FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Year: 2007 (2004)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English

I am not a particularly intelligent man. I know what I need to know and I understand what others have told me I need to understand. I totter around the world like most other people oblivious of the size of the universe, relying to a large degree on knowledge generated by others and wisdom accumulated by generations before me. I am, by all accounts, a banker belonging to the most commonplace persuasion.

And yet, the mediocre mind that I possess, I still cannot find a single original thought in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”, hailed by Fortune Magazine as ‘one of the smartest books of all time’.  

“Fooled by Randomness” has achieved near-canonical status in the literature of risk, uncertainty, and human irrationality. Its reputation rests on its supposedly radical thesis: that we routinely mistake luck for skill, underestimate randomness, and build narratives to explain what is often just noise. Yet reading the book critically, one is struck less by its originality and more by Taleb’s flair for repackaging ideas that, while vital, are hardly new.

At its core, “Fooled by Randomness” argues that human beings are cognitively ill-equipped to understand probabilistic reality. Taleb illustrates how traders, investors, CEOs, and even scientists often credit themselves for success that is better attributed to statistical variance. This insight, though forcefully delivered, echoes long-established ideas from behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy from Hume’s scepticism about causation to Popper’s critique of historical determinism. Taleb’s contribution thus remains shrouded in mystery.

Ironically, what he presents as revelatory is something many thoughtful readers might consider common sense: unpredictable events happen (or “shit happens” might better capture it), luck plays a large role in outcomes, and our confidence in our own stories far exceeds the evidence of their actuality. His central admonition, “expect the unexpected”, is ancient in spirit. So is “alea iacta est”. Or “pride goeth before destruction”. The list goes on and on.  

One is reminded of Stoic counsel, medieval warnings against hubris, and the probabilistic humility embedded in scientific method or the biblical call to modesty, piety and reflection. Taleb’s philosophical posture is a modern reframing of old wisdom, delivered with charismatic frustration at humanity’s refusal to internalise it.

But this lack of originality does not render the book irrelevant. If anything, it underscores Taleb’s larger, and surprisingly damning, point: even the simplest probabilistic truths must be endlessly restated because we as humans persistently fail to live by them. We prefer neat explanations over messy randomness, confident predictions over uncertainty, and flattering narratives over the humbling truth of chance.

A particularly sharp example is his takedown of the caste of Risk Managers in financial institutions. Taleb argues that Risk Managers act primarily to protect themselves rather than their firms. From my own professional experience, this rings painfully true: risk frameworks often become bureaucratic armour rather than genuine safeguards, designed more to deflect blame than to confront uncertainty.

The very fact that “Fooled by Randomness” feels obvious is part of its evidence: our institutions and personal decisions alike routinely disregard what should be common sense.

This is where the book earns its value. Taleb’s observations, though not groundbreaking, are delivered with a piercing clarity that exposes the gap between what we should know and how we actually behave. He forces the reader to confront not merely intellectual errors but the emotional and cultural forces that encourage them. If we continuously act as though the world is more predictable than it is, then perhaps even cliché warnings about uncertainty need to be articulated, loudly and repeatedly.

In the end, “Fooled by Randomness” is less an original treatise than a necessary one. Its power lies not in novelty but in its unrelenting insistence that our blindness to randomness is self-inflicted and catastrophically persistent. Taleb may not tell us anything fundamentally new, but he tells us what we perpetually fail to remember. Rather like a demented patient is repeatedly fascinated by the same discovery, to our oblivious selves, this book endures as a periodical reminder of something our primitive minds simply cannot contain for any meaningful period of time.

WHAT IS SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?

Author: Ingvar Carlsson & Anne-Marie Lindgren
Year: 2019
Publisher: Tankesmedjan Tiden
Language: Swedish 

Social Democracy is by far the most successful political project in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia in the 20^th century, and it is at the core of what made this region the envy of the world*. But few people, even those who vote for the Social Democratic party or identify as social democrats, truly know what it is.

As debates over the meaning of social democracy grew increasingly muddled, Ingvar Carlsson, who would later become leader of the Social Democratic Party and Sweden’s prime minister, teamed up with Anne-Marie Lindgren, a respected publisher and political analyst, to bring clarity. In 1974 they co-authored “Vad är socialdemokrati” (“What is Social Democracy”); a concise attempt to define the party’s principles and purpose. The book has since been translated to a number of languages, and revised and updated four times. The latest edition, published in 2019, reflects both the endurance of the project and the evolution of its ideas.

