I am a failure as a jobseeker and a citizen.

Non Stop Inertia, by Ivor Southwood
It’s oddly fitting that I’ve had to delay writing a review of a book about work because I’ve been too busy at work. Doubly so as it’s a review that won’t even interest most of the readers of this blog. Non-Stop Inertia is a part biographical and part academic left-wing critique of contemporary UK working culture. It’s an examination of concepts of precarity, and emotional labour. Those aren’t terms I’d heard before, but the concepts underlying them are ones I think most of us would recognise.

For me the yardstick for this sort of writing is Barbara Ehrenreich’s tremendous Nickeled and Dimed. If you’ve not read that book, it’s a sobering account of what living on minimum wage with minimal labour rights is actually like (in that case in the US, but the experiences Ehrenreich describes can certainly be extrapolated to the UK without much difficulty and I imagine to many other countries too).

Ehrenreich wrote from the outside in. She’s a respected writer and journalist who decided to write (among other things) about the lives of the working poor. Ivor Southwood by contrast writes from the inside out, he is one of the working poor. The subject matter is the same though, that hinterland (largely ignored by politicians) of people who slip back and forth between precarious employment and unemployment mostly just getting by, sometimes not getting by at all.

Here’s how it opens:

Business at the warehouse was going downhill rapidly. There had already been meetings on the floor and warnings about dire times ahead. I’d only been taken on from the agency and made “permanent” a couple of months earlier, and already I was expecting to be got rid of. I’d been applying for new jobs continuously anyway since I had started there. But for others who were more attached to the place, its social and historical solidity was dissolving before their eyes. We knew that sooner or later there would be a huge cull which would eliminate about a third of the workforce; but in the meantime people were being given notice in dribs and drabs, two or three every month, mostly people like me who had only recently been employed. Every day could be the day you got the tap on the shoulder.

Southwood takes his particular circumstances as a starting point to explore wider themes. Not just the precarious nature of much contemporary employment (when governments boast of how many new jobs have been created, they often forget to mention how many of them are temporary positions at minimum wage), but also the way in which the unemployed are expected to treat unemployment as if it were a job in itself, and the way in which whether in work or looking for it they’re expected to present an unfaltering image of bland positivity.

All of this of course takes place in the context of a wider culture in which the consumer is held out as king, and in which the values of consumerism seem to migrate into areas where they don’t naturally fit. As Southwood notes, “Even the Jobcentre calls its claimants “customers”.”

Part of Southwood’s thesis is the concept of emotional labour (he’s exploring the idea, he doesn’t claim authorship of it) and the “emotional labourer”. The point is that the employee increasingly is required not merely to turn up and perform their day’s work (with the concept of a day’s work of course becoming increasingly elastic, as home and workplace boundaries soften in the wake of new technologies), but also to present an appropriate emotional front while doing so.

In some professions this has always been true. A McDonalds’ server in the 1950s would have been expected to smile and welcome the customer just as much as one today. What’s new however is the way this self-commoditisation has spread into areas where traditionally one wouldn’t have expected it. Even in the most tedious of jobs employees are expected to show passion for the product, a commitment to the company mission, an emotional engagement in other words which may be wholly at odds with anything one could reasonably expect someone to actually feel.

This spreads beyond work into the search for work. The CV and interview (if you get one) become essentially performative; the prospective employee and employer both adopt a peculiar cod-management/cod-self help rhetoric which sits over the banality of the actual job being discussed. As Southwood says:

the most mundane experience becomes the occasion of a personal epiphany: “working in a busy café really taught me something about the importance of customer service.”

To put my own cards on the table, I think Southwood is right about this. It’s visible in exaggerated form in programmes such as The Apprentice (with the UK version being a bizarrely low-rent emulation of its vastly more moneyed US parent), but it’s true through much of the working world. It’s particularly true at the lower end of the job market (at the professional end your work likely is something you can emotionally engage with, and the connection between your activity and your company’s success is much more evident, so this kind of fake enthusiasm simply isn’t as required).

This isn’t just an issue for the employed. The job-seeker who doesn’t come across as sufficiently positive, who seems demoralised or depressed, risks seeing benefits cut due to a perception that they aren’t doing enough to cure their misfortune.

“Jobseeker”: a more demeaning label is difficult to imagine. It recalls a childish game of hide and seek, and the unemployed are indeed often treated like errant children who need to be kept in line by playground supervisors who make sure they go back into class promptly when the bell rings. There is also the spiritual connotation of “seek and ye shall find”: if you do not find a job this is not a reflection of any real social situation, it is simply a failure of faith on your part; you just do not really believe.

Southwood goes on to show how this system acts to displace analysis of the extent to which an individual’s joblessness may result (at least in part) from factors outside their control:

The only labour now exchanged at the Jobcentre is the performative sort: empty gestures, feigned enthusiasm, containment of hostility, suppression of resentment. The “customer” and “advisor” are required between them to conjure an interaction which is entirely fake, a form of surface acting stretched over the underlying reality of compulsion and surveillance. Posters and leaflets in the Jobcentre depict smiling figures in work-like scenarios, proffering handshakes or clutching official-looking folders. The discourse of customer service adopted by the staff presents an illusion of empowerment, as if the claimant were choosing to buy a product, and deflects any real criticisms of the system onto pseudo-issues of standards or quality.

The language of empowerment then is deeply political. If unemployment is treated as a personal issue, a question of commitment, skills and attitude, then that frames a debate in which the question of whether there are actually enough jobs to go round (and whether they pay enough to live on) isn’t asked. The focus moves from asking whether the economy is working, to asking why the individual isn’t. 

This all makes the book sound rather a grim read, and it likely would be except that Southwood has a fairly lively sense of humour about it all. I loved asides such as this:

If the Jobcentre does indeed hail the benefit claimant as a customer, it is that type of shop where, having been monitored suspiciously by staff for signs of shoplifting, one feels obscurely intimidated and leaves the premises convinced that the theft alarm will go off, even if one’s pockets are empty.

Where Southwood explored his personal situation and used it to illustrate wider societal trends I thought the book worked well. Where he turned to the more academic side of his argument, however, I have to admit to flagging a little. Paragraphs such as:

The argument for a move from macro- to micro-politics represented an effort to divert the flow of the new liquefied culture, to claim the new politics of identity for those whose everyday lives had been routinely crushed by patriarchal-colonial capital.

are quite hard going if you’re not yourself an academic. Southwood explains all his points well, I was never lost even though in many cases he was drawing on a sociological tradition I’m not familiar with (not that there are any sociological traditions that I am familiar with), but phrases like “patriarchal-colonial capital” just don’t make my heart beat faster.

Equally, while I agree with Southwood that there’s something demeaning and ultimately dishonest about the faux-consumerification (great, I’m doing the jargon thing now) of what is frequently low-skilled and uninteresting work, that doesn’t mean the individual is entirely powerless. If there are no jobs you’re not going to find one however positive you may be, but equally while much of how our life plays out is beyond our control it isn’t all beyond our control. Southwood says:

But then I listen to the politicians and the lifestyle gurus and I think that perhaps my situation is self-inflicted. If only I hadn’t attempted to improve myself by going back into higher education – if I had learnt some practical skill to make myself easily employable, rather than fill my head with useless knowledge, or if I had spent the time between lectures doing part-time jobs rather than studying or, even worse, writing – I wouldn’t now be underemployed and trapped by debt.

The hard answer to that is, well, yes. If he had learnt a practical skill instead of going into higher education with no long term goal then he likely would have better employment prospects and less debt. It’s profoundly unfair of course that some people by virtue of birth need never worry about employability and can just follow their dreams and whims, while others must abandon deeply held passions in order to make a living. Profoundly unfair, but true for almost all history.

For a few decades after the second world war there was an expectation that society could and should be fair. If you look to nineteenth century or earlier fiction there’s no such concept, servants are servants and masters are masters. In the twentieth century, for a while, subsidised university education and full employment created a different world in which the servants could at least dream of becoming the masters (even if, if you look at the numbers, actual social mobility didn’t change much).

That dream is now closing and we’re returning to the world of the nineteenth century novel. The existence of a precariat, a class of people a single paycheck away from penury, is nothing new. Dickens would have recognised it in a heartbeat, he’d just have called it something else. Perhaps Southwood’s misfortune in part is to have the dreams of a man of the 20th century, but to be living in the 21st.

Still, Non-Stop Inertia is an argument, it’s not the entire debate. Southwood puts forward his perspective, but never claims that there aren’t others. He’s stronger on the personal side than the academic, but that’s the more interesting side anyway, and his analysis is much stronger than his few proposed potential solutions (as he himself admits), but that’s ok because the truth is that just because someone identifies a problem doesn’t mean they have to be the one to come up with an answer to it (or even that one exists). In the end when he writes about:

This constant precariousness and restless mobility, compounded by a dependence upon relentlessly updating market-driven technology and the scrolling CGI of digital media, together suggest a sort of cultural stagflation, a population revving up without getting anywhere. The result is a kind of frenetic inactivity: we are caught in a cycle of non-stop inertia.

I think he writes about something which is real and which may of us would recognise. That makes this a worthwhile book, and one I’m glad to have read.

For the curious, there’s an interesting interview with Southwood here and an excellent review of the book here.

