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.