The book is divided into six sections: 1. History of Social Democracy, 2. Ideological legacy of Social Democracy 3. Social Democratic ideological development: The world of production, 4. Social Democratic ideological development: Distribution of the results of production 5. Social Democracy – am outdated ideology? 6. The future?

If there is a single lesson to be drawn from this book, it is that it should not be mistaken for either a bible or a manifesto. Social democracy, by its very nature, resists dogma. It rejects any fundamentalist interpretation of its founders or ideological forerunners. As Carlsson and Lindgren themselves put it:

“Within some left-wing parties, Marx and ‘Marxism’ (or notions of ’Marxism) have at periods of time been seen almost as a religious document, in which some of the more obscure words provide a guideline that is not to be questioned. Such trends, albeit not as evident as in the past, can also be found in modern-day debate. This type of single-minded literal approach is extremely dangerous – and this applies to all theories – political or religious – seen as representing the Truth with a capital T. The history of Communism shows us how dangerous such single-mindedness can be, and how it directly opposes the ideal of freedom and equality.”**

It is thus neither a roadmap nor a yardstick, nor does it claim to be a philosophical treatise on the nature of happiness or a blueprint for utopia. Instead, it offers a framework for understanding society, an intellectual toolkit that enables readers to identify the structures and processes that produce social injustice, and to devise practical, contextually relevant solutions suited to their own time and circumstances.

Although its intellectual roots lie in the writings of Karl Marx, the social-democratic movement began reinventing itself almost from the outset. A decisive break with classical Marxism, as articulated in the “Communist Manifesto” (see review from August 2021), came when social democrats abandoned the goal of redistributing ownership of the means of production and instead sought to democratise control over them. This shift owed much to the trade unions, which formed the backbone of Sweden’s labour movement. Traditionally, economists distinguish between two main factors of production: capital and labour. The unions’ initial priority was to gain greater control over the latter; the time, energy and skills of their members. But their thinking soon influenced the political wing of the movement. The call to transfer ownership of capital gave way to a more pragmatic demand: to share control over capital and the rewards of production more equitably.

This insight proved decisive in sparing Scandinavia the violent upheavals that shook parts of Europe under Communist and Fascist movements. Instead, it laid the foundation for a path of gradual, democratic reform. Once owners of capital recognised that their property rights were not under direct threat, they became more inclined to negotiate and compromise. The result was the emergence of the so-called Swedish model, i.e. an enduring framework that balances the interests of capital, labour and the broader public. It fostered a society in which innovation and cooperation could flourish, not through conflict, but through consensus, ensuring that no group’s prosperity came at the systematic expense of another.

The at the time of writing this ongoing dispute between Tesla and the Swedish trade union IF Metall must be seen in this historical context. Tesla’s management appears to operate as though it is free from norms and responsibilities, yet their actions risk undermining the very foundation of Sweden’s prosperous welfare model. Elon Musk’s apparent inability to recognise or respect this legacy is regrettable. Equally, if not more concerning, however, is the fact that many Swedish workers, by opting not to join the union, seem unaware of the broader consequences of their choices for both themselves and the collective framework that has long safeguarded their rights.

It is a pity that works such as this by Carlsson and Lindgren are unlikely to alter this dynamic. The reason is simple: their arguments demand a degree of analytical sophistication that, in 2025, remains beyond the grasp of much of the population leaving it up to others to fight their fights for them.

* Yes haters, it is hardly a secret that the acrid venom you spew upon Sweden on social media springs from none other but your own envy and crushing sense of inadequacy. You are not fooling anybody.

** The whole book is available in English at the Palme Center webpage, wherefrom this quote was sourced.

A DOUBLE PORTRAIT

Author: Agneta Pleijel
Year: 2020
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish 

My first brush with Agneta Pleijel’s writing occurred in the early noughties through her work “Lord Nevermore”. This is a tale spun around two Polish souls of vastly different temperaments yet bound by the exquisite absurdity of friendship, and parted, as fate would have it, by the ruthless savagery of inane politics, in this case the first world war. What struck me the most was the ease and elegance with which she recreates the private chambers of her characters’ minds, not so much depicting the young men but rather listening in to a conversation between them. To read her was like attending a séance where the dead remained unaware of the living and conversed uninhibitedly with one another in our presence. In later years, she turned her art inward and produced that singular re-invention of the autobiography that I was moved to christen synaisthimatography; the cartography of the emotional landscape itself. By this work alone, she surely established herself as a towering giant of modern belletristic writing.