Nostalgia for the future

Militant Modernism, by Owen Hatherley

Who would have thought a book on brutalist architecture could be fun? Who would have thought a book dedicated to Southampton City Council Architects Department could be an invigorating read? Well, me I guess or I wouldn’t have bought it, but even so I was surprised by how enjoyable Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism is.

Clocking in at under 150 pages, Militant Modernism consists of four essays on different aspects of modernism, topped and tailed by a foreword and afterword which seek (with mixed success) to put the individual pieces into a larger overall context. At its heart Militant Modernism is an examination of the promise of modernism as a utopian alternative to traditional approaches to architecture, to culture, and to sex. This is Modernism as Socialism, a destruction of what was in order to clear the ground for a better tomorrow that sadly never arrived. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Erase the traces. Destroy, in order to create. Build a new world on the ruins of the old. This, it is often thought, is the Modernist imperative, but what of it if the new society never emerged? We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future’s ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting. So what would it mean, then, to look for the future’s remnants? To uncover clues about those who wanted, as Walter Benjamin put it, to ‘live without traces’? Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?

Hatherley appears to come from a very similar background to my own. He grew up on an English council estate, listened to post-punk music and read comics like 2000AD and authors like Ballard and the Strugatsky Brothers. Like me, his politics was forged in the 1980s, a peculiarly partisan decade, and so by opposition to a particular strand of right-wing philosophy. My impression is that he’s perhaps a few years older, and of course I went on to City law (betraying all my youthful ideals like so many before me) where he went on to write books about Modernism. Still, he writes from the place I come from, and that makes this in some ways a very easy book for me to respond to.

Hatherley opens by looking at how architects and town planners of the 1960s sought to create a new utopia, a working class Eldorado in which the traces of a tired traditionalism would be swept aside in favour of genuinely democratic forms of housing, which would in time lead to genuinely democratic people. The experiment of course failed, and the buildings it produced are even now widely reviled. The promise was of a new kind of living, but it was a promise largely imposed from without and whatever chance it might ever have had of succeeding was throttled by costcutting and use of substandard non-specified materials. As so often happens, architecture in compromised implementation achieved far less than it offered in pristine theory.

Where Hatherley excels is in his passionate eloquence. He sees the flaws of this architecture (it’s hard not to when you’ve grown up with it). He sees too though what it was trying to achieve, and the sheer ambition of it. He’s brilliantly excoriating about the timidity of what we in the UK have today: “Postmodernism’s aesthetic of pastiche, historical reference, cosiness and conservatism.” He rails against how “… in houses, schools and hospitals the choice is between an ultra-timid Ikea Modernism or the semi-Victorian developers’ vernacular of Barrat Homes and their ilk.”

Hatherley knows his material, and he’s often highly persuasive in arguing for a reassessment not just of the remnants of this vast social experiment carved from steel and concrete, but more importantly of its aims. He’s equally persuasive though in his attacks on the blandness of much of what replaced it, and on the intellectual vacuity at the heart of modern British intellectual and political life.

We live in a managerial age, with no great choices of ideology or vision. Our leaders compete on the same narrow platform speaking the same peculiar and euphemistic language full of mock-outrage and sham-empathy. Our intellectuals aren’t, they are instead personalities picked either for the flamboyance with which they present themselves or their ability to speak in brief generalities which sound vaguely profound but which ultimately reassure the viewers by echoing back to them what they already think.

Perhaps the most irksome of Ikea Modernism’s products was Channel 4′s The Perfect Home, presented by Alain de Botton, promoting his The Architecture of Happiness. Perambulating about the place with an expression of casual intellectuality and immense self-satisfaction, he encapsulates all that is malign in British intellectual life.

The introduction and first chapter cover this material with real vigour, and are an absolute pleasure to read. Hatherley covers an extraordinary amount of material in these few pages, at one point providing an impressively concise analysis of the differences between Vortiticism and Futurism – and why Futurism had appeal in newly industrial societies such as Russia and Italy but not in longer developed countries such as Britain (though this analysis of course owes much to Wyndham Lewis’s own arguments, and a case could be made that the real difference between Vorticism and Futurism was born of Lewis’s refusal to be part of a movement he wasn’t the head of). I attended an entire exhibition on Vorticism quite recently, and Hatherley explains it better here in a handful of sentences than that exhibition did with entire roomfuls of exhibits (and it was a good exhibition).

Hatherley goes on to an analysis of Modernist architecture in the Soviet Union, of its now largely unrecognised influence on international architectural movements and of the tragedy of how so much groundbreaking and inspiring work was cut short by Stalinism and a Soviet state that grew far less keen on revolution once its own people were the ones in charge. He looks too at the tremendous (and again largely unrecognised) influence of Soviet science fiction on Soviet architecture, and therefore on Western visions of what architecture could do.

Unfortunately, not every section is equally successful. The essay dealing with sexpol (revolutionary sexual politics and the links between communism, architecture and sexuality) ironically becomes in places rather dry as Hatherley reaches increasingly to obscure sources and dense theoretical terminology. The chapter culminates in a detailed analysis of the still controversial 1971 film WR – Mysteries of the Organism. The film even today is heavily censored, but as Hatherley explores it that comes to seem increasingly not so much an act of repression as one of mercy. The film sounds a self-indulgent mess, and it’s hard not to notice that the revolutionary cinema it emerged from and which addressed ideas of sexual liberation still mostly involved male directors making films about liberated women having lots of sex but dying before the end of the movie. As with that least feminist of films, Thelma and Louise, the actual politics and the ostensible politics may be very far apart.

Similarly, while I enjoyed the final essay (on Brecht and on taking a critical stance in relation to culture) it didn’t feel to me a natural fit with the sections on British and Soviet architecture. In that afterword Hatherley brings the book’s various strands together by explaining that the point is exploring how to create a counter-culture. Hatherley doesn’t mean here some form of vague late-1960s hippy alternative, “but rather Modernism itself as counter-culture, drawing on sexual politics, industrial aesthetics, critical theory, a new urbanism, in order to suggest – ‘as a tradition and as a vision’ – the possible outlines of a world after capitalism.”

That makes sense to me, and perhaps in a larger book Hatherley would have pulled that off. In this one though I’m left with two great chapters which fit well with the afterword and foreword, one rather dull chapter and one chapter which while very interesting I really wasn’t persuaded did fit that well with the rest. Despite that I’m left with a more nuanced view of modernist and brutalist architecture, a deeper understanding of how theory and politics interacted and helped shape (now largely overooked elements of) our culture and in the main part I was thoroughly entertained along the way. This is an ambitious book, and while not every part of it worked for me that’s a price I’m more than willing to pay if the result is that a book stretches and challenges me. It may even appear on my end of year list, and that’s not bad going for a thin book on an architecture I grew up hating.

Human nature was just so much infinitely malleable putty

City of Heavenly Tranquility, by Jasper Becker

I don’t like abandoning books. I used to take it as a point of pride in fact that I never abandoned them. Those days are long past. Now I don’t hope a bad book will turn into Tolstoy on page 205.

What’s frustrating about Jasper Becker’s City of Heavenly Tranquility is that it shouldn’t be a bad book. It’s a non-fiction study of Beijing, it’s history and how that history is being lost today in a wave of new construction. It’s written by Jasper Becker, who wrote Hungry Ghosts – an excellent account of the horrific mass famine created by Mao’s policies in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Becker knows his material and he can write. What went wrong?

City of Heavenly Tranquility is essentially a form of travel writing. Becker visits places, interviews people, writes what he finds and gives it a historical context. It’s not quite reportage, but nor is it intended merely to entertain. Becker’s core thesis is that historic Beijing is being wilfully destroyed by a Chinese bureaucracy that is utterly indifferent, even hostile, to the priceless heritage it is annihilating.

Imagine the outcry if, in less than a decade, London underwent a similar transformation. If the West End, Notting Hill, Knightsbridge, Holland Park and the City of London were to be levelled and replaced by giant residential and commercial blocks. If every landmark – Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, Regent Street, Covent Garden, the courtyards of the Temple, the alleys of Soho – were to disappear at once. Imagine the outcry if in less than a decade New York underwent a similar transformation. If Wall Street, Central Park, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Bronx, the Upper East Side were to be levelled and replaced by giant new residential towers and commercial office blocks. If every landmark – Times Square, Madison Square Gardens, Radio City – were to disappear at once.

That’s an absolutely valid subject for a book. The Chinese authorities, and probably a fair few of the Chinese public, would have counterarguments but there’s nothing wrong with a healthy debate. The trouble then isn’t the concept. It’s the execution.

In the first chapter Becker describes how he is shown round a housing development intended for the new urban rich:

‘I like it, especially the fake fireplace. This is real luxury,’ I said politely. ‘Later, I will show you the landscaped garden, the vast lawn, the children’s playground, the European fountains, the stylish sculptures, the beautiful flowers, and the underground car park,’ she said.

It’s a well written passage. As the conversation progressed though I found myself wondering how true it was. Becker is shown round because he’s pretending to be a prospective buyer. He isn’t openly there as a journalist. That’s of course normal, but his text purports to be what was said. Did he take contemporaneous notes? Write it up immediately afterwards? Or has he reconstructed it, written essentially what was said, if not the precise words?

The line between reportage and fiction can be a slippery one. That though is a reason to take extra care and to be clear with readers how you’ve drawn that line. I wasn’t far into the book, but already I had concerns about the accuracy of what I was reading (I also thought quietly satirising the vulgarity of new money a bit easy, but that’s a far lesser point).

Becker has little time for modern China, which he sees as brutal, vulgar and undemocratic. Against the brash present he places the fruits of 5,000 years of civilisation. What’s being lost, for him, is immense. What’s being gained in return is tawdry. Here he puts the special nature of Beijing in perspective:

in Beijing the two great strands of Asian history are united: the settled urban civilization, steeped in Confucianism, and the wilder world of the Huns, the Mongols, the Manchus and other nomadic peoples who roamed the steppes of Asia, living in felt tents.

The problem with all this is the question of alternatives. It’s easy to deride rapid development and its costs. I stayed in a hutong (traditional alley area) and I’d be sorry to see them all go (most are already demolished to make way for new apartment complexes). That said, I don’t have to live in one full time. If I did I might be a bit less keen on history and a bit more on good plumbing.

It’s clear that China’s modernisation has a cost. It’s clear too that decisions have been taken which future, richer, inhabitants of Beijing will sorely regret. Popular protests against demolition of beloved sites or buildings are brushed aside. The beautiful is being cast aside for a needlessly ugly pragmatism. Still, it’s important to remember that this isn’t just a tourist destination. People have to live there.

Far from Beijing’s ugly pretensions to modernity, one felt a little freer and in such a haunt of ancient peace could savour an unchanging China fixed for ever in a romantic decay.

I like romantic decay as much as the next man. Probably more than many since I am on occasion of a somewhat melancholic bent (despite being generally cheerful, I guess I’m cheerfully melancholic). That said, a tourist’s romantic decay can be a resident’s slum. China isn’t a theme park.

Were my only issue with Becker’s thesis (much of which I was persuaded by, just not the naive romanticism of quotes like the one above) then I wouldn’t call this a bad book. A book isn’t bad because I don’t agree with it. The much greater problem is the inescapable whiff of cut-and-paste.

My suspicion, though only that, is that this book is a collation of magazine articles edited together into one work. A chapter would mention Mongol rule, then another would mention it again as if for the first time (which if each chapter were a standalone article it would be of course). A section would talk of how the Mongol khans hid their tombs so well that they were never found, and then another would introduce the same factoid again without recognition of the previous reference.

Equally the quality of the chapters varied widely. Some are marvellous. The description of the Ming court eunuchs and their conflicts with the mandarins were absolutely fascinating:

It was only natural that the mandarins felt contempt towards eunuchs, whose chief qualification was a willingness to submit to castration, while they had to pass very competitive examinations.

So good were these sections that if Becker decided to write a book about the Chinese imperial court generally I’d buy it in a heartbeat. The following is just one, slightly salacious, example:

The sexual practices of the imperial court make for the oddest reading. Court astrologers were employed in determining the optimum hours for sex, based on cycles for yin and yang, in the belief that with the right timing the result would be a boy. Then, after the second meal of the day, a eunuch would present the emperor with a silver tray with bamboo slips, each with the name of one of the concubines. The emperor would turn over the name of his choice and she would then be brought at the correct time, wrapped in a blanket. It was the duty of the eunuch standing in the alcove to shout after a decent interval, ‘Time is up’, followed by the advice: ‘Preserve your imperial body, Sire!’ If there was silence after the third call, then the eunuch would step in to carry the woman out, only pausing to ask if the emperor wished her to bear a child. If the answer was yes, then he would record all relevant details in a notebook.

Becker also writes persuasively about the crimes of Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the Summer Palace and so robbed the Chinese people and humanity generally of a great treasure. Elgin was a barbarian, and Becker is right to condemn him. In another section though you get journalistic filler like this:

Many of the men – more than thirty, some said – who had helped Howard Carter open Tutankhamun’s tomb had died in mysterious circumstances. Some believe they succumbed after inhaling deadly bacteria trapped in the Egyptian tombs: could that happen here in China?

Against which I wrote a one word comment (it was “bollocks”, kindle preserved my notes on that passage for posterity).

The end result is a book that has great things with it, but that isn’t the sum of its parts. There’s two or three different books here, and they sit poorly together. It was that along with the repetition that made me wonder if it was cobbled together from assorted articles, some good and some less so.

Ultimately the origin of the book doesn’t matter. What does is that I got so irritated by it that I stopped reading it. It’s been over a year now since that decision, and I don’t see it changing at this point. I’ve had a part draft of this review kicking around since February and since I had a free moment it seemed a good time to post this one up.

I read City of Heavenly Tranquility on my kindle, as mentioned above. The kindle edition is unfortunately extremely badly formatted, containing many errors such as “sturdyirongates” being written as one word. If you are interested in the parts about the Imperial court and the eunuchs I’d strongly advise getting a physical copy. Also, for the record, the quote I’ve used as the title of this piece is a view Becker ascribes to the bureacrats, not one he at all supports.

all the more human

Flypaper, by Robert Musil and translated by Peter Wortsman

Robert Musil is famous (being a bit generous with that word there for a moment) for his unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. By all accounts it’s an incredible work. I’m too fond of editors to ever welcome the idea of reading an interrupted book – one that not even the author finished polishing – but I’ve been told that for Musil I should put that prejudice to one side.

Fair enough, but The Man Without Qualities has another barrier besides being incomplete. It’s nearly 700 pages long. That’s a lot to launch into with an author I don’t know.

Enter Penguin Modern Classics with their pocket editions each coming in at around the 60 page mark. Flypaper is a collection of fueilletons, short essays, by Robert Musil. There’s nine of them in this tiny collection, and as an introduction to Musil it’s about as good as it could be. That’s the joy of these little Penguin editions. They cost almost nothing, they’re concise and they’re a tremendous way to try out an author who for one reason or another you might be unsure about investing in.

Each of the nine little pieces in this collection is a small marvel of mercilessly precise observation. The title narrative, Flypaper, consists of a description of a piece of flypaper and the slow death of the flies that land on it. It’s at times hard to read. Partly I admit because I had nightmares about flypaper as a child (someone unwisely left some above my bed at a relatives home, meaning I had a front line view of exactly what Musil describes here. Whether that caused the peculiar horror I still have of the sight of dying insects or whether that fear already existed and so made the flypaper terrible I have no way of knowing). Partly though because Musil takes something as insignificant as the death of a fly and by not looking away invests it with majesty and with a more universal significance.

Here’s Flypaper’s first paragraph, after which it gets much more disquieting:

Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it – not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there – it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognised as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers holds us tight.

Musil then explores the flies ever tiring attempts to free themselves, each miring them more firmly to the paper. He talks of moments of furious struggle, of sudden exhaustion, of the slow despair and futility of a fight against inevitable disability (as wings and limbs become stuck fast) and death.

There is real empathy here, and it is the empathy which makes it so awful. The next, Monkey Island, examines a small island in the heart of Rome. A wide and deep ditch separates the island from the land around it, and on it is a tree and a colony of monkeys none of whom can quite jump or climb that ditch.

This then is the monkeys’ kingdom. Musil’s gaze sweeps over it, from the strongest monkeys who form the royal family of the island to the outcasts who live within the ditch itself. It is a microcosm of us, a point Musil has no need to underline but which cannot be avoided as he shows the social and literal gulf dividing those monkeys who have from those who feed from fallen crumbs.

I won’t describe each essay. They are superbly written. Some, like those first two, draw out uncomfortable truths about our own existence. Some, such as The Painstpreader or It’s Lovely Here are satires, of artistic mediocrity on the one hand and of tourists’ desire to encounter “something that is acknowledged by experts as beautiful” on the other.

The briefest piece, titled Sarcophagus Cover, is a touching description of two ancient Roman sarcophagi that have on them a couple still gazing affectionately at each other through the long centuries. The last, The Blackbird, is a sort of fable different in nature from all that has gone before. Not so much an essay as an example of his fiction, but no less finely crafted. Musil has range.

This next quote is an entire piece, albeit a very short one. I hesitated to quote it, since after discussing Flypaper and Monkey Island there’s a risk of giving the impression that Musil only focuses on the cruel. That’s not true of course. What Musil focuses on is the world.

Fishermen on the Baltic

On the beach they’ve dug out a little pit with their hands, and from a sack of black earth they’re pouring in fat earthworms, the loose black earth and the mass of worms make for an obscure, moldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand. Beside this they place a very tidy looking wooden chest. It looks like a long, not particularly wide drawer or counting board, and is full of clean yarn; and on the other side of the pit another such, but empty, drawer is placed.

The hundred hooks attached to the yarn in the one drawer are neatly arranged on the end of a small iron pole and are now being unfastened one after the other and laid in the empty drawer, the bottom of which is filled with nothing but clean wet sand. A very tidy operation. In the meantime, however, four long, lean and strong hands oversee the process as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm.

The men who do this crouch two by two on knees and heels, with mighty, bony backs, long, kindly faces, and pipes in their mouths. They exchange incomprehensible words that flow forth as softly as the motion of their hands. One of them takes up a fat earthworm with two fingers, tears it into three pieces with the same two fingers of the other hand, as easily and exactly as a shoemaker snips off the paper band after he’s taken the measurement; the other one then presses these squirming pieces calmly and carefully onto each hook. This having been accomplished, the worms are then doused with water and laid in neat, little beds, one next to the other, in the drawer with the soft sand, where they can die without immediately losing their freshness.

It is a quiet, delicate activity, whereby the coarse fishermen’s fingers step softly as on tiptoes. You have to pay close attention. In fair weather the dark blue sky arches above, and the seagulls circle high over the land like white swallows.

The phrases there. “A very tidy operation.” The fishermen with their “kindly faces” impaling the worms. The transition from fat life to “squirming pieces” and the tidy convenience of the sand-filled drawers. The fingers that “step softly as on tiptoes”. Marvellous imagery culminating in that final vision of freedom and beauty and utter indifference. To the fishermen the worms are no different to the hooks or the drawers; the gulls are part of their scenery, as they are to the gulls.

I’ve not commented on the translation. Obviously I’m not familiar enough with German to read the original (or I would have), so I can’t say how faithful this is. I can’t say that of any translation really. Still, the language is spare and precise and beautiful and I can’t believe but that Wortsman has done an excellent job here.

The point, as I understand it anyway, of the Penguin pocket editions is to tempt readers to try new writers. For me it’s worked. I’ve tried Musil, who I knew about but was daunted by, and I’m no longer daunted. I plan now to pick up a copy of his short novel The Confusions of Young Torless and that going well I think The Man Without Qualities is looking a lot more enticing than it once did. Well done Penguin.

The death of enchantment

What Ever Happened to Modernism, by Gabriel Josipovici

It’s perhaps fitting that in sitting down to write this review I found myself struggling with how to start and with questions about my authority to say anything.

There are three broad strands in What Ever Happened to Modernism? Josipovici writes a brief history of modernism (though he wouldn’t thank me for saying that). He makes an argument for why modernism is not a historical event or movement but an ongoing challenge to art (he might thank me for that). Finally he offers a critique of contemporary English literary culture (which got his book more discussed than read, but then that’s true of so many books).

I … want to argue that Modernism needs to be understood … as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us.

A few years back I had a fondness for popular science books. Among my favourite authors in that field was John Gribbin. Gribbin writes about complex concepts in modern physics, but he does so in a hugely accessible way. He knows his stuff, but he can explain it to laymen. If you’re interested in understanding the rudiments of quantum physics and lack the relevant background Gribbin’s your man.

I read a fair few Gribbin books, and thanks to him have a reasonable grasp (as reasonable as I probably can have anyway) of what’s going on in the world of modern cosmology. Even so, I couldn’t pick up a text aimed at actual physicists and have a hope of understanding much beyond the commas.

What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a work of literary criticism. Literary criticism is a bit like economics. If we read and enjoy literature then literary criticism can seem intuitive, obvious even. In the same way because we all, with varying success, balance our bank accounts economics can seem intuitive, obvious even. The truth is though that I, and probably most people reading this blog, lack the background and training to engage in literary criticism at the academic level.

That’s relevant to a key problem with this book. What is it? Populist or academic? It’s a bit of both, and that raises difficulties which I’ll return to.

Finally, I should note that in order to talk about the book I’ll have to summarise its nearly 200 pages of closely argued text in my own words. That means I can’t do the argument justice. In paraphrasing it I diminish it. To properly capture what Josipovici says I would have to write it out again verbatim.

For Josipovici modernism is a response in art (all art, music and painting too for example, not just literature) to the “disenchantment of the world”. That disenchantment is the loss of the Medieval sense of the numinous as being part of everyday life. In short, the Medieval vision of a world filled with purpose and divine meaning gave way to what would ultimately become the Enlightenment with its vision of a secular world governed by reason and natural laws (yes, I did just gloss over about 400 years there).

This is absolutely critical to everything that follows. The death of enchantment does not mean that people were happy in the middle ages but disillusioned thereafter. It is not a personal loss of enchantment. The point is that the European concept of the world changed from it being a place in which the natural and supernatural were different facets of the same reality to a world in which the natural and the supernatural were firmly separated (and in which the supernatural could therefore potentially be discarded entirely).

With the death of enchantment comes the death of meaning. Before the disenchantment of the world it is possible to speak with authority, because the world has meaning from which authority can be derived. After that disenchantment there is no longer such an authority. The only authority that exists is that which we assert.

For Josipovici this raises questions about the authority of the artist. In particular, the authority of the author. If the world no longer grants authority then where does it come from? What right has the author to assert that what they write is in any sense true? Worse, if the world is without meaning is not the act of writing a novel itself a form of lie about the world, an imposition of narrative where none in fact exists?

Josipovici explores this in part by a frankly fascinating discussion of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He focuses particularly on the way through the foreword and other authorial insertions Cervantes undermines the reliability of his own work and on how the text is no more reliable than Don Quixote’s perceptions within it.

Don Quixote’s madness dramatises for us the hidden madness in every realist novel, the fact that the hero of every such novel is given a name merely to persuade us of his reality, and that he has giants created for him to do battle with and Dulcineas for him to fall in love with simply to satisfy the demands of the narrative. And it dramatises the way we as readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world. It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted. We need enchantment and are prepared to pay good money to get it. The profound irony of Don Quixote is this: that we as we read about the hero’s obvious delusions we believe that we are more realistic about the world than he is, less enchanted, whereas we are of course ourselves in that very moment caught in Cervantes’ web and enchanted by his tale.

Historically, BC (before Cervantes) the artist could appeal to tradition. The death of enchantment though means that tradition can no longer be trusted. It is founded on nothing beyond itself. The author can of course create their own tradition, can create their own reality, but in doing so they create narrative and so write something which has no real relation to the actual world around us.

In this sense then modernism is an attempt to address the problem faced by art in seeking to represent a world that is independent of humanity. When the world was created in our image we could trust it in some sense to reflect us. If it is not, we cannot, and tools of art such as perspective, harmony, narrative, may all be nothing but our own inventions; not mirrors at all.

In our modern age, an age without access to the transcendental and therefore without any sure guide, an age of geniuses but no apostles, only those who do not understand what has happened will imagine that they can give their lives (and their works) a shape and therefore a meaning; the shape and meaning conferred by an ending.

What does all this mean though for the author? If you are driven to write because writing is intrinsic to your very nature, but you no longer believe in tradition and are troubled by the implications of the act of writing, where does that leave you? The problem of modernism is the problem of the artist who no longer believes they have authority but yet must create art.

We are now in a position to understand a little better the nature of the anxieties that gripped the writers of our opening examples. What is afflicting Mallarmé, Hofmannstahl, Kafka and Beckets is the sense that they feel impelled to write, this being the only way they know to be true to their own natures, yet at the same time they find that in doing so they are being false to the world – imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning which it doesn’t have – and thus, ultimately, being false to themselves.

Modernism then is “… the effort, through art, to recognise that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art. That effort is at the heart of modernism.” This is the essence of Josipovici’s argument.

Modernist fiction is fiction which seeks to engage not only with reality but also to engage with its own reality. If the only possible authority is that which the author establishes for themselves then the work itself must establish that authority and in order to do so must recognise its own existence. That means that in order to be realistic, it must acknowledge its own artificiality and therefore the fact that it is not real.

Or perhaps not. Josipovici spends a fair while attacking “false friends” of modernism. Various critics and writers who while advocating it and defending it have missed the point and so diminished it. This raises again of course a question of authority. What authority does Josipovici have to assert his interpretation over those others he regards as mistaken? Naturally, only that he establishes through his arguments through the course of his book.

That takes me back to something I mentioned early on – the issue of whether this is a populist or an academic book. Josipovici backs his arguments through frequent references to Hegel and Kierkegaard, neither of whom I’ve read. In a very real sense I’m simply not qualified to debate the points he raises. This isn’t though an academic text. Stylistically it feels aimed very much at me. It makes its arguments in lay terms but by reference to texts that most laymen won’t be familiar with.

The problem is that Josipovici is making a case for modernist literature as a valid and relevant literary form. He argues that it is a form which is superior to the novels currently enjoying success among the English speaking literary readership. To do so he must write at a populist level, but his argument is not populist and understanding it takes real work. As I write this I’m unsure that I have understood it (but am sure some would say I haven’t). This may not be an avoidable problem, but it could be that modernism needs a John Gribbin and Josipovici is by nature a physicist, not a populariser of physics.

I’m conscious that I’ve made this book sound terribly dry. That’s unfair because it’s not. Josipovici ranges widely in his use of examples, moving within the space of a page from Mann to Stravinsky to Picasso. He quotes even more than I have here, and his quotes are well chosen. He examines the poetry of Wordsworth and makes an excellent case for it as being more exciting, more innovative than in all honesty I had ever recognised. He is excited by modernism, and he communicates that. I finished the book with a fresh (if possibly wrong) understanding of modernism and a renewed desire to engage with it.

There’s a lot in here and I can only touch on a fraction of it in this blog entry. Josipovici talks about Greek drama and its focus on action (praxis) and social context rather than the individual. He made me reconsider my views on some of Picasso’s work and has me reaching for Stravinsky recordings my wife owns that I hadn’t previously even bothered to listen to. At times reading it is invigorating.

Where Josipovici is less successful is where he criticises others. To his credit he doesn’t hide behind generalities. He names authors that he regards as having missed the point of the challenge raised by modernism and who he sees as producing works that are flat, unexciting, mere anecdote. He doesn’t always persuade me on them though.

Among his examples of writers of slightly dull realist fiction (which he would note is nothing of the kind) is Anthony Powell. I have though read the entirety of A Dance to the Music of Time and to read it as purely a story, as an exercise in narrative, is rather to miss the point.

Powell is telling a story, yes, but he’s also exploring issues of the nature of personal identity, the degree to which the individual is an extension of a social context rather than an atomic unit. Powell is quite consciously looking back himself to Greek drama and to questions of what it means to have free will (arguably Nick Jenkins lacks free will, Widmerpool possesses it and this is not necessarily to his advantage).

Put bluntly, I don’t agree with Josipovici on Powell. Equally, I don’t agree that the problem with McEwan is that he is a stylistically conservative writer who writes supposedly realist novels that are in fact suffused with a wholly fictitious meaning. Actually, as I write that (and I’ll let it stand) I’m persuaded that’s precisely the problem with McEwan. He writes ostensibly realist novels that are in fact so slavishly plot driven that they become more fantastic than anything Tolkien wrote.

The irony here is that I only heard about What Ever Happened to Modernism? because of a handful of pages where Josipovici criticises certain members of the current literary canon. That got his book discussed, but it’s a very small part of it. Josipovici’s main interest is in arguing for modernism, not against what we have instead (though he is absolutely scathing about Nemirovsky, querying why a fairly middlebrow novelist is being hailed as a major literary discovery).

A little controversy is nothing to be afraid of. To argue for something is inevitably to argue against something else and I like that Josipovici names names. It also doesn’t hurt that I instinctively agree with him. I do think current Anglo-American publishing is deeply conservative and that we lack in a formally unexciting period.

… ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the ‘pretentious’, worships the serious and the ‘profound’, so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a ‘majestic sweep’, are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.

Quite. Still, was there ever a time that wasn’t true? Did The Great Gatsby outsell The Green Hat? I doubt it (though if it did that analogy will look pretty silly). Modernism is on Josipovici’s account a challenge, and the challenging will always be less popular. We most of us read for enjoyment, perhaps for escapism, and narrative is inherently enjoyable. It’s a lie, but it’s a beautiful lie.

I opened unsure how to start, and I close unsure how to finish. Josipovici ends by recognising that he has himself no intrinsic authority. He recognises that it could be argued that all this is just a matter of taste, though he hopes he’s shown it’s not that simple. He expects the argument to continue, and I expect he’s right. Like him, I’m glad that’s true. There are no endings in art, no final summations, so it’s probably right that I don’t really have one here either.

Here is a (predictably acid) review by Philip Hensher, here a (predictably glowing) one by Tom McCarthy. There’s also an excellent blog entry on the book by Danny S Byrne here which I strongly recommend. As I wrote this I was given the link to this blog entry which I have yet to properly engage with (partly as I didn’t want it to influence my own thoughts while I was still crystallising them) but which looks exceptionally well informed.

… the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose.

In Praise of Shadows, by Junichirō Tanizaki

Nobody has given as much thought to the lavatory as the Japanese. Not even NASA.

A few years ago my wife and I went on holiday to Japan. We wanted to spend at least one night in a ryokan, a traditional inn, and in Kyoto we booked that one night at the Tawariya.

The Tawariya is an institution in Japan, though not a well known one. Heads of State stay there. Our one night cost a large proportion of our accommodation budget for the entire holiday. It was worth it. It was a place of beauty and charm that embodied the highest traditions of Japanese culture and cuisine.

In the main our room was one that a Japanese nobleman of centuries past might well recognise. Paper screens, tatami flooring, a small and carefully unkept garden just outside the main window, an alcove with a beautifully chosen calligraphy scroll, a cedarwood bath filled to the brim with searingly hot water and a rich smell of cedar rising off it.

The only real exception to classical design was the toilet. That was modern, and modern as only a Japanese toilet truly can be. It had a heated seat, it had a soundsytem built in with a choice of noises to drown out any offending ones you might make yourself, it had a built-in bidet and a whole host of other functions. It had a control panel. More precisely, it had a control panel in Japanese.

I stood in front of it. I have always been of an empirical mindset. I pushed a button. A jet of warm water rose majestically out of the bowl and neatly sprayed my crotch. I was, of course, fully dressed. We had to call a maid to help us turn it off.

In Praise of Shadows is an essay written in 1933 by the Japanese author Junichirō Tanizaki. Tanizaki is a major figure in Japanese literature. He’s most famous for The Makioka Sisters, which I haven’t read, but among his other novels was Diary of a Mad Old Man which I have and which I thought extraordinary. Here he talks about design, about beauty and about the importance of shadows to the Japanese aesthetic.

At first In Praise of Shadows seems like a book on architectural design. The Vintage edition I read, smoothly translated by Thomas J Harper and Edward G Seidensticker (wonderful name that) even comes with a foreword from Charles Moore of the School of Architecture at UCLA. It opens as follows:

What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn.
…
The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches ina closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary milk glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it.

Tanizaki goes on to describe his own efforts in reconciling tradition with modernity (a problem that is if anything harder to address today than then). He’s pleased with how he managed to get decent heating into his home by putting an electric heater in a sunken hearth, but his compromise with the traditional paper screened sliding doors (he puts glass behind the paper to keep the heat in) just looks unfortunate.

In Praise of Shadows doesn’t just come with a foreword. It comes too with a helpful afterword by Thomas J Harper. In it he discusses the difference between the traditional Japanese essay and the ones we in the West are used to. While ours tend to focus clearly on a particular point, in Japanese tradition the essay meanders and touches on one subject and then another. It’s thought more natural – a closer representation of how the mind really functions. There is still a point, but it’s approached by a more winding path than a European or North American reader might be used to.

Having given some thought to home design Tanizaki thinks about traditional toilets. In temples they were dimly lit places, full of shadows and placed at the end of paths among hushed gardens. They were places of reflection. Admittedly very cold places of reflection, but then “elegance is frigid”.

Such bathrooms are of course not practical in a modern home and anyway, the taste increasingly is for Western style convenience with gleaming tiles and bright white light. There is no place in them for shadows; shadows are synonymous with dirt. In the traditional bathroom the shadows concealed the grime, the Western one however must be spotless and more, must be seen to be spotless.

Tanizaki then sees Japanese design changing in the face of modernisation, and modernisation here means Westernisation. The question that raises is whether you can adopt Western designs and technologies without also adopting Western culture.

To take a trivial example near at hand: I wrote a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like our writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to sink down from the handle into the brush. And since we would have then found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper – even under mass production, if you will, – would have been most in demand. Foreign ink and pen would not be as popular as they are; the talk of discarding our system of writing for Roman letters would be less noisy; people would still feel an affection for the old system. But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions. Quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment, when one thinks of it, has had a vast, almost boundless, influence on our culture.

Although a short essay, around sixty pages, Tanizaki covers a lot of ground and I’m not going to attempt to mention all of it here. He talks about the importance of shadow in Japanese arts and design. He considers traditional gold inlaid laquerware and how gaudy it often seems in the electric light of the museums in which it is displayed. In a room lit only by candles the gold instead catches the little light present and so becomes something part hidden and glorious.

Even the plain black laquerware which the Japanese once used widely but now use only for bowls and trays becomes something more when seen by candle. He discovers this though in a traditional restaurant which now only uses candles on request – most customers prefer modern lighting.

… I realized then that only in dim half-lights the true beauty of Japanese laquerware revealed. The rooms at the [restaurant] are about nine feet square, the size of a comfortable little tearoom, and the alcove pillars and ceilings glow with faint smoky luster, dark even in the light of the lamp. But in the still dimmer light of the candle stand, as I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of the laquerware a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond, a beauty I had not before seen. It had not been mere chance, I realized, that our ancestors, having discovered laquer, had conceived such a fondness for objects finished in it.

Tanizaki’s argument wanders, at times to odd places. He muses on women kept bone-thin in gloomy houses – their pale faces and hands emerging from shadows which seem almost to emanate from the sleeves of their thick kimonos. He makes them sound beautiful, but it is a beauty which is very much in the gaze of the beholder. His women may be elegant, but I would personally rather be a Harajuku girl in cosplay that I at least chose for myself. Once again, “elegance is frigid”.

More challenging is Tanizaki’s thesis that much of Japanese aesthetics is born from skin colour. That with white skin the West is drawn to a lack of ambiguity and to banishing shade so that everything is bright and absolute. The Japanese skin he sees as always tinged with shadow however pale it is, and this he sees as influencing character.

It’s nonsense (and the afterword has little sympathy for this part), but what’s not nonsense is his argument that wherever it comes from culture shapes design and is in turn then shaped by it. Modernisation and Westernisation are inextricably linked.

Tanizaki is nostalgic, but not stupid. He does not wish to return to a fast disappearing past. In his own home he tries to balance the modern and the traditional like everyone else and even he only sometimes gets it right. He means it when he talks about the toilet as a place of repose, but he knows too that there’s something slightly silly about the idea.

What Tanizaki is arguing here is that the Japanese aesthetic is unique because it comes from Japan – from its conditions, history, culture. That does not deny the uniqueness of other aesthetics. The problem for Japan though is that it has been passed by, superceded, and to compete must adapt and the fact of that adaptation necessarily means the destruction of its own aesthetic. Yes, fragments remain, but for him the remaining examples of flower arranging, calligraphy, dance, are dead arts preserved but no longer vital. Japanese culture is the culture of the museum.

Tanizaki died in 1965. I don’t of course know what he’d have made of the exuberance that is contemporary Japanese culture; the extraordinary merging that has taken place of Japanese and Western arts which has led as much to us borrowing from them as them from us. He would though probably have noted that however much Japan may have a new and again unique aesthetic it is not the aeshetic he writes about here. That is carefully preserved in museums and history books.

The Tawariya, beautiful and perfect, is a work of delicately preserved cultural driftwood left behind after the tide of history has long since receded. Tanizaki would have liked the place, may well have stayed there once, but I do not think it would have changed his view. The toilet would have amused him though.

Tanizaki ends by turning to the art closest to him. He thinks little can be saved of what was, but not nothing. In Regis Debray’s Venices Debray seems to talk about the history of Venice but in fact talks of his fears for Europe’s future. Debray isn’t ready for the museum. Tanizaki is more pessimistic, but he sees literature as perhaps one final place where some fragment can be preserved that is authentically Japanese.

For Tanizaki modernisation brings light, cleanliness, efficiency, above all comfort. What it destroys though is the shadows. In literature there is another choice. As he says: “I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.” Tanizaki’s vision of literature is not a comfortable one and he did not write comfortable books. He wrote great ones though. Comfort isn’t everything. Elegance is frigid.

toasting the Chinese at the Florian

Against Venice, by Regis Debray

I mentioned in my recent post on Paul Morand’s Venices that I was reading Regis Debray’s 2002 book Against Venice (published by Pushkin Press, with an afterword by the author and translated by John Howe). In fact, I only bought Venices because I was already planning to buy the Debray and knew it referenced the Morand.

Well, I enjoyed the Morand, even though I hadn’t really expected to and was seeing it almost as homework before the Debray. Naturally then, I didn’t enjoy the Debray as much as I hoped. That’s not because it’s bad, it’s not – it’s very well written – perhaps it’s just because I agreed more with Debray than I did with Morand.

So what is it exactly? Well, it’s about 70 pages of argument against Venice, or more to the point against the idea of Venice and the way it’s held up as a cultural touchstone. It’s a mixture of insight, exaggeration, wit, sly dig, rant and cri de couer. It’s also (and this is part of its charm) exasperating, unreasonable, unfair, sometimes quite irritating, and by the end unexpectedly serious. If you can, it’s best read in one sitting, it’s just more enjoyable when Debray is given space to get up a decent head of steam. There’s a definite feeling at times that he knows he’s being absurd, but he’s not going to let that stop him.

Debray knows his territory, he knows the city but more importantly he knows its tourists, he understands the lure of the place. At times, he’s very funny and cruelly accurate. If you’ve ever been to Venice you’ll probably recognise this:

“You’ll see,” murmurs the tourist in his trattoria, furtively lowering his voice, “on this route, you won’t see a single other tourist.”

Like most people who love Venice, I want to see the city, I just don’t especially want to see other people seeing the city. There’s an allure to the idea of finding the real Venice, but of course the tourist Venice is the real Venice.

Debray contrasts Venice with Naples, one of my favourite cities on Earth. I studied Italian in Naples, staying in the Spaccanapoli, and I love the place. I love its noise, its chaos, its grandeur so differently faded to that of Venice. Debray loves it too, and he uses it as an effective counterexample, the living versus the preserved, the populist versus the elite:

THE ISLAND CITY with its little finger genteelly stuck out, used as a drawing room by the whole planet, is a place where “people of quality” display common behaviour. While in the volcano town, shrieking with vulgarity, the common people portray an air of distinction.
This does not prevent the lagoon from being ten times more frequented by tourists than Posilippo. The ones who do cross Naples scuttle through with lowered eyes, petrified of scippo, of pickpockets and bag-snatchers, heading as quickly as possible for that direst of school impositions, Pompeii. The popular town repels the populace, the snobbish one attracts it. An overwhelming majority for the adulterated and dressed-up. As usual.

Every section opens with a few words in block capitals by the way, there’s no significance to it (no obvious one, anyway).

There’s a subtlety to Debray’s argument at times, an underlying thread which only really becomes apparent as you go on. It’s the issue of whether it’s a good thing to be a monument, a cultural treasure, whether perhaps it might not be better to be less refined but more alive:

It is possible to weep hot and bitter tears in Naples, city of extravagance, for the same reasons that hearty laughter is normal there; people do not sob in Venice, city of autumn, city of evening, for the same reason that Venetian gaiety must content itself with a thin smile. It is a polite place, where people get depressed but stop short of suicide.

Another element of Debray’s argument (there are several) is the way Venice affects artists. Debray isn’t at all hostile to Morand it turns out, he tweaks his nose a bit but of the four or so references to him most are pretty positive. What he hates is Morand-lite, people who write of the city in the most romantic terms, but who lack Morand’s sheer skill and so just become banal:

For one quicksilver Morand, for one mandolin pizzicato from Fauré, how many boating songs are there, how many serenades and other pieces of gondolier kitsch (a word, incidentally, that seems to come from the wrong country?).

Debray also mocks the heirarchies of tourism. The cultured wander about clutching their abridged copies of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, looking down on backpackers, people on cruises and those doing eight cities in eight days (or whatever):

The sight of two broke, bare chested trippers with “structuralist beards”, gulping grappa out of the bottle, was enough to send Paul Morand into a deep depression described in the closing passage of his post-1968 work Venises.

Actually, it didn’t. What Morand objected to was someone drinking his grappa and not saying thanks, it was the lack of gratitude that depressed him, not the appearance or the gulping.

For Debray, it’s almost impossible now to engage with Venice. The whole place has been so written about, there are so many novels and guidebooks and histories, so many films too and photographs and received stories, that we struggle to see it at all. We see it through a prism of others’ experiences, we know so much before we arrive we risk inhabiting what others said about it, not what we see ourselves.

We ourselves are afloat on a raft of references, every glimpse of the landscape releasing, like a conditioned reflex, this or that association with some paragraph, picture or sequence.

Still, he understands its charm, the pleasure of walking through its streets devoid of cars, its history and architecture, its theatricality. He loves the place, he despairs of convincing anyone, even himself, of his argument. After all, it’s Venice isn’t it? It’s an easy place to love.

For Debray though, ulimately, there is a tragedy to Venice and it is that it is no longer a living city. He contrasts religion in Naples, fervent, impassioned, almost pagan, with its absence in Venice where the churches are places for mass tourism and the paintings and statues objects of cultural appreciation rather than devotion. He is particularly scathing about the practice of having coin-activated lights which briefly illuminate some particularly highly regarded artwork for the paying public:

In the mini-Babylon of the cultured, a glance at the angels may no longer bring salvation, but that does not prevent it from being lucrative.

As Against Venice draws to its close, the real issue emerges. Could Venice be a mirror that shows us Europe’s future? As he says

I seem to remember that in the period of its greatness – the iron-willed “triumphant city” was not loved. When it still had military strength and rights of veto, in the Lepanto era, nobody praised its mysterious grace or its cats slumbering between embroidered cushions. Its power – nuclear, industrious, restless and confrontational – was feared, not contemplated. “Sweet and magical clarity” is a thin recompense for inventing a world.

If Venice can become a theme park, why not Paris? Why not London? Madrid? Arguably, much of Britain has already gone down that route, a service economy serving more vigorous civilisations elsewhere. Venice once ruled, it was a power, now other powers send their tourists to visit it and praise its charms and there are hardly any Venetians left.

Debray is not Morand, I felt here no racism, no resentment of other cultures rising to their own day in the sun. That said, he’s not ready for Europe’s day to be over just yet, and for him Venice is essentially a museum while Naples is anything but. Venice is beautiful, yes, but Naples is the better place to live.

Against Venice makes a perfect companion with Venices. It’s definitely enjoyable to read them in order as I did, Venices then Against Venice. Debray is serious and joking at the same time, no small trick, and there’s a brio to it all which is hard not to admire. There’s a scene in the Patrice Leconte film Ridicule, the Abbé de Vilecourt is making a speech proving the existence of God before the court of Versailles, entertaining the King with the fluency of his logic and rhetoric (before boasting that he could prove the opposite just as easily). Debray reminds me of the Abbé in that part of that scene, at the height of his powers and in full enjoyment of them.

Before I go, it’s worth noting that Nicholas Lezard at the Guardian did a combined review of Venices and Against Venice here. It was his review that partly helped put me on to these works, and it’s well worth reading.

Against Venice

Pyongyang

Guy Delisle is a Québécois animator, comic writer and artist. He is most famous for his graphic novels Shenzhen and Pyongyang, which illustrate his experiences managing animation teams in China and North Korea.

Guy Delisle came to my attention through the Just William blog, with this post here, I made a mistake about the order of Shenzhen and Pyongyang (2000 and 2003 respectively), and so started with Pyongyang thinking it was the first. It wasn’t, but it was excellent, and given it’s taken from real life getting them out of order doesn’t much matter (there’s no plot in real life, after all).

Pyongyang was originally written in French, and is translated by Helge Dascher. It’s a very natural translation, enough so that I didn’t actually realise for quite some time that this was a translated work.

Anyway, what’s it like and what’s it about? Very simply, it’s about Delisle’s experiences living and working for a period of a few months in Pyongyang, capital city of North Korea. As such, it’s a very rare insight into what life is like in that astonishingly isolated country. As you might expect, it’s not really a cheery read. North Korea comes across as being as terrible as you might imagine, a bizarre mix of poverty, empty spectacle and official deception.

Delisle has a very simple art style, uncluttered. He uses a range of grey shadings, but with a lot of variation in panel sizes – creating an effect where there are close-ups and long-shots and so a sense of movement in what might otherwise be a fairly static text. There’s a sly humour running through it, Delisle clearly at times became deeply frustrated with the constraints and absurdities of North Korean life, though he’s aware too of quite how much trouble a joke on his part might cause to the locals (perhaps not always aware enough though, I’m still not wholly sure it was wise or safe to lend one of his translators a copy of George Orwell’s 1984). I’ve attached three images below, the second is where Delisle slips out for a walk without his then translator to do some shopping one day.

North Korea itself is utterly surreal, on arrival Delisle is given a bunch of flowers, and is expected to leave them at the base of a huge statue of Kim Il-Sung (the statue visited under a pretext, as Delisle’s must appear a natural gesture). He stays in a vast and empty hotel, 50 storeys high, with all foreigners on the 15th floor – the only one that’s lit. There are two restaurants in the hotel, Restaurant Number 1 and Restaurant Number 2 (number 3 being under renovation), every morning at 7am his maid wakes him to replenish the water in his mini-fridge regardless of any do not disturb sign he may hang on his door. There are ideas of how things are done, but distorted, lacking any sense of why they are done, reduced to empty form.

Pyongyang itself is curiously, disturbingly, sterile. No one loiters, no one chats, people go about their business and do not linger. At Delisle’s own work, a Korean technician sits alongside him pointing at the screen whenever he pauses a moment so as to let him know what to do next. She sings along to the radio in Korean, naturally she speaks no English, so she is not able to provide any actual help to him. Everything is controlled, all the radio stations are tuned to the same station and when he tampers with his to tune in to other frequencies he finds there are broadcasts he was unable to listen to but they all play exactly the same thing. At night the streets are unlit, his animation team practice every morning with wooden rifles, it is a phenomenally joyless country.

Delisle does try to get to know the local culture, he hears about the philosophy of the country’s two leaders, he visits national museums, at times he even manages to go out for walks on his own into the streets, but in a very real sense there is no living local culture. There is mass culture, state approved, state disseminated, with any sign of individuality or independent thought clearly very dangerous indeed – the re-education camps are always waiting. As Delisle says “at a certain level of oppression, truth hardly matters, because the greater the lie, the greater the show of power.”

The indifference to humanity portrayed in this comic is extraordinary, the “volunteer” workers, the desperate poverty, the openly stated calculations of what percentage of the population need survive to allow society to continue (30%). For centuries people have dreamed of utopias, we must be thankful that most of us never have to experience them.

There is a question as to how appropriate this material is for a comic. Like many things, I think the answer to that lies in the execution. Here, Delisle shows us a city most of us will never visit, I learnt more from this comic than I have from anything else I’ve read or watched on the place, there’s an immediacy to this form that can make it a powerful tool for reportage of a sort that more conventional accounts can struggle with. It’s easily read, it’s often very funny, and it’s absolutely horrible because what it portrays is horrible. Delisle is not a journalist (unlike, say, Joe Sacco is in his comics about Gorazde and Palestine), but for all that he makes serious points and it doesn’t diminish their impact that he makes them in a comic.

Overall, I think this is a skilful portrait of a place that most of us know very little about, it’s well drawn and written and expertly translated. Having read it, I know more than I did, and I enjoyed learning it. That’s no small achievement, and I’m looking forward to reading his Shenzhen next.

As a final note, of all the things in this comic which I found ugly or depressing, perhaps the worst – among all the monumentalist architecture, cowed population, poverty and fear – comes when Delisle asks his translator why he has seen no handicapped people. He is told that there are none. The perfect society has no place for the infirm.

Pyongyang

The English are fond of scribbling on walls

A Visit to the Barbary Regencies in 1830 is an unusual book, unusual for me anyway. It is an excerpt from the diaries of Lord Grosvenor, originally published by him in this form, in which he details his visit to the Barbary regencies of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers in the year 1830 (as the title rather suggests). It is 100 pages long, but has generous spacing and margins, making it a very quick read.

The difficulty with writing about diaries, is that by their nature they are a bit bitty. That’s the case here too, Grosvenor writes about what happens to him, there isn’t an overall narrative or theme to draw out. Accordingly, my main goal here is simply to illustrate the nature of the diaries and what makes them interesting. As a result, I’ve tried to bring out the feel of the diaries below, but haven’t attempted too much by way of analysis.

Anyway, I said above that this is a quick read, it’s also rather a fun read. Lord Grosvenor is an entertaining diarist, his experiences are interesting, and it’s a window to a world that is much more alien than we often give it credit. Grosvenor travels the region on board the Isis, a 50 gun frigate commanded by Captain T. Staines (no sniggering!). To anyone with the remotest fondness for Patrick O’Brian (which really should be everyone), it’s a reminder too of quite how good O’Brian is and quite how much he gets right.

Grosvenor’s trip takes place at a time of some tension, each of the regencies is technically independent but none try that indepence too strongly with the Sublime Porte. France is blockading Algiers, and military action once started might spill over to Algiers’ neighbours so making them understandably nervous.

It’s in the above context then that Lord Grosvenor writes his impressions of the landscapes passed, of the rulers and other figures he encounters, and of the various European dignitaries and travellers also at large in the region. Here, he describes the ruler of Tripoli:

The Pacha’s appearance, if not prepossessing, had at least the merit of novelty; the quantity of kohol with which he had stained his eyelids, making it scarcely possible to distinguish his features and the large silk tassel of his Bournouse, which fell over a small white turban upon his forehead, gave him a singular, but not very pleasing expression of countenance. His age may be from sixty to seventy; his figure is of a proper Tripolitan corpulency, and of this advantage he is so sensible, that he sat upon the very edge of the throne to ensure it’s not being lost upon us. But, however vain his Highness may be of his figure, he is still prouder of his pink silk stockings – mais hélas! il faut souffrir pour être beau. The European stocking-weavers (for Tripoli has none to boast of) not being yet sufficiently accustomed to the Barbary market, it became a matter of no small difficulty to procure a pair sufficiently elastic for the royal dimensions; and those his Highness now wore must have painfully impeded a free circulation.

Although apparently a fairly merciful fellow by local standards, it should be noted that one of his wives is fond of revenging herself on any disrespect by having the culprits strangled with a bowstring.

Still, such are the hazards of courtly life in what Lord Grosvenor refers to as the Orient. It is fair to say that this is not the happiest period in the history of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world, there is a palpable sense of decline, these cities are rich outposts now divorced from what was once one of the most powerful empires on Earth and their relationship with the European powers is now far from an equal one.

Just as life on shore has its diversions, so too does life on ship. The following passage could, once again, have come straight from the pages of an O’Brian novel:

Sir T. Staines had orders to take on board any extraordinary animals that Col. Warrington might wish to send to England, and was much dismayed upon finding no less than four ostriches, two antelopes, three Fezzan sheep, three blue cranes, besides several stuffed birds, waiting to be embarked. He was constrained to make immediate preparations for their accommodation; and they were all brought safely on board, except one ostrich, which, in its struggles up the ship’s side, injured itself so much, that it was thought better to leave it behind.

Later a possibly imaginary lioness must also be contended with. This is of course the great age of natural history. Amateur scientists and collectors travel the world to find rare creatures unknown to European experience, and then kill, stuff and mount them.

Generally, Lord Grosvenor is simply a passenger. On occasion, however, he himself is of some assistance in the voyage:

Upon the aide-de-camp’s return I was called in to act as interpreter, his knowledge of English and Sir T.’s of French, being just sufficient to create a serious misunderstanding.

The issue there at hand being that Captain Staines has orders to check in at Algiers, and the French have orders that nobody shall be allowed to make port there. A misunderstanding, in these circumstances, could have very serious repercussions indeed.

Later there are more reminders of the belligerence of the time, France is not the only nation to be engaged in these waters:

We passed the Austrian squadron, consisting of one double bank frigate, two corvettes and two brigs, lying off Algesiras. They are by way of blockading the port of Tangeir, and bombarding the Emperor of Morocco, with whom Austria is at issue; but their navy is of the most contemptible description, and the campaign will therefore end as is has begun, at Algesiras.

Although dismissive of the Austrians, the attitude to the French is very different and far more respectful. An Algerian plan to destroy a French force using 150,000 local tribesmen is expected to meet with little success, however legion the tribesmen may be it is expected they will be no match for French discipline and artillery.

Grosvenor speaks too of the difficulties of pre-steam travel (obviously not in those terms though). The Isis is at times carried perilously close to shore, or near to shallow waters. There are storms and seasickness, quarantine and as ever in the golden age of sail the wind is of utmost importance:

Had we remained but twelve more hours at Gibraltar, we should have missed the wind which only just carried us through, and perhaps have been prisoners for a month.

Prisoners there merely meaning delayed, not literal imprisonment.

The book comes with prints of the original engravings that accompanied it, not in the highest quality here of reproduction but interesting for all that, and with two appendices which formed part of the original work and which add some supplemental detail about Captain Staines and about some subsequent military events, respectively. Here Lord Grosvenor explains how Captain Staines lost his arm back in 1807:

Poor Sir T. Staines was dreadfully wounded in this engagement; and, his surgeon being killed, he was forced to apply the assistant to amputate his arm at the socket. Perceiving that the young man was very nervous at being called upon to perform so perilous an operation, Sir T., with the utmost presence of mind, raised himself from his bed, and told him in a confidential manner, that although he much lamented the surgeon’s death, he yet, upon this critical occasion, felt greatly relieved at not being necessarily under his care, having much greater reliance on the skill of his assistant. Thus encouraged, the young man proceeded and performed the operation with great success.

Later, Sir T. loses much of the use of his other arm in a duel, yet remains in good spirits. Extraordinary. No wonder they won an empire.

A visit to the Barbary Regencies in 1830

The East! The East!

Mark Mazower’s The Balkans, subtitled “From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day”, is a 176 page (including detailed guide to further reading and index) overview of the history of the Balkans over the past 550 years or so. It is a masterpiece of concision that sheds light on a complex and fractured history, while at the same time passionately arguing for a view of the Balkans rooted in European reality rather than easy mythology. To Mazower’s credit, heavy reference is made to primary sources, resulting in a book usefully illustrated with quotes from travellers to the Balkans and the people themselves.

Mazower examines, in surprising detail given the limited space he allows himself, the conditions of the Balkans under Ottoman rule, the perceptions in the West of the Christian subjects of the Sublime Porte and the implications our concepts of Orientalism had on our understanding of Balkan territory. He also addresses how, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, old divisions based on religion came to be replaced with imported concepts of nationalism – with ultimately horrifying results (though, as he is at pains to point out, results echoed in many other parts of Europe).

Mazower investigates too the root causes of the relative lack of development in the Balkans, focusing (among other factors) on the lack of major navigable rivers and the presence of geographic barriers to the development of rail networks, which coupled with membership of a declining and backward-gazing empire during the key years of the nineteenth century led to the region missing out on much of the development experienced further West.

Coupled with late industrialisation were slow patterns of urbanisation, with a relatively late continuation of the peasantry as dominant social group. That, in turn, led to generations of Western travellers romanticising a peasant population onto which they projected their own ideologies.

In other words, the emergence in the Balkans of urban populations at a level close to the European norm, with its characteristic pattern of small families, high consumption, industry and services, is entirely a product of the last five or six generations. Until well into this century, the peasant predominated, for few people lived in the towns, and few of those who did lacked close ties to the land.

Looking at the peasants dressed in their picturesque costumes, foreign visitors were struck by the persistance of what they regarded as an antiquated life form. ‘In most ways the native seems to have changed little since Biblical days,’ wrote two British students of Macedonia in 1921, ‘so that it may almost be said that in observing the modern Macedonia one is studying the type amongst whom St. Paul preached and travelled.’ Their view that ‘the primitiveness of the native peasantry is their most marked feature’, was one shared implicitly both by travel writers and by postwar modernisation theorists and social anthropologists. Ethnographers, enthralled by the nineteenth-century romantic view of peasants as the respository of national tradition, charted what they took to be the pagan origins of their beliefs, ornaments and customs; American classicists heard in the oral epic poetry of Serbican guslar players the direct descendants of Homer.

On that last note, Ismail Kadare’s novel The File on H uses the 1930s efforts of American academics to study then contemporary epic poetry to explore issues of censorship and surveillance in Hoxha’s Albania as well as to discuss the nature of oral traditions. Ismail Kadare is a superb writer, and I recommend The File on H (and equally Broken April, which deals in blood feuds, the Albanian code known as the Kadun and more broadly on how to live with knowledge of mortality) unreservedly.

Returning to The Balkans, Mazower is also excellent on the role of Orthodox Christianity in the region, how it was preserved in part by the fact of Ottoman conquest from the threat of the Catholic powers. Under the Ottomans, there was a spread (despite growing and eventually endemic corruption) of an Orthodox world within the Ottoman world – “a world of Balkan orthodoxy whose horizons stretched from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from Northern Italy to Russia.”

Key here is how under the Ottomans communities were generally governed by members of their own faith. The Orthodox were ruled by in the main the Orthodox, though close contact and intermingling with Moslems and Jews often led to a pragmatic blurring of faiths…

We read, for example, of a sixteenth-century Istanbul man who vowed in the midst of a dangerous fever that if he recovered he would give up his taste in young boys. Cured, he thought better of it, but hesitated to break his vow. Having been advised by the ulema of Istanbul that he could not wriggle out of an oath once made, he sought the advice of the rabbis of Salonika to see if they could find a loop-hole. (They suggested he try women).

This promiscuity of faiths matters because for Mazower it puts the lie to Samuel Huntington’s famous concept of the ‘clash of civilisations’, which “situated the Balkans on one of the global fault-lines of this clash.” Mazower is clear that whatever the future may hold, Huntington’s thesis is in no way true of the past, that there was a cross-traffic of conversions, practices, beliefs and traditions – and a degree of cohabitation – that have no reflection in a Huntingtonian world.

Continuing the remarkable combination of brevity and precision that characterises this book, Mazower lucidly explains the background to and causes of World War I in around six pages, a tremendous feat in my view. Naturally there is a loss of detail, but in a title coming in at just 176 pages any topic is necessarily just an introduction. That he sheds light on the conflict at all, I consider no small achievement.

In dealing with the twentieth century, Mazower deals also of course with more recent history, and with the bloody internal conflicts and ethnic cleansing that have characterised it. For Mazower, the concept of there being a “peculiar propensity to violence among the people of the region” is a myth, he is at pains to place Balkan conflicts in the context of wider European conflicts and to show a pattern of massacres over our joint history.

Writing off Balkan violence as primeval and unmodern has become one way for the West to keep the desired distance from it. Yet, in fact, ethnic cleansing is not a specifically Balkan phenomenon. It took place through much of central and eastern Europe during and immediately after Hitler’s war: more than fifty forced population movements took place in the 1940s, involving the death and transplantation of millions of Germans, Poles, Ukranians and many others. The roots of its ferocity lie not in Balkan mentalities but in the nature of a civil war waged with the technological resources of the modern era. Unlike national wars, civil wars do not unify society – in the way, for instance, the Second World War helped unify British society. On th econtrary, they exacerbate latent tensions and differences, and are fought out amid a total breakdown of social and governmental institutions.

Mazower reminds the reader more than once that ethnic cleansing is not unique to the Balkans, quoting also in this light Hitler’s comment ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’. This refers of course to the 1915-1916 massacres of hundreds of thousands (perhaps more) Armenians by the Ottomans – still controversial today.

For Mazower, the difficulty with understanding the Balkans lies not in its history being unusually complex or fractious, but rather in the perceptions we have built up of it as somewhere Easternised, alien. Its long existence under Ottoman rule and the widespread nineteenth (and indeed more recent) view that Europe is synonymous with Christendom have resulted in its being seen as outside our culture and history, apart from us. But of course, as with Turkey itself, any attempt to separate the Balkans from the rest of Europe is based on fantasy, there is no clear line to be found.

The disconcerting inter-penetration of Europe and Asia, West and East, finds its way into most descriptions of the Balkans in modern times. Europe is seen as a civilising force, a missle embedding itself in the passive matter of the Orient. Travellers routinely comment on signs of ‘European’ life such as houses with glass windows, cabarets, or hotels with billiard rooms. Balkan cities are usually described as having a European facade behind which hides an oriental – meaning picturesque but dirty, smelly, wooden and unplanned – reality. Railways are European, cart tracks are not; technology is definitely European, but not religious observance. The social fabric is almost always divided into a modernising surface and a traditional substance. Oriental realities – the power of religion, the prevalence of agrarian poverty – are assumed to be phenomena which have not changed for centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, as numerous accounts testify, it was virtually impossible for Western travellers – esposed to the heady delights and sensual Orientalism of writers such as Pierre Lodi – not to see the Balkans in this way.

Mazower’s book is excellent, a fascinating introduction to the region and its history and one that shed for me considerable light on both. I learnt much that I did not previously know, and was inspired to read further (I have a copy of Misha Glenny’s much longer book of the same name and of Mazower’s history of Salonika, now known as Thessaloniki). This is a tremendous work of popular history which carries the depth of its understanding on light and easily read prose.

Spectacular.

The Balkans. My copy had a better cover than that, showing a bomb-thrower being taken into custody in Sarajevo in 1914. The cover linked to for me is redolent of the Orientalism Mazower is so keen to dispel, which is a bit of a shame in some respects.