Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The punitive gesture of censoring finds its origin in the reaction of being offended. The strength of being-offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself; its weakness lies in not being able to afford to doubt itself. "

J.M. Coetzee's Giving Offense (1996) is a collection of 12 essays about the nature and essence of censorship, its various aspects and manifestations, and its effects on the society and on the artists (the subtitle of the book says it simply: Essays on Censorship). While a profound and highly scholarly work, meticulously researched and referenced on over 50 pages, this set of philosophical and literary criticism analyses is not at all impenetrable thanks to Mr. Coetzee's unsurpassed lucidity of writing. The depth and elegance of the author's analyses are so much above my ability to explain them that I am embarrassed writing this review, feeling like an elementary school kid tasked with annotating Finnegans Wake. I will thus limit my highly unqualified comments to a few selected essays, although each of the 12 fascinating studies deserves detailed analyses by scholarly-inclined readers.

Chapter Four, entitled "The Harms of Pornography: Catharine MacKinnon", is a devastatingly sharp critical analysis of Ms. MacKinnon's writings. Mr. Coetzee points out the parochialism and limitedness of some of her central ideas, as evidenced by her sole focus on the Western world, and her lack of interest in the widespread objectification and denigration of women in the world of advertising. Coetzee is at his most forceful when he criticizes what I would call a severe intellectual fraud perpetrated by Ms. MacKinnon who relativizes truth to gender and interprets female sexuality as a "construction of male power".

Allow me a personal aside here: Coetzee's writing resonates with me so strongly because he observes the social phenomena not from the perspective of what is "right" and what is "wrong" (which, of course, depends on who defines the rightness or wrongness and when and where the definition is constructed), but purely from the perspective of logic - through examining whether the arguments are valid. Coetzee's reasoning is so resoundingly refreshing because it goes strongly against today's prevalent mode of social discourse, driven by the so-called Political Correctness movement, the mode that eschews calm, logical analysis and instead focuses on attempting to right past wrongs, thus - incidentally - introducing new wrongs.

In Chapter Six, entitled "Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode", the author offers an analysis of censorship and - more importantly - of self-censorship in 1930s, the darkest, Stalinist period of the Soviet history. In the next essay, "Censorship and Polemic: Solzhenitsyn", Mr. Coetzee, among many fascinating threads of analysis, mentions both proscriptive and prescriptive aspects of Soviet censorship and - most interestingly - describes "the dynamic of spiraling mimetic violence precipitated by a collapsing of distinctions", referring to a dialectic embrace between the enemies (Solzhenitsyn vs. the regime).

Out of the remaining chapters I would like to mention one on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, which is a little outside the main thrust of the collection. While it indeed deals with issues of censorship, it focuses more on the universal and humanistic values of Mr. Herbert's poetry and on his use of allusiveness as a "mode of humanistic affirmation", and his recognition of irony as an ethical value. In Chapter Eleven which deals with relationship between the philosophy of apartheid and the system of censorship in South Africa, Mr. Coetzee - who is a mathematician by education - introduces the "algebra of mixing blood" - a sharply ironic device to illustrate the madness of apartheid philosophy.

Giving Offense is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It took me almost 20 hours to get through the 240 pages - the effort was totally worthwhile and I am happy that the onset of my senility has so far been slow enough to allow me the enjoyment of the read.

Four and three quarter stars.


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What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Kansans just don't care about economic issues [...] Kansans have set their sights on grander things, like the purity of the nation. Good wages, fair play in farm country, the fate of the small town, even the one that we live in - all these are a distant second to evolution, which we will strike from the books, and public education, which we will undermine in a hundred inventive ways."

The main thrust of Thomas Frank's What's the matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, published in 2004, has not lost its relevance in 2015, particularly with the elections coming in the U.S. the next year. The author is trying to elucidate the phenomenon that seems beyond rational explanation: why have a large majority of people living in Kansas - the typical working class population who had solidly voted Democratic before 1980s - switched to supporting conservative Republicans? Why have they begun voting against their own economic interests? Why are there more supporters of conservative agenda among working class people than among those who profit from that agenda? Cutting taxes, reducing government, weakening regulations and customer protection - all these goals favor the rich and hurt the poor and the middle class by reducing or eliminating altogether the social safety net that covers the people who cannot afford to cover themselves. A conservative platform is always pro-business: business owners should be free to reduce salaries, cut and outsource jobs, reduce maternity benefits, avoid paying for medical care of their employees, etc. Why then do the poor people and the exploited people in Kansas vote en masse for the agenda that favors the rich and helps the economic exploiters?