In “Dubbelporträtt” (not available in English but a rough translation could be “A Double Portrait”), Pleijel returns to the semi-biographical but deeply personal storytelling. The tale is based on the true story of Agatha Christie, the undisputed queen of mystery, sitting for Oskar Kokoschka, the world-renowned Viennese painter from whom Christie’s grandson Matthew commissioned a portrait of his grandmother for her 80^th birthday. Both Christie and Kokoschka reluctantly accept the initiative.

In her subtle orchestration of this encounter, Pleijel permits Kokoschka to try to engage in meaningful and intimate conversation with his highly reserved subject, in an attempt to capture her personality for the portrait. The elderly lady, ever on guard and unwilling to let anybody in, especially not a foreign painter, no matter how prominent her grandson assures her that he may be, proves delightfully impervious to analysis. While the painter imagines himself dissecting her soul, it is she who conducts the true inquisition, listening serenely as he reveals far more of himself than she ever intended to yield.

And so the drama unfolds across six sittings, each one a duel disguised as civility, while the portrait slowly but surely takes form. Not until the very end, Christie finally opens up and grants Kokoschka the keys to her inner self allowing for the portrait to become the masterpiece that is still in Matthew’s possession to this day. A memento of an English heart momentarily unveiled.  

“Dubbelpoträtt” may lack the sweeping grandeur of “Lord Nevermore” but the inimitable Pleijelan blend of whit, warmth, and curiosity all abound. Beneath its modest frame, dwells an investigation of more profound dimensions than first meets the eye. For what, in truth, is a portrait? Is it the likeness of the subject, or the confession of the artist? Is the final painting really a portrait of Agatha Christie? Or is it a portrait of Oskar Kokoschka painting Agatha Christie?

And here Pleijel strikes her most modern note. In an age intoxicated with machines that imitate human thought and creativity, she reminds us that art has never been about replication, but revelation. A machine may produce an image; only a human can err beautifully enough to make it art.

Art in all forms can be said to be a reflection of the artist. This includes the art of writing. In an interview from 2020, Pleijel confessed that her choice of exploring this legendary encounter was born from love for their arts. No one was present in the room when Christie sat for Kokoschka. No one knows what words were uttered. So Agneta Pleijel does what historians cannot. She invents. The novel is a re-imagination of the event. The conversation is what Pleijel imagines could have taken place. Or maybe even what she hopes actually transpired.

Thus, as the portrait was more about its creator than its subject, “Dubbelporträtt” becomes a story less about Agatha Christie or Oskar Kokoschka and more about Agneta Pleijel. Perhaps, she does not step into the minds of her characters. Rather, she invites them to dwell within hers. As did Kokoschka. The outcome is that most exquisite of human inventions; the fusion of creator and creation, where truth and illusion clasp hands and become what we call art.

 

BLINDNESS

Author: José Saramago
Year: 1998 (1995)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

In Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “Seams” (in the short story collection “Tales of the Bizarre” reviewed in January 2020) a man wakes to discover subtle but uncanny alterations in his world. Socks that suddenly have seams, stamps that are now round instead of square, the familiar blue ink in his pen inexplicably replaced by brown. Socks aren’t supposed to have seams, are they? These small deviations from the expected unravel his sense of stability. He is bewildered, but those around him find nothing unusual. For them, round stamps and brown ink are the natural order of things. Through these quiet distortions, Tokarczuk exposes how fragile the category of “normality” really is, how dependent our sanity and social coherence are on countless unnoticed details that we assume to be permanent. If such trivial shifts can destabilise us, how deep are our roots in what we call reality? How thin is the membrane separating order from chaos?

José Saramago’s “Blindheten” (“Blindness”) poses this question on a catastrophic scale. Whereas Tokarczuk’s protagonist falters before the dissonance of socks and stamps, Saramago strips his characters of sight altogether, and with it, the entire apparatus of modern life. The sudden epidemic of blindness tears through an unnamed city, dissolving the seams that hold civilisation together. Law, government, decency, even the simplest routines of cleanliness or trust collapse within days. If Tokarczuk reveals the precariousness of order in miniature, Saramago demonstrates its total implosion. Civilisation, it seems, is not an edifice of stone but a scaffolding of habits, agreements, and illusions that threatens to collapse at the slightest tremor.

