Shabbat
Reading List
Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): I recently finished reading Home Bound, a richly layered new memoir by the writer and attorney Vanessa A. Bee. The book considers all the things that a home can be to a person: not only a place of shelter, but an arbitrary determinant of opportunity, a social signifier, a speculative investment. And, at the same time, a loving attempt to externalize one’s interior self; the comforting manifestation of a cherished set of ideas.
In a series of essayistic reflections, Bee explores how her many homes have shaped the direction of her life and contributed to her complex sense of identity. Born in Cameroon, she was adopted as a baby by her biological aunt, and spent her early childhood in a majority-white town in central France before moving into government-administered housing in Lyon, then in London. When she was a pre-teen, she and her mom moved to Reno, Nevada, where they at first lived crammed into an aunt and uncle’s already full house. Bee narrates the way her social and political consciousness emerged in response to her shifting place in the world. Whereas, in Lyon, she realized during a series of neighborhood protests against police brutality that “the mere act of living in this project makes us the kind of people who’d burn our own homes . . . a reality that subsumed our identity the moment we qualified for the white apartment,” in Reno, she may have shared a bed with her cousin, but the middle class neighborhood “masked my poverty and excused by blackness. It allowed me to pass.”
Bee has said that she initially set out to write “an essay collection loosely themed around the importance of state assistance for economically vulnerable kids to succeed—a sort of anti-Hillbilly Elegy.” Her book interweaves this thread with more intimate explorations of her family lineages—but her insistence that a home is a right remains central. For Bee, a better world would be one in which everyone had not only adequate shelter, but the ability to shape their surroundings; she writes about buying her first condo—while working at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), trying to guarantee affordable housing for others—and painting the walls, as she was forbidden to do while living in the apartment in Lyon.
This emphasis on housing as a site of personal agency as well as decommodified security reminded me of the wonderful book Modern Housing for America, by the historian Gail Radford, about a New Deal-era group often remembered as the “housers,” a movement of activists and intellectuals who attempted to bring high-quality social housing to the US. The group insisted that public housing must be beautiful and desirable, offering not only the essentials but also “freedom and flexibility.” Radford tells what is ultimately the story of the movement’s crushing defeat without acceding to the tendency of past events to generate their own sense of inevitability. It’s no wonder that the book has become popular among a new generation of housing activists; it quietly insists on an enduringly revolutionary set of possibilities. Bee’s own book ends on a forward-looking note, as she lets go of some of the homes she has carried with her and embraces others. If readers of this newsletter will excuse the shameless promo, I should mention that I’m excited to discuss all of this and more with her in a conversation at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., this coming Tuesday, 11/1.
Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): Recommending a book by Mike Davis this week feels like adding to the sea with an eye dropper. Beautiful, moving words have been written about Davis’s books, his life, his ethos, his “prophetic” analyses, his piercing prose, his refusal of careerism, his commitment to the cause of labor. Then there are Davis’s own self-representations, mined from countless interviews, which seem to capture his essence better than what anyone else can write.
What could I add to all this to convince you to read or reread Davis but a personal story? As for many others, Davis was my gateway drug to socialism. I went to college aspiring, embarrassingly, to become a development economist. Reading Planet of Slums shattered that dream. “From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago,” Davis wrote. “Most cities of the South, however, more closely resemble Victorian Dublin,” a Dickensian slumscape of destitution, disease, and despair.
The sheer erudition of Planet of Slums—the speed with which it zipped from place to place without ever losing local specificity or the global picture—blew me away, but what was most mind-boggling about the book was how Davis completely subverted understandings of capitalism, progress, and history itself. In hoping to be a development economist, I had wanted to help “develop” my country (India) so “we” could reach where Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago had. But here was Davis telling me that in fact the whole world—Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago included—was actually heading the way of Bombay and Rio, and that this trajectory was no error or glitch to be fixed by an economist but exactly what the system was designed to produce and keep producing into the future. “The one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums,” Davis wrote, “might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of...Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.”