Mr. Frank's answer is clear and convincing. The conservative Republican movement - unable to gain support of the working class on the economic issues - appropriated the religious and social agenda and captured the cultural anger of the working, "ordinary" people, the anger aimed at promotion of "disgusting counterculture", liberal judges, attempts to expand gun control, availability of abortion, liberal media, atheist scientists, immoral decadence, and the secular-humanist disease in general. Much of this anger comes as a backlash against the excesses of the "liberal Sixties", and anti-intellectualism is one of the main unifying themes of the conservative movement.

The leaders of the movement have managed to frame the political choices as the struggle between - on the one side - authentic, hard-working Americans, who enjoy hamburgers, cherish guns, and fervently pray to God, and - on the other - depraved, latte-guzzling, Volvo-driving, liberal, Eastern elite whose ideas are alien to the original values of the true Americans. The conservative leaders have understood that people's cultural, moral, and religious convictions drive their political choices.

The unspoken underlying motto of the conservative movement is to "socialize the risk and privatize the profits". The beauty of the monumental swindle performed by the right-wing ideologists is that the working class people - who will carry the burden of the business risks and will not participate in any of the profits - happily vote to ensure their own poverty and irrelevance, getting instead the feeling of superiority of their religious, moral, and cultural convictions.

In my view (here I need to disclaim that this paragraph is not about Mr. Frank's book) during 11 years since the book was published the situation has gotten worse: one reason is the further polarization of society caused by the universal access to Internet, which allows people to read only the news and articles with which they agree. Another reason for growing support of the conservative agenda are the obvious excesses of the liberal-backed political correctness movement, particularly in the area of diversity enforcement. Yet another new factor is the poor people's fierce resistance to the Affordable Care Act, the law that helps them get access to quality health care: in the authentic American way they prefer to not have any health care rather than to follow some socialist-flavored Canadian or European models.

What's the Matter with Kansas is a meticulously researched work (over 40 pages of notes and references) of unparalleled clarity and thoroughness. I have two critical comments: the author is passionately liberal, and his strong bias shows through his writing. His logically sound and factually correct argument and conclusions would be more effective if they were presented in a cold, unemotional style. My other gripe is that everything in the book is binary, black or white: people are either conservative or liberal. True, the polarization is increasing but there are still substantial numbers of people who agree with some tenets of each side - conservative and liberal - but disagree with some others. There are still some centrists out there.

One of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read.

Four and a half stars.


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Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Angels, it is said, are often unsure whether they pass among the living or the dead." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

When trying to characterize Cees Nooteboom's novel Lost Paradise (2005) in one word, "ethereal" immediately comes to mind. Synonyms of "ethereal" are many: "delicate, exquisite, dainty, elegant, graceful, fragile, airy, fine, subtle". Except for "fragile", all these adjectives fit the book perfectly. I would add three more adjectives to specify my perception of the book: "whimsical, enchanting, and magical". Now, what do the real critics - people who unlike me can write well in English - say about Lost Paradise? Their adjectives are "luminous, numinous, glorious, dreamy, self-conscious, daring, poetic, provocative, cleansing, brief, beautiful, mysterious, radiant, imaginative, dense, layered, magical, innovative, cool, sophisticated, ironic" (the last three are courtesy of J. M. Coetzee).

Even if one can say that Lost Paradise is about angels, the novel has an earthly plot, and not an insubstantial one at that. In a stunning Prologue, Mr. Nooteboom performs the best metafiction trick ever. Let's only say that suddenly - while being inside the story - we are outside of it and looking in. Highly virtuosic! Part One takes us to Australia where two young Brazilian women, girls really, fascinated with the indigenous people's culture, visit the sacred Aboriginal places. For one of the women, the narrator, this journey becomes a life-altering event, in spiritual, physical, and artistic dimensions. Towards the end of the story the women perform as angels in the Perth Angel Project (this is an event that really happened in 2000). Part Two is narrated by a middle-aged Dutch literary critic who travels to a rejuvenation clinic in Austria and is subject to sophisticated healing and anti-aging treatment. Eventually, the two stories merge - obviously angels must have helped.

While the synopsis may sound superficial, an incredible amount of weighty substance is packed into this slim volume (150 pages; Mr. Nooteboom obviously follows Italo Calvino's advice that "books ought to be short"): the dying of the Aboriginal culture, the serendipity of intersecting trajectories of human lives, the transforming power of art that lifts the human existence to transcend its earthly form, the celebration of life, the role of chance, loving as the essence of being, even the trauma of rape, and - perhaps most touchingly - the homage to the ancient humans, our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago.