Among the many who stumble through the blindness, two figures form the novel’s most striking contrast. As all other characters they remain nameless: the doctor’s wife and the girl with the sunglasses. They appear at first as opposites. The doctor’s wife embodies middle-class respectability, a figure of family stability and conventional decency. The girl with the sunglasses, a part-time sex worker (not by financial necessity but by sexual promiscuity) belongs to the margins, shielding herself from social stigma behind her tinted lenses. Yet in the moment of disaster, their paths converge, and in their juxtaposition Saramago reveals two poles of human response to catastrophe: one grounded in responsibility and altruism, the other in intimacy and rediscovered dignity.

SPOILER ALERT

The doctor’s wife, uniquely spared from blindness, steps out of her prominent husband’s shadow and becomes the group’s reluctant leader. Her immunity to blindness is never explained. It is allegorical, a reminder that to see is not only to perceive but to bear responsibility. She becomes a kind of inverted panopticon. In Foucault’s famous image, the one who sees from the central tower exerts power over the many who are seen. Yet here, the doctor’s wife does not discipline but suffers. Her vision is a burden. She alone must clean the excrement-covered ward, lead the group through chaos, bury the dead, and carry the memory of all she witnesses. Seeing, for her, is not empowerment but an ethical wound, an obligation to act when others cannot. For this reason, she keeps her ability a secret from the others.

The girl with the sunglasses undergoes a transformation of another sort. Stripped of the markers of her profession, she is no longer defined by society’s hypocrisy. Her beauty, once a commodity, becomes irrelevant; her sunglasses, formerly a mask against judgment, lose their function in a world where no one sees. In their place emerges a person of compassion and tenderness. She nurses the old man with the black eyepatch with a love that is untainted by transaction, discovering an intimacy that had eluded her in her previous life. If the doctor’s wife embodies the pain of clarity, the girl with the sunglasses embodies the possibility of moral vision even within blindness.

Together, they lay bare the thinness of the veneer that Thomas Hobbes diagnosed centuries earlier. In “Leviathan” (reviewed in April 2022) Hobbes warned that without strong institutions, life reverts to a brutish war of all against all. Saramago stages this collapse with merciless precision. Within days, the quarantine asylum devolves into violence, hoarding, and sexual exploitation. Food becomes currency, women are traded like rations, cruelty and cowardice reign. Western civilisation, so confident in its legal codes and humanitarian principles, is revealed as the emperor’s new clothes. It rests not on unshakable foundations but on such invisible seams as agreements, routines, shared perceptions, and as Hobbes would argue, the fear of repercussions. Once sight is lost, the seams disintegrate.

And yet, the novel resists cynicism. For even within this Hobbesian nightmare, solidarity flickers. The doctor’s wife shoulders responsibility without succumbing to domination. The girl with the sunglasses discovers dignity in love rather than passion. Together, they sketch the possibility of a different humanity: one not guaranteed, but latent beneath the collapse. Saramago suggests that civilisation’s scaffolding may be fragile, but within the rubble there are still gestures of recognition and care that refuse to be vanquished.

The ending offers no easy redemption. Sight returns arbitrarily, just as it was lost. We may assume that civilisation will be rebuilt. The city remains there. But whether it will be less blind than before remains doubtful. The doctor’s wife, still sighted, has seen too much to trust in renewal. The girl with the sunglasses, by contrast, carries the fragile hope that love discovered in blindness might persist into sight. Between them, they frame the paradox of the human condition: responsibility and compassion, burden and intimacy, clarity and fragility.

Saramago’s novel may be a provocative accusation against the weakness and baseness of man, but it is without a doubt a triumph for literature. His prose flows like an unbroken current, lyrical, ironic, and humane, where his long sentences carry profound truths, while his short ones either prick or punch in just the right spot as is necessary. And it seems that when one looks at the world of today, one may feel a little like Tokarczuk’s protagonist wondering about abnormal seams. We used to berate liars, didn’t we? Fascism used to be a bad thing, didn’t it? One would be forgiven for entertaining the idea that in order to open certain minds to the truth, they first need to be gently pricked… or in some cases, forcefully punched.

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.