and self-interest survive, perhaps even flourish. And yet this flourishing is not without its own pathology. For Friedrich Nietzsche, values like altruism and self-sacrifice are symptoms of weakness, tools of the powerless to bind the strong. Yet the strength Rastignac gains is ambivalent. He wins power, but loses warmth. He becomes shrewd, but perhaps no longer fully human. Balzac neither condemns nor celebrates this metamorphosis; he simply records it, with cold precision.

The moral world of “Ojciec Goriot” becomes truly troubling when viewed through Nietzsche’s critique of altruism. For Nietzsche, values like self-sacrifice and humility are the product of a “slave morality”. Goriot’s relentless self-denial, his total subjugation to the will of his daughters, would appear to Nietzsche not as virtue but as a form of decadence; a renunciation of the will to power and of life itself. His daughters, who manipulate and discard him in pursuit of beauty, status, and influence, are closer to Nietzsche’s “strong” individuals, though without his corresponding ideal of the creative, life-affirming Übermensch. They are not admirable, but they are potent, and in their cold self-interest, they expose the fragility of Goriot’s love. Balzac neither endorses Nietzschean strength nor Goriot’s abjection; instead, he holds them both up to scrutiny, showing the horror of a world where moral weakness is punished and moral strength is dehumanizing.

What emerges from this interplay of philosophical ideas is not a simple moral lesson, but a tragic recognition of the contradictions at the heart of human life. Altruism, in its purest form, may be beautiful, but it is also profoundly vulnerable to exploitation. Egoism, on the other hand, offers power and success, but at the cost of empathy, connection, and moral clarity. Balzac seems to suggest that the moral ideals we inherit, whether from Kantian duty, Hobbesian realism, or Nietzschean egoism, cannot be cleanly applied to the mess of social life. Each contains truth, but none is sufficient. The novel ends not with resolution but with irony: Rastignac ascends, Goriot is buried alone, and the city looms indifferent and vast, its glittering promises secured only by the loss of innocence or the collapse of self.

In this way, “Ojciec Goriot” becomes not only a work of literary realism, but a philosophical drama or a parable of modernity in which love and power, virtue and strategy, collide with tragic inevitability. Balzac does not moralize; he exposes. His characters are not lessons but questions, and the answers they suggest are as disturbing as they are true.

 

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Year: 2021 (1864)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator Cecilia Borelius-Rohnström)

Some people choose to be unhappy. Not because they are doomed by fate or overwhelmed by circumstance, but because they cannot bear the vulnerability that joy and connection require. For these people, happiness feels like weakness, and love like exposure. The only emotion they feel safe expressing is resentment and their most reliable source of comfort is to distribute that unhappiness outward, like a contagion.

In “Anteckningar från ett källarhål” (“Notes from the Underground”), Fyodor Dostoevsky gives voice to one such man. The Underground Man, bitter, and obsessively self-conscious, lives in voluntary isolation, sharpening his cynicism and building elaborate justifications for his own misery. He is a man who has turned away from the world not because the world has rejected him, but because connection demands surrender, and surrender is unbearable.

He is not simply a man without love. He is a man who cannot tolerate being loved.

While the novel is often read as a philosophical precursor to existentialism, indeed Jean-Paul Sartre cited it as an influence, what makes Dostoevsky’s short but dense work so powerful is its psychological clarity. The Underground Man is not merely a symbol or a theoretical construct; he is a living case study in emotional dysfunction. His life is defined by a profound inability, and ultimately an outright refusal, to love or be loved.

This is not because love is unavailable to him, but because love requires vulnerability, surrender, and an openness to grace, all things he equates with humiliation. What emerges from “Anteckningar från ett källarhål” is a portrait of a deeply damaged personality: a man whose need for control and pride is so consuming that it obliterates his capacity for intimacy. The ultimate incel, if you wish.

“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness,”* the Underground Man proclaims early in the novel. This diagnosis of himself is remarkably prescient. The character’s hyperconsciousness, his habit of analysing every motive, overthinking every emotion, and anticipating every possible humiliation, aligns closely with what Søren Kierkegaard would call "the sickness unto death": the despair that comes from being alienated from oneself. In Kierkegaard’s view, despair is not simply suffering, but a state of active self-estrangement, in which the self refuses to be what it truly is. For the Underground Man, selfhood is not a project to be realised, it is a battlefield on which he endlessly defeats himself.