This being a Cees Nooteboom's work, it is beautifully written, and the translation from Dutch by Susan Massotty is superb as well. (After the rating I am quoting a dazzling passage.) And despite all the depth, this is a very readable book! The last scenes of the first part, the vividly portrayed happenings from the Perth festival, are unforgettable.

Cees Nooteboom has joined the list of my most favorite authors. After the ascetic and serious Rituals, metafictional In the Dutch Mountains, and unforgettably beautiful The Following Story, Lost Paradise is another exceptional work by the Dutch writer. One may be stunned by how different the books are - the supreme quality of prose is the only similarity between them - which to me is one of the marks of truly great writers and artists in general; they rarely if ever repeat themselves.

A few weeks ago I asked my wife - who knows much more about serious literature than I do - to read Nooteboom's The Following Story, which has recently become one of the very best books I have ever read. She liked it, but not as much as I did. "Impenetrable", she said, "Too enigmatic." Maybe. Well, if we put these three novels on a scale of impenetrability, then The Following Story would be somewhere in the middle, with Rituals at the enigmatic end, while in Lost Paradise all is in the plain view of the reader - thus yielding a very low score on the impenetrability scale. Perhaps only the references to Milton's Paradise Lost are a little obscure.

Finally, I should add that the readers who have seen Wim Wenders' magnificent movie about two invisible angels who roam over Berlin, Wings of Desire, will find some similarities in the overall mood. Perhaps one needs angels to reflect so sharply on the human condition.

Five stars.


"I would like to say something about my body, about how I have realised, more than ever, that it will be there only once, that it coincides with what I call 'me', but I reach a point where things can no longer be described in words. One cannot talk about ecstasy. And yet that is what I mean. I have never existed as much."



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The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"We will feel the draft blowing through the cracks in the structure of causality"

Is there such a thing as an impossibly beautiful book? Probably not, but Cees Nooteboom's "The Following Story" comes awfully close. So close that when I had finished reading the novella, I immediately read it again. It might not resonate with everybody, though: past a certain age, one subject tends to preoccupy one's mind, and Mr. Nooteboom writes, beautifully, about that subject. So while a younger reader will be likely to ask "What is that all about?", those of us who are almost there, will know.

This short novella has two distinct parts: In "One" Herman Mussert, a teacher of Latin and an author of cheap travel guides, tells us how having gone to sleep in Amsterdam, he wakes up in a room in Lisbon, the same room where he had made love to a woman many, many years ago. We do not know which "he" he is, though: the "he of then" or the "he of now"? The structure of causality is drafty indeed. What is "now", by the way? Where is it where it is not here any more? And what is "I"? Am I the same I as 20 years ago?

In the dreamlike and hypnotic "Two" Mr. Mussert is on a ship traveling across the ocean, into the mouth of the Amazon river, close to the city of Belém on the Brazilian coast, and then up and up the river, past Manaus and the Rio Negro junction, surrounded by the nocturnal jungle. The ship passengers take turns to tell stories of their lives and then they quietly disappear, one by one, never to be seen again. Mr. Mussert is waiting for his turn.

The two parts, so remarkably different, need each other: the second would not make its tremendous impact without the first; the first without the second would just be a philosophical discourse on causality and passage of time. What makes this book so powerful is that its ostensibly main theme - our impermanence - is not the dominating one; "The Following Story" is also about love in its multitude of forms: love for beauty, as in poetry of Ovid, love for a student who shares the teacher's zeal in the quest for truth and knowledge, love for Socrates' courage of convictions, and - of course - Mr. Mussert's love for Mrs. Zeinstra.

The translation is extraordinary; I do not believe the prose of the original could be any more luminous and delightful. The one problem with "The Following Story" is that after reading it most other books will seem like empty tales "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Five stars.


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Iron Curtain : The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Being a Pole I am lucky to have been born several years after the end of World War II. I was spared the unspeakable horrors and atrocities committed by Germans during the war and occupation. I was also spared the horrors and atrocities that accompanied the Russian liberation of Eastern Europe and were still happening behind the Iron Curtain during the first 10 or so years after the war. My first memories that relate to politics date to 1956, which was the year demarcating the terrible period of High Stalinism and the tough-but-not-all-that-dreadful times of late 1950s to early 1980s.

Anne Applebaum's "The Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe: 1944-1956" is a monumental work, meticulously and exhaustively researched (almost 70 pages of references), well written and compulsively readable; in addition I have found it tremendously illuminating. Based on what my family and older friends had told me about the 1940s and 1950s I can see how historically accurate the text is. At the same time I have learned so much about an important period in my native country's history.

