Reading roundup

It's been a while since I've talked books here. Since that, or something in that neighborhood, is this blog's ostensible purpose, I'm going to do so now, albeit briefly.

I've read 30 books so far this year. Aside from those I've already blogged about they're a motley lot. The list ranges from great classics (Anna Karenina) to overhyped "edgy" first novels by supposed wunderkinds that I didn't like very much at all (Citrus County, Hemlock Grove) to several bleh-to-meh embarrassing pop brain-vacations (Pompeii, The Gargoyle, Sister) to one deeply insipid celebrity memoir (Diane Keaton's Then Again) to one disappointment (The Prague Cemetery) to one interesting work to which I had a complex reaction that I just haven't had time to parse here (Open City) to several books that I just pretty darned well liked. The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips, Middle Age: A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates, The Missing by Tim Gautreaux, Shifting through Neutral by Bridgett M. Davis, Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, The False Friend by Myla Goldberg, Assumption by Percival Everett.

There were two doozies too. Really wonderful books that got to me the way I always hope a book will as I turn to its first page.

One of those is The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis. With writing that soars to lyrical heights, with deep emotion, with charged political consciousness, this novel tells the tale of three generations of women in a family whose struggles and travails tell a larger story, that of Uruguay in the 20th century. I am ashamed to confess that, until last year when I read the magnificent Memory of Fire trilogy by the brilliant Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, I did not know that the working class of Uruguay endured the same kind of fascist suppression, and in the same period, as did the workers of Chile under Pinochet and Argentina during the Dirty War. Nor about the great history of working-class and communist organizing in Uruguay. With this wrenching novel, De Robertis corrects my ignorance, and wins me over as a literary fan in the process. She has a new novel out, Perla, which looks like it takes on a story of the children of the disappeared of Argentina. It's a definite to-read.

The other great book I recently read is The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. In not much more than a hundred pages this exquisitely written, heartbreaking novel packs the kind of wallop few fatter tomes manage. Otsuka pulls off something amazing here. She makes the reader care, pulls the reader deeply in, yet there is no one protagonist, no unitary story. Rather, the book is written in the first-person plural—that is, in a sort of a chorus of voices. Whose voices are they? Japanese women whose families have made marriage agreements with men in California in the period just after World War I. We first meet them on the boat crossing the ocean. And we follow them for the next quarter century or so, as nothing they were promised comes true, as they live hard lives, toiling in the agricultural fields, raising children, trying to survive, always in the face of racism, always dreaming of something better. At the same time, and this is crucial, this choral narrator is not of one voice and she—they—do not in any way conform to stereotypes. It's impossible to unpack how Otsuka does it, but somehow sentence by sentence she both brings to life many individuals with as many dreams, aspirations, disappointments, loves and hates, and conveys an overview of what life was like for the community as a whole. Which all comes to an unbearable climax in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor when, at the order of FDR, that entire community is forced from their homes and into internment camps in the middle of nowhere. The final pages are full of pain and terror. And then, at the very end, Otsuka does something truly audacious. The final first-person-plural chorus of voices concluding the story—telling of the empty houses, of the neighbors at first missed then quickly forgotten, the sadness shrugged off, the questions not asked—are the Anglos who go on living their lives, who spread out in fact, taking over the empty shops and farms and houses, as if those forcibly removed had never been there at all. Stunning. Devastating. Damned great writing.

Finally, I'm currently reading Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman. It's so-so and I may or may not bother finishing it. Stylistically it's a clunker, ploddingly written and unbelievably repetitive. What actual information and analysis is here is thin. Basically it's one of those books that should have been, and perhaps had its first incarnation as, a journal article and should have been left at that. Ehrman's argumentation, too, is not very satisfying. The greatest part of it consists of circular reasoning, basically that because everybody says so it's true. The earliest Gospel writers, he tells us, were clearly retelling or embellishing stories they'd heard from others, and in a leap that doesn't quite do the trick of convincing me he avers that this proves the stories are true, at least the bottom line of the stories, the existence of this Jesus fellow. I don't have a strong opinion about whether there was a Jesus fellow or not though I lean more toward thinking that there was than that there wasn't, but Ehrman doesn't provide much solid evidence to support that position. I like reading this stuff on occasion. I've read a couple of Elaine Pagels' books, I read Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity, I read articles now and then on all this business. It's interesting, how it all unfolded, though why is more interesting and Ehrman, so far at least, doesn't have anything to say about that. Meanwhile there's lots of criticism of this book, lots of back and forth polemics slinging their way across the Internet, and after reading some of it I must conclude that Ehrman's scholarship is less than stellar. So. I may stick through to the end. Or I may not.

Revolutionaries, real & fake

May Day, this "Democracy Now" broadcast about it as the day began, and the news that Tomas Borge had died the day before all prompt me to share some news and muse.

Here in New York City, it was a glorious day of solidarity in action. We rallied all afternoon in Union Square, we marched down Broadway, we stood with the Transport Workers Union in their contract struggle with the MTA, we stood with immigrant workers, and great numbers of Occupy Wall Street youths stood with the workers and oppressed, with labor organized and undocumented, in a mass demonstration of unity. The marchers numbered somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000, which made it the biggest May Day manifestation since the vast uprising of immigrant workers in 2006.

S.E. photo

Meanwhile, the working class of Nicaragua mourned on May Day, lining up in the thousands outside the National Palace of Culture in Managua to file past Tomas Borge's coffin. Borge, who died April 30, was one of the leaders of the Sandinista revolution that overthrew the hated U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The U.S.-based bourgeois news reports of his death defile and defame him—naturally, for here was an actual revolutionary—but it was those crowds of mourners that told the real story. Borge wrote several books that are worth revisiting, and just last year when asked whom he most admired he responded: "First, Fidel Castro. Second, Fidel Castro. Third, Fidel Castro. Fourth, Fidel Castro. Fifth, Fidel Castro."

In contrast, there's a fake revolutionary of the sort Borge would easily recognize, for they called them contras in Nicaragua, a guy who's been going around trying to diminish the Occupy Wall Street movement, seizing every opportunity to publicly denounce and divide it—all the while, of course, claiming to be all for it. This is Chris Hedges, writer and journalist beloved of social democrats, one of the leaders of the anticommunist left-liberal loyal opposition, those trying to reign in what they call corporate capitalism, as if there were any other sort, as if some extreme corporate takeover has sullied the system and can be rolled back to a kindler gentler variety as if that ever existed and ever could. This fellow throws around the word "revolution" a lot, positioning himself as a proponent, yet if you listen closely much of the time he's actually extolling counterrevolution. As in yesterday morning's "Democracy Now" broadcast, when he was given lots of air time to continue his crusade of the last couple months, excoriating the "Black Bloc" tactic sometimes used by some activists. For me, the tipoffs, if any were needed beyond his actual argument, are in his reference to the German "revolution" of 1989—better known to any actual revolutionary as the counterrevolution that overthrew the German Democratic Republic and opened up eastern Germany for capitalist ruination—and his quoting of Vaclav Havel, scion of a rich family who organized toward and eventually led the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia, bringing his own class back into power and henceforth functioning as a puppet of U.S. imperialism.

As you'll hear if you listen to the program, Hedges' case is that somehow wearing black bandanas is an inherently counterproductive tactic and that this specific tactic somehow invites intervention by agents provocateur. This is not merely nonsense on a logical, logistical, political and every other level. It is not merely oppositional contrarianism, precisely the opposite of the support Hedges professes. It is itself a perfect example of the kind of undermining destructiveness he claims to be worried about. The so-called journalist, in other words, is himself the agent provocateur. It is he himself who's working hard to break up this exciting young movement, trying to turn activists against each other while he masquerades as an ally. That is the objective reality. Hedges fails the Which Side Are You On test. It's a shame he got yet another opportunity to do the ruling class's dirty work on May Day morning.

Luckily, Teresa Gutierrez of the May 1 Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, who was also on the program although given scant air time by host Amy Goodman, managed to get in a clear counter to Hedges' baiting. The real foes, she said, are the cops. The cops are the ones to worry about, not various militant forces using various tactics. It's the cops who attack, try to divide marches, isolate groups, and so on. They're the ones to watch out for. 

As a comrade of mine noted the other day, I've never seen an OWS activist of any stripe beat someone with a nightstick or pepper spray someone or throw someone in jail. This the cops do. Their work is made easier by contras like Hedges.

Our work is to keep fighting. For real revolution, by the workers and oppressed against the bosses and bankers, their government and military, media stooges try as they may to slow our way.