In modern psychological terms, we might recognise this as a narcissistic defence mechanism in which vulnerability is so intolerable that it must be replaced by control. His encounters with others are not opportunities for connection but arenas for psychological warfare. His interactions with former schoolmates are marked by bitterness and a fixation on perceived slights.

Most tragic, however, is his encounter with Liza, a young prostitute who offers him the possibility of tenderness. When she responds to his philosophical speech on degradation with something like empathy, he becomes unhinged. What could have been a moment of shared humanity, becomes an existential threat. Liza threatens to see him, to treat him not as a freak or a failure but as a person. He cannot allow it. He responds by humiliating her, handing her money in a moment that reads like a deliberate reenactment of her life-trauma.

“But this I can say for certain: though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the heart, but came from my evil brain.”*

What makes this so poignant is that he knows exactly what he is doing. This tension between insight and paralysis lies at the heart of Dostoevsky’s genius. The Underground Man is not delusional. He is painfully self-aware. But rather than using that awareness to change, he uses it as a weapon against both himself and others. His failure to act, to connect, to seek forgiveness is filtered through a philosophical defence of inaction. People with deeply entrenched cognitive distortions will often reject positive experiences because they contradict the internal narratives they have built. Such experiences threaten to shatter the very cornerstone of their identity as outcasts and victims. The Underground Man cannot accept Liza’s compassion because it violates the only truth he believes defines him: that he is fundamentally unlovable.

What makes Dostoevsky’s portrayal so unsettling is that this refusal of love is not presented as a personal flaw to be overcome. It is presented as a choice. The Underground Man chooses his isolation and nurses his misery. He would rather suffer on his own terms than risk happiness on someone else’s. This is not the story of a man who could not find love. It is the story of a man who saw love coming and slammed the door shut. In doing so, he ensured that he would never be humiliated. But also, that he would never be saved.

* English quotes are from the Judith Boss translation at Project Gutenberg.

WINTER IS COMING

Author: Garry Kasparov
Year: 2015
Publisher: Public Affairs
Language: English

In 2010, in the aftermath of the global credit crunch triggered by the American sub-prime crisis and the sudden failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers Inc, the Greek economy had come under particular pressure. Standing at the brink of national bankruptcy that would risk hurling the entire world into a second calamity, the EU launched an aid programme leading to a conservative disbursement of merely 52 billion euros. At that time, I was following the events in Greece in my professional capacity and my verdict was “Not nearly enough. This will hurt more than help.”

In 2014, the makeshift barricades of tyres and sandbags on the Independence Square in central Kyiv were still aflame when the Russian government annexed Crimea and covertly moved troops into Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine responded with whatever military force they were able to muster whereas the Free World chose to impose modest and largely inconsequential sanctions on selected individuals and companies. Again, as a professional observer of the unfolding conflict where people were losing their lives and their freedom, my verdict was “What would happen, if Barack Obama, at the invitation of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, would deploy 50,000 troops to Donbas? I bet not a single shot would be fired, and no one would have to die.”

In the case of Greece, the aid package was interpreted by the market as the ultimate limit of the EU’s willingness to stand by Greece, and speculation against Greek national debt exploded. In the end, the EU had to bail Greece out with a total of 330 billion worth of support programmes.

In the case of Ukraine, faced with such lukewarm and hesitant resistance, Vladimir Putin was emboldened to eight years later launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine leading to the death of close to a million Russian soldiers to this date, and heaven knows how many Ukrainian troops and civilians.

My point is that skimpiness today, may multiply the costs by tomorrow.  

In that light, Garry Kasparov’s “Winter Is Coming”, first published in 2015, i.e. just about the time I was bemoaning the vacuum of decisiveness in the face of danger, reads as a vindication.

Kasparov, the chess grandmaster-turned-oppositionist, has spent the better part of two decades shouting into the wind. The book is an unflinching indictment of Western complacency, tracing a direct line from the Second Chechen War (see review of “A Small Corner of Hell” from September 2023) and the suppression of independent media to Crimea, Donbas, and beyond. His language is unsparing, his targets broad: Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, George W. Bush—each is rebuked for misreading or enabling the Kremlin. Kasparov is particularly dismissive of the recurring Western delusion that Putin is a pragmatic leader who merely seeks respect and security.

What distinguishes Kasparov’s analysis is less the originality of the insight than the moral urgency with which it is delivered. While many commentators held out hope that Putin’s authoritarianism might be tempered by economic integration or generational change, Kasparov saw a different pattern, one disturbingly familiar to those who study autocracies: consolidation, repression, expansion. His instincts have proved more accurate than many of the softly hedged assessments emanating from think tanks and chancelleries.

This provokes a haunting suspicion. If Kasparov understood … if even I understood … How could Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Herman van Rompuy not understand? The only conceivable answer is that they did. They simply failed to act.

One thing that Garry Kasparov, in all his unquestionable lucidity, did not foresee is the ongoing demolition of liberal freedoms and democratic institutions in the Free World. He did not predict that the US would turn on its allies and join the ranks of autocratic and oppressive regimes and he did not predict that Europe, instead of exporting its liberal values to Hungary, Serbia, Belarus, and Poland, would instead import their penchant for racism, populism, and nationalism.   

Kasparov writes not as an academic or a diplomat, but as a participant in Russia’s political unraveling. His reflections on the missed opportunities of the Yeltsin years, the rise of the siloviki, and the Kremlin’s mastery of manufactured consent offer more than polemic. There is real analysis here, shaped by direct confrontation with the machinery of the Russian state. That lived experience, alongside his fluency in the West’s ideological blind spots, gives the book a unique and, in hindsight, tortured and furious voice.

What once seemed like Cassandra-like fury now reads, unsettlingly, as reportage from the near future. With Ukraine engulfed in war, and Western democracies scrambling to reset their posture toward Moscow, Kasparov’s book has acquired the gravity of foresight fulfilled. Few will finish “Winter Is Coming” without conceding that the grandmaster saw several moves ahead. The time is come to pay the full price of what could have been managed at a bargain ten years ago. It is far from certain, that the West will prove solvent.

TIPS FOR LIVING WITH A MASSIVE PENIS

Author: Richard M. Downs
Year: 2024
Publisher: Membrum Virile Press
Language: English

Finally made you click the link! 

Have a wonderful April Fools' Day. May the sun shine on your smiling face, today and always.  

 

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Year: 2016 (2009)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie
Language: Polish

Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk is one of a handful of writers that I was familiar with before they were awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I have also previously shared some thoughts on her writing on my blog (see review of “Tales of the Bizarre” from January 2020). One of her most famous titles, and for many Swedes the entry point into her literary output, is “Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych” (“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead”). This novel presents a narrative that intertwines themes of justice, accountability, and the nature of existence, enveloped in a murder mystery, all through the perspective of Janina, an eccentric and reclusive woman living in a remote village in the Polish mountains.

At the heart of Janina’s existence is a profound sense of alienation. She is an outsider in the community, not just because of her eccentricities and lifestyle but also because of her unconventional moral beliefs. Her deep empathy for animals and her insistence on treating them as equals to humans, including ascribing them the ability to plan and execute elaborate coordinated acts of passion, create a worldview that sharply contrasts with the dominant human-centric perspective of the other characters in the novel.

This alienation can perhaps be understood as a defence mechanism in the sense that it is a way of protecting herself from the disillusionment of a society that has failed to acknowledge the deeper, more empathetic layers of existence. Her past as a successful architect is only hinted at and when it is, only in the meaning of her falling out of favour and choosing to seclude herself from society.

Janina’s second obsession is with astrology. At first glance, this seems to emphasise her commitment to the idea of a unified universe or natural cohesion, but it also suggests an unconscious desire for control in an unpredictable and threatening world. She believes that the natural world is governed by a higher, mystical order, one that can be understood through astrology and the signs of nature. This belief can be interpreted as a manifestation of the need for certainty in a disappointing and inexplicable Kosmos, as well as an attempt to find meaning in the randomness of life and death, success and humiliation. Through astrology, she constructs an alternate narrative in which the forces of the universe—rather than the arbitrary and ultimately meaningless cruelty of human beings—are in control.

Above all of this hovers Janina’s problematic views on justice. Despite her conviction that every action is predetermined by the stars and that people have but limited freedom to determine who they become and what choices they make, she is drawn to the idea of accountability, guilt, and retribution. Above all, this is manifested by the novel’s poetic leitmotif “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” by British 18th-century poet William Blake. These poems explore the tension between the innocence of childhood and the corruption of adulthood, the dualities of good and evil, and the human capacity for both creation and destruction. Janina identifies with Blake’s vision of a world that is not simply governed by societal conventions but is in constant conflict between the opposing forces of innocence and corruption. The opposite of innocence is not guilt; it is experience, society, education, and history. Corruption is thus inevitable. Janina’s quest for justice is not grounded in human legal systems but in her own moral code, one that aligns with Blake’s critique of institutionalised power and the systems that fail not only to protect the vulnerable but moreover to preserve innocence to begin with.

This is where equality between humans and other animals ends. Janina never tries to read the horoscope for an animal. She does not judge them for their instincts the way she judges humans for acting upon theirs. The idea of justice echoes throughout Janina's pursuit of a reckoning for the wrongs committed against animals and the natural world. The divide between the human and animal kingdoms is not based on our intellect, technology, language, culture, or society. To Janina, the only dividing factor is mankind’s deviation from innocence.

 

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

Author: Hannah Arendt
Year: 1992 (1963)
Publisher: Daidalos
Language: Swedish (Translator Barbro & Ingemar Lundberg)

Hannah Arendt’s “Den banala ondskan” (“Eichmann in Jerusalem”) remains one of the most provocative and intellectually rigorous studies of totalitarianism, moral responsibility, and the nature of evil in the twentieth century. Emerging from Arendt’s coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, the book offers both a historical account of the Nazi bureaucrat’s role in the Holocaust and a profound philosophical meditation on the mechanisms of mass murder. With her penetrating analysis and sharp prose, Arendt delivers a work that continues to spark debate among scholars, ethicists, and political theorists to this day.

At the heart of the book lies Arendt’s groundbreaking thesis of the “banality of evil.” Rather than portraying Eichmann as a monstrous figure driven by ideological fanaticism or sadistic cruelty, she presents him as a disturbingly ordinary bureaucrat, a man whose mindless adherence to duty and legalistic rationalisation enabled his participation in genocidal policies. In Arendt’s view, Eichmann’s moral blindness and lack of critical self-examination, rather than inherent malice, made him a key functionary in the Nazi machinery of death. At the heart of the book lies Arendt’s groundbreaking thesis of the “banality of evil.” Rather than portraying Eichmann as a monstrous figure driven by ideological fanaticism or sadistic cruelty, she presents him as a disturbingly ordinary bureaucrat, a man whose mindless adherence to duty and legalistic rationalisation enabled his participation in genocidal policies.

Arendt’s work is methodically structured, meticulously researched, and philosophically astute. She provides a comprehensive account of Eichmann’s career, from his early days as a functionary in the SS to his central role in organising the logistics of deportation and extermination. At the same time, she does not shy away from critiquing the legal and political dimensions of the trial itself, particularly the use of the Israeli court to serve a broader national and symbolic function. While she acknowledges the necessity of justice, she raises concerns about the legal framework under which Eichmann was prosecuted, particularly the retrospective application of laws and the potential for political instrumentalisation.

Despite its intellectual brilliance, “Den banala ondskan” was met with intense controversy, particularly regarding Arendt’s perceived tone and her discussion of Jewish leadership’s role in the Holocaust.

A more confined but no less interesting area of critique, however, was her engagement with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Arendt accuses Eichmann of distorting Kant’s idea, arguing that he misapplied the principle in his defence. A more rigorous reading of Kant, however, complicates Arendt’s conclusion, raising the unsettling possibility that Eichmann’s actions were, at least formally, consistent with Kantian ethics.

Arendt asserts that Eichmann invoked Kant’s categorical imperative in bad faith, failing to grasp its fundamental emphasis on moral autonomy. Eichmann claimed that he acted according to duty, submitting to laws that he did not himself create, and he saw his role as implementing the decrees of the Führer rather than exercising independent moral judgment. Arendt dismisses this defence, arguing that Kant’s philosophy demands self-legislation in accordance with universal moral law, rather than blind obedience to external commands. However, this interpretation raises a significant dilemma: Kant’s moral philosophy is famously rigid in its emphasis on duty, and under certain conditions, it may indeed produce the kind of mechanical compliance that Arendt condemns.

In short, Eichmann’s compliance with the categorical imperative was not a matter of genocide, which would hardly be possible to reconcile with Kant’s ideas, but rather of duty and following the law. No single individual can will their own law, but they can will whether to abide by it or not. Willing that the law is universally obeyed seems quite compatible with the categorical imperative.

Many notable thinkers have over the years supported Arendt’s conclusions that a reading of Kant that provides for such heinous acts as the Holocaust is a gross distortion. Carsten Bagge Laustsen and Rasmus Ugilt even go as far as calling it “absurd”. Slavoj Zizek sees it as a circular argument to say that ‘your duty is to do your duty.” Others, like Joshua Halberstam, are less dismissive. For if the act of abiding by the law cannot be elevated to universal law, there seems to be an inherent flaw in our understanding of what law means.

Be it as it will, Arendt’s insights into the bureaucratic nature of modern evil remain profoundly relevant in contemporary discussions of state violence, obedience to authority, and moral responsibility. Her reflections on the dangers of unthinking conformity resonate beyond the historical context of the Holocaust, offering a crucial framework for analysing crimes against humanity in later periods. Including our own era.

MURDER IN THE FAMILY

Author: Cara Hunter
Year: 2023
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers
Language: English

In an affluent London neighbourhood, a young man is murdered in the garden of a stately townhouse. The Metropolitan Police conduct an investigation, yet despite their efforts, the case yields no arrests. With no clear leads, it is eventually relegated to the archives, another unsolved crime gathering dust in the cold-case cabinet. Decades later, the victim’s stepson approaches a television producer with a proposal that reflects the growing public appetite for true-crime entertainment. His idea is to assemble a panel of experts, criminologists, forensic specialists, psychologists, and lawyers, and task them with solving the decades-old mystery.

The novelty of “Murder in the Family” by Cara Hunter lies neither in its setting nor plot but in its narrative structure. Rather than a conventional story, it unfolds as a script, a transcription of the television show itself. Dialogue lines are interspersed with brief stage directions indicating characters’ movements, expressions, and positioning. The episodes are punctuated by a television critic’s column, as well as text message and email exchanges, adding layers of commentary and context. The investigative process itself remains offstage. The team, assembled before the cameras, reports on their findings and the reader is exposed only to their discussions during filming; never the interrogations, site visits, and forensic analyses that take place between episodes. The result is a story shaped not by direct action, but by the act of performance, blurring the lines between investigation and entertainment.

“Murder in the Family” is the second epistolary or documentary-style book project I have encountered in a short span. The first, “Sleeping Giants” by Sylvain Neuvel (reviewed here in January 2024), struggled to sustain its premise. By contrast, “Murder in the Family” is a more cohesive effort. Its dialogue is largely convincing, and the information conveyed seems relevant not only to the plot but, more importantly, to the characters themselves.

The plot is engaging and immersive, though it spirals out of hand toward the end in pursuit of a bombastic finale. Hunter appears aware of this challenge and makes efforts to maintain a sense of plausibility. She weaves in backstories and character dynamics among the investigative team, designed to introduce both conflict and intrigue. These, too, require explanation, and the author makes a concerted effort to provide it, with varying levels of subtlety.

These challenges may, in part, stem from the book’s intended audience. Written for young adults, who seem to expect heightened drama and neck breaking plot twists, it relies on narrative devices that, while effective in maintaining engagement, ultimately strain credibility. To sustain the attention of less seasoned readers, the author introduces developments that eventually veer from the credible and enter into the forced. Halfway into the novel the central murder mystery has become secondary to the evolving discord between the investigative team members. The book’s cover invites readers to “solve the mystery before they do,” but this challenge is undercut by the steady infusion of new information designed more to generate surprise and suspense than to encourage deduction.

A minor but noticeable detail lies in the portrayal of the novel’s transatlantic cast. Given that the team members hail from various backgrounds and countries, the recurring references to distinctions between British and American English suggest an awareness of cultural and linguistic nuance. Yet, the author forfeits the opportunity to manifest this in the orthography. Therefore, the American character, a former member of New York’s finest speaks of “colours” and “neighbours”. It is easily explained by pointing out that the transcript of a British television show will be in British English, but nonetheless a missed opportunity.

“Murder in the Family” is an entertaining and easily digestible book which, had it been more geared toward the mystery and less he-said-she-said-high-school-drama, could have been a truly engaging reading experience.       

 

THE JEEVES COLLECTION

Author: Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Year: 1992 (1923, 1925, 1963)
Publisher: Chancellor Press
Language: English

If one has yet to make the acquaintance of Reginald Jeeves, gentleman’s personal gentleman, and his occasionally woolly-headed employer, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, then one has the good fortune of standing on the precipice of a rare delight. A world inundated by country house antics, aunts of a most fearsome disposition, and engagements formed and dissolved at the drop of a hat awaits.

"The Jeeves Collection" by P. G. Wodehouse is, in short, a smorgasbord of delightful prose, absurd entanglements, and a valet who would have the whole world running smoother than a well-buttered crumpet if given half a chance. The form of the whole bally thing is best characterised as a conglomeration of three short story collections originally titled “Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves”, “The Inimitable Jeeves”, and “Carry On, Jeeves” published between 1923 and 1963. The plots revolve around Bertram’s gallant but misguided attempts to navigate society, friendships, and the occasional perilous romance, all while Jeeves hovers in the background, dispensing wisdom like a brainy, and often quite smug, but always impeccable oracle in a black tie.

The universe of Jeeves and Wooster abound with memorable characters, all of whom regularly put good old Bertie in the soup; be it the constantly lovesick Bingo Little, the irredeemably over-confident Tuppy Glossop, the tyrannical aunt Agatha, the choleric Roderick Spode, or any other family member, friend, acquaintance, and antagonist. Watching over it all is Jeeves, who, with the quiet confidence of a man who has long since mastered the art of crisis management, extracts his employer from every mess.

Jeeves’ solutions, however, are not always as seamless as one might have preferred, and particularly in situations where one of Bertie’s friends needs to be rescued in one way or other, Jeeves seems to find an almost sadistic pleasure in humiliating his Master. It all turns out well for all parties in the end, but for the most part, it is Bertie who picks up the bill. The happy-go-lucky chum that he is, he seems quite content doing so.

One cannot, of course, read Wodehouse without tripping over the troublesome relics of the British class system. The world of Jeeves and Wooster is one where gentlemen of leisure drift from club to country house, their primary duties involving luncheon, light banter, and avoiding employment (and in Wooster’s case marriage) at all costs. Meanwhile, the true machinery of civilization hums efficiently beneath them, powered by the clerks and workers of the world; some of whom, like Jeeves, while technically in service, are in fact the real puppet masters of the social order.

For all its rowdy escapades, Wodehouse’s world is one in which class boundaries remain firmly intact, though observed with a knowing wink. Bertie, good egg that he is, relies entirely on Jeeves to navigate the deceiving waters of life, never questioning the latter’s superior intellect. Indeed, the Jeeves-Wooster dynamic is less that of employer and servant, and more of an amiable lord-and-vassal arrangement, where the vassal is unquestionably in charge but allows the lord the comforting illusion of authority.

Wodehouse’s language, at last, is a pleasure to behold. Sentences are assembled with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker who has also, in his spare time, mastered the art of comedy. One finds oneself guffawing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and if one is not careful, alarming nearby creatures with bursts of unexpected amusement.

In conclusion, life is short and one can never have too much of a good thing. Especially when that good thing involves a valet of Jeeves’s calibre, a cast of characters whose primary purpose seems to be hurling themselves into disaster, and an author whose wit is as keen as Jeeves’ powers of observation and as fiery as Bingo Little’s heart.