The book is divided into two parts: "False Dawn" which deals with the years from 1944 to 1948 - the years of liberation from German occupation and subsequent enslavement by the Soviet ideology - and "High Stalinism", which investigates the 1949 - 1956 period. The author focuses on three countries that were undergoing the process of "Stalinization": Poland, Hungary, and East Germany (the so-called "German Democratic Republic"). Historically and socially, the countries are quite different, yet the fates they suffered in that gruesome period are very similar.

"The Iron Curtain" offers a broad panorama of the times and utilizes a wide array of angles of view. The individual chapters illustrate various aspects of the process of "Stalinization": the Communist leadership, the security apparatus, the armed anti-Communist opposition, massive ethnic cleansing, the indoctrination of youth, the role of radio (the main mass media at the time), the so-called free elections and referendums, the nationalization of industry, the role of small business, the persecution of church and the religion's role in leading the resistance, the show trials, the elimination of all civic and social institutions, the creation of homo sovieticus, the so-called "socialist realism" dictate in arts and culture, the reluctant collaborators and passive opponents of the system, and finally the revolutions against Stalinism, which began in 1953 and culminated in 1956.

While Ms. Applebaum's work - she is a Pulitzer Prize winner for her "Gulag", and in my view she deserves another award for the "Iron Curtain" - is extremely thorough and rich in detail, the best feature, to me, is its structural concept: interweaving the serious historical study approach with deeply resonant personal stories of people. It is yet another testimony to the quality of the author's work that various reviewers identify different central themes of the book. The motif that resonates with me the most is one that the author mentions at the end of the Introduction "I sought to understand how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes, [...] how they came to make terrible choices the most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face." The motif of ordinary people, present throughout the entire book, forcefully appears close to the end, where Ms. Applebaum writes about "the system's ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest".

As a pragmatist and an ideology skeptic I have been particularly impressed by the story of Wanda Telakowska of the Ład group, a "reluctant collaborator", a true positivist, who worked very hard - and successfully! - to preserve the notions of beauty and harmony in art design for mass-produced items despite the then prevalent grim model of socialist realism. She managed to convince the "Sovietized" people at the top of power hierarchy that reconstructing Polish culture after the war was an important goal.

It took me way over a month to read the book as I read every single sentence with full attention. I needed to know about that horrible period. I owed it to my parents, grandparents, and all the people who had to suffer so much. I had an obligation to learn about those times and tell that to others. "The Iron Curtain" should be a mandatory reading to help people understand how totalitarianism works, how dangerous an ideology can be, how easy it is to mislead millions and millions of people and how it is possible that even after almost everybody quits believing, an ideology can thrive for long years.

Four and three quarter stars.



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Summertime by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Summertime" (2009) is the final part of J.M. Coetzee's fictionalized autobiography: it completes the trilogy that began with "Boyhood" and "Youth" . In the first two books Coetzee refers to himself in the third person, as a "he". Here he goes even further - "Summertime" is narrated by an English academic, a Mr. Vincent, who is working on Coetzee's biography, after the author has died. There is no doubt that the deceased John Coetzee, the subject of Mr. Vincent's biography, is the very same J.M. Coetzee, who created Mr. Vincent's character, and who - fortunately for us - is still very much alive and active as a writer. Henceforth, I will refer to fictionalized Coetzee as JC, to distinguish him from the "real" J.M. Coetzee.

The book is composed of five interviews with people, mostly women, who knew JC well in the early and middle 1970s in South Africa, and it is bracketed with undated fragments from JC's notebooks. I find the first three interviews totally spellbinding. Dr. Julia Frankl, born Kiš Julia of Szombathely, Hungary, used to be JC's lover. Margot is JC's cousin, who shared childhood with him. Finally, Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian dancer, is the mother of a teenage girl whom JC taught poetry. We learn a lot about JC from these interviews but we learn even more about the three women - the stories are masterpieces of characterization and they make me feel I have known these women for a long time. Some critics opined that J.M. Coetzee cannot create strong female characters. Nonsense!

Julia talks vividly about her affair with JC and portrays him as a man who has no ability to connect with other people. He is like "the man who mistook his mistress for a violin." Margot, the cousin, tells many wonderful stories from their common childhood, and the account of them going to Merweville in a car that needs fixing is beautifully told. Adriana, a mother who knows very little about raising her daughters yet thinks she knows a lot, claims she was the target of JC's affection. Each of the three stories would make a fabulous novella.

In contrast, the two latter interviews, with JC's colleagues from the university in Cape Town, where he taught, are exclusively about him: both Martin and Sophie are virtually transparent - they serve solely to convey JC's views, beliefs, and motivation. Let me point out two main themes that may help us better understand JC (and by extension J.M. Coetzee). The first is summarized by Mr. Vincent: "What Coetzee writes [...] cannot be trusted, not as a factual record - not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity." Can recursion in literary arts go any further? J.L. Borges often played with recursion, but his are rather formal games. In "Summertime" we have J.M. Coetzee writing about how JC's writings about himself cannot be quite trusted, we have the "real" author's fiction about how the author's literary double fictionalizes the events of his life. Magnificent!

The other theme will undoubtedly be considered more important by J.M. Coetzee readers (not by me, though.) Why hasn't he been more active in condemnation of apartheid? Why has he tried to right the wrongs only through literary means? Sophie explains to Mr. Vincent that JC was not apolitical but rather "anti-political". And there comes one of the most astute fragments of the book "In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state."

At the end of her interview, Sophie gives a sharp summary of who JC really was. I will not quote the powerful fragment but I strongly recommend the last two paragraphs of that interview to anybody interested in understanding J.M. Coetzee's work.

The second set of "Undated notes" contains a profoundly sad passage about an incident from JC's youth which illustrates the complicated relationship he had with his father. It brought tears to my eyes, and I would like it to become mandatory reading for everybody, especially for parents and their grown-up children.

I was quite reluctant to read "Summertime": I figured that writing about oneself via stories told by other people is a form of narcissistic self-gratification, yes, extremely refined, but still a masturbation of sorts. I was wrong - this is yet another great book from one of the greatest contemporary writers. I am heaping all this praise despite one two-sentence fragment, which sounds like it was written by a bestseller writer rather than a real one: "His father opens his eyes. Generally he is sceptical about the capacity of the ocular orbs to express complex feelings, but this time he is shaken." A case of truly horrible, jarring periphrasis. I almost believe J.M. Coetzee is teasing the reader "Look, I can write crap as well as all other crap authors."

Finally, deep thanks to the author for "liquefaction". If not for "Summertime" I would not have had a chance to read an absolutely outstanding poem by Robert Herrick, written almost 400 years ago, whose first stanza is:

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Four and three quarter stars.


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Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tibor Fischer's "Under the Frog" was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize (the best original novel written in the English language) in 1993. Indeed it is an extraordinary book - powerful, often tragic and hysterically funny. It is advertised as a "black comedy" - well, maybe; life in general might be viewed as a black comedy, considering the futility of human efforts in the face of the guaranteed unhappy ending. Salman Rushdie offers a blurb for the cover: "A delicate, seriocomic treasure." True, but let's clarify that the comic element comes from the writing. While many issues addressed in the novel - deprivation, suffering, death - are not quite that funny, Mr. Fischer's prose is absolutely, totally hilarious.

The novel tells the story of Gyuri Fischer and several friends of his, basketball players, against the backdrop of dramatic events in Hungary between 1944 and 1956, covering the period from the end of German occupation, through the so-called liberation by the Soviet troops, which brought Russian occupation, to the hard years of Rákosi Stalinist regime, until the novel culminates in unforgettable scenes from the failed Hungarian uprising of October 1956.

The depiction of the October uprising in Budapest is astounding in its sheer power. The revolutionary fervor of ordinary people, the chaos and randomness of street fighting, people throwing petrol bottles at Russian tanks, moments of revenge on hated Hungarian security agents, led to tops of high buildings to practice their flying skills. The days of freedom, hope, joy, and death.

The book may take some effort to understand for readers who never lived in a totalitarian regime, where 99.9% of the society are completely against the government, yet nothing can be done about it as most people naturally prefer to live enslaved than die hero deaths or linger in prison. Over half a million of Hungarians were imprisoned, executed, or sent to Russian labor camps, after the "liberation" of this small country. Those who did not actively oppose the government were allowed to live in a Communist heaven, where people pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them, with virtually the entire economy being underground, and grocery stores carrying only two items: pickled gherkins and apricot conserve.

The picture painted by Mr. Fischer is frightfully accurate. The conditions in Poland, my native country, were not as drastic as in Hungary and not as many people perished in Stalinist times, but the grim atmosphere of oppression was the same, and the Polish people enthusiastically celebrated the Hungarian uprising of 1956. These October days are my first memories connected with politics. I recall demonstrations in support of Hungarian freedom fighters, and the blood drives to help thousands of victims. My life was so much easier though - I am about 20 years younger than Gyuri, I missed the war and the Stalinist period, and conditions after 1956 were quite benign both in Hungary and Poland, with Communism showing its "human face".

An outstanding novel, exceptionally well written. Sad and funny to tears.

Five stars.


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