The post-Slums reversal left me reeling and made me deeply suspicious of everything else I had ever read or learned that had taken the narrative of history-as-progress for granted. After all, what Davis challenged here was more than just a definition of urbanism or development—it was the baseline assumption inherent to modernity that however unequally, however incompletely, over the past several thousand years things have been getting better. What if this were false for the vast majority of people? How dramatically would everything we do have to shift if we accepted that the slum was going to be the norm in a generation or two, not the ignoble exception? Through years of graduate work, organizing, conversations, and writing, I’ve gone back to Davis’s provocation again and again, asking myself the same questions.
If, as the cliche goes, the mind is not a vase to be filled but a fire to be lit, it was Davis who lit mine along with thousands of others’ in a conflagration that may have the power to change things or at least to tip the first domino. My political personhood began with Mike Davis, and I mourn what we’ve all lost now that he is gone—our teller of truths, starter of fires.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Never in a million years did I think I would be summoned to defend the viciously maligned gay rom-com Bros in the Jewish Currents newsletter—and not only because I am deeply, hopelessly straight. But also because it’s admittedly . . . not great. I don’t frankly disagree with Ari when they wrote, last week, about the “total lack of chemistry in all its guises” between the leads.
But—and of course, I should really stay in my lane here, but whatever—it’s just a studio rom-com! It’s allowed to, like, have a few laughs and be totally forgettable. Why does it have to be, as Ari reported of the conversations swirling around the film in the queer community, the “not-kidding-around-this-time nail in the coffin of queer life and art”? Take it from a straight: Rom-coms are bad! That’s part of their appeal! And this one had some actual laughs (though admittedly I can’t remember them now), which is more than I can say for that abomination of a gay Christmas movie Happiest Season. (Of course, I only watched that Christmas movie because it was gay and I can’t say I’ve seen other ones. Are all of them that soulless?) I understand the pressures that come with greater mainstream representation, but freed of personal investment from this particular representational discourse, I’ve decided to die on the hill of mindless fun.
But perhaps the real reason I feel compelled to make Bros the first (totally gratuitous) back-to-back rec in this newsletter is that Ari left out a crucial piece of context for those fence-sitters in the JC readership. This is almost less a gay rom-com than it is a Jew/non-Jew rom-com (a hallmark of all the greats of the genre: Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally): In a kind of curious bait and switch, the only real conflict between the two leads, while disguised as being about Billy Eichner’s over-the-top gay presentation, is actually about his over-the-top Jewiness. Basically, what’s-his-face hot guy and his nice goyishe family are annoyed. Is it a parable about internalized homophobia or heartland antisemitism or just about the fact that Jews and/or gays need to tone it down? Who cares! It’s Friday night and I want to not think about the midterms or kids throwing soup at Van Gogh or, god forbid, Kanye for approximately 120 minutes. Consider this your permission to do that!
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I recently read two articles in a left-wing magazine that I found politically ignorant and, in fact, ignoble. They were all that’s terrible in left-wing writing, replete with name-calling and self-righteousness, filled with a self-proclaimed purity few mortals can attain to. Turning from them in disgust, I needed to read someone I could be confident would not disappoint, someone free of cant and self-delusion. I had to choose between H.L. Mencken and Joan Didion. Not having re-read her since her death, I went for the latter’ classic collection, The White Album. I was right to do so: Didion never lets you down.
Her mastery of language, eye for detail, and refusal of the obvious make all of the essays, written during the height of the ’60s and into the ’70s, essential documents of their time and of our society. It makes no difference what subject she examines, even unlikely ones, like Hollywood or shopping malls or the establishment of high-occupancy vehicle lanes in Los Angeles. But where Didion excelled, and where many—I warn you all now—will find her extremely problematic, is her description of ’60s America as a country not breaking out of its shackles but descending into chaos.
For Didion, the representative event of the new America being born was the Manson murders, the low point of the decade elevated to an archetypal moment. Student radicals are mocked, their posturing interpreted as ultimately meaningless, their college occupations empty, for “disorder was its own point.” A fundraising event held at the home of Sammy Davis Jr. is ridiculed as mercilessly for its vapidity as Tom Wolfe’s account of a different event in Radical Chic. The music played there is mocked as “not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson.”
All of this is relatively light compared to her attacks on the still-young women’s movement. Didion rejects the notion that women are protesting their status in society: “But of course something other than an objection to being ‘discriminated against’ was at work here, something other than an aversion to being ‘stereotyped’ in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seems that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.”
Any magazine editor who published these words today would be unemployed by day’s end. Didion would later write about political issues from a slightly different viewpoint, and do so brilliantly. But the heart of Didion, why she is still necessary, is for her tonic effect, for her illusionless vision of humanity. She was part of a generation, that, as she wrote, “lived with the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs,” of experiencing “the political irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.” We all need a dose of Didion, those who refuse ambiguity most of all.
David Klion (newsletter editor): On September 28th, my wife (and JC Board Vice-Chair) Lauren Goldenberg gave birth to our daughter Simone five weeks early; we have been commuting daily from our apartment in Brooklyn to a NICU on the Upper East Side ever since. This makes me the second Jewish Currents staffer to become a NICU dad (and the third to get hit by a car; I’m fine!) in the past year or so. Simone is beautiful and “feisty,” as the nurses say, and is making steady progress, but this surreal setup means that for now I have a lot of time to read when another new parent might be trying to steal naps whenever possible.
Last week, I tore through a 600-page book that has nothing to do with parenthood, but that I had been meaning to read for a while: Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner’s acclaimed and comprehensive 2008 history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Weiner, a reporter, doesn’t share precisely the same anticolonial leftist perspective on the CIA as some JC readers; his premise is that the United States ideally ought to have a well-functioning, professional intelligence agency, but what he means by that is an agency that collects and analyzes accurate information about the world in order to advise presidents on how to avoid wars. What we’ve actually had since the CIA’s founding in the wake of World War II, Weiner persuasively argues, is an unaccountable cabal of reckless, incompetent adventurers who are awful at gathering intelligence, and only marginally less awful at their real business of overthrowing and manipulating foreign governments.
Because of the US’s hegemonic wealth and military power, the CIA has enjoyed its share of high profile “successes” in the form of imposing brutal right-wing dictatorships from Guatemala to Iran to Congo to Indonesia to Chile, but its failures have been every bit as legion. Weiner recounts, for instance, how the agency recruited Nazi collaborators in the 1940s and ’50s to infiltrate Eastern Bloc governments and consistently saw them captured and executed due to superior Soviet intelligence, and how the many subsequent efforts to murder Fidel Castro and topple Cuba’s communist government flopped. Meanwhile, the CIA consistently failed to call some of the biggest geopolitical events of modern times, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the 9/11 attacks.
Even if you’re broadly familiar with many of these stories, Weiner has done a real service in compiling them all in one readable narrative that relentlessly indicts 60 years of CIA directors and US presidents for criminality, immorality, and incompetence. There are revelations on every page, and you’ll come away angry but also with a new respect for how complicated the world is, and how delusional it is to imagine anyone can control it with a few well-placed bribes and assassinations.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Around this time last year, perhaps as a way to steel myself against the approaching terrors of new parenthood, I started watching horror movies—a journey I chronicled intermittently in this newsletter. With Halloween season again in full swing, I’m recommitting to the project. Last week, I watched David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends, which follows Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021), concluding Green’s trilogy of direct sequels to John Carpenter’s untouchable 1978 masterpiece about a remorseless masked killer named Michael Myers.
Halloween was most notable for its antipathy to the very notion of a Halloween sequel. While the franchise is famous for the comically convoluted relationships between its 13 films, which repeatedly void previous installments, Green’s 2018 film was the first to take the original as canon while throwing out its initial direct sequel, Halloween II (1981). This movie—which Carpenter co-wrote with Debra Hill, his script partner for Halloween—introduces the twist that the paradigmatic “final girl,” Laurie Strode, is not a random victim, but the killer’s long-lost sister. The revelation is great narrative fodder, but it destroys the mystery of Myers, who transforms from an unaccountable force of nature to a man with a pathological agenda. In Murray Leeder’s book on the first film, Carpenter admits that he disdains the twist, which he feels “makes no sense,” and says it was devised as a justification for the sequel’s existence: “That was purely a function of having decided to become involved in the sequel to this movie where I didn’t think there was really much of a story left,” he explained. “What was I going to say? There was nothing more to say.”
Indeed, the procession of sequels that followed—with the exception of Halloween III (1982), which takes place in an entirely different timeline and gives Myers only a cameo appearance when the original film plays in the background—can’t stop saying needless nonsense. They build out elaborate justifications for Myers’s murderous drive and apparent invulnerability, effacing the ominous unknowability that gives the original its power. It’s a common problem with horror sequels: The desire to expand on a film to continue to profit off its premise often requires explicating the inexplicable. (In a piece for the defunct website The Dissolve, Tasha Robinson argued that because this impulse is at odds with cultivating fear of the unknown, “horror sequels are literally the opposite of horror,” which perhaps explains why some of the best sequels to horror films, like Aliens, shift genres altogether.) Even as the franchise occasionally negates its own explanations—for instance, developing a thread about druidic magic only to abandon it for H20 (1998)—it stays locked in this explanatory mode.
Green’s 2018 Halloween, then, is remarkable because it accepts Carpenter’s premise that the original left “nothing more to say,” yet still attempts to make a movie out of that nothing. It directly follows the original film, overrides the idea that Laurie is Myers’s sister, and—in the spirit of what Tyler Malone calls the “decayed psychologism” of the original—repeatedly introduces and then undermines theories about Myers’s motives, a dialectic that culminates in the killer smashing his psychiatrist’s skull, literalizing the ultimate rejection of rational explanation. Though it has little of the subtlety or ingenuity of the original, the 2018 film could have stood alone as a potent anti-sequel. But of course, it made too much money not to produce further follow-ups, creating a curious predicament: How do you make a series of horror sequels that challenge the form’s essence, which at once defines and ruins it?
The result is a trio of self-loathing sequels, movies at war with their own existence, which struggle to honor the enigmatic atmosphere of the 1978 film while still advancing the story. Halloween Kills doubles down on inexplicability by denying that Myers and Laurie, who has spent decades convinced the killer will return for her, have any special connection, but in casting about for some engine for its plot, settles on an equally unsatisfying motive. Reaching desperately for broader significance, it also tries to shoehorn in a timely political moral about the dangers of mob thinking, reducing inscrutable evil to elementary symbolism.
Halloween Ends represents the greatest structural diversion since Halloween III (and in fact, its title sequence suggests an explicit affinity with that wildcard entry), shifting much of the emphasis away from Myers. The film—admirably ambitious but poorly written, half-heartedly acted, and unconvincingly directed—instead focuses on Corey Cunningham, a babysitter who becomes a town pariah after a tragic accident befalls the child under his care, setting the stage for a melancholy meditation on how bogeymen can be created by mundane cruelty. This thematic shift at once contests the singularity of Myers’s inscrutable evil and honors it by letting it diffuse through the world as a force that transcends him. Tiresome voiceover speeches by Laurie (played, for the seventh time, by Jamie Lee Curtis), drawn from her memoir-in-progress, develop an overwrought theory of evil—what could be more didactic and less scary? Yet the striking incompatibility between her account and the understandings of Myers developed in the previous films generates an incoherence that (perhaps unwittingly) returns us to a sense of profound mystery.
Even its treatment of the film’s conclusiveness at once adheres to and subverts the sequel form. While the official synopsis markets the movie on the pretense of true finality, its producer has clarified that it is only his company’s last entry. (According to Curtis, it’s her last one too, though she said the same thing in 2002.) Asked whether the film would close out the franchise, John Carpenter, who returned to help score the trilogy, remarked, “I will have to see how much money it makes!” The film elegantly plays off this ambiguity, bringing its story to an almost comically clear resolution while still gesturing toward the impossibility of ever truly killing a profitable franchise in the name of aesthetic integrity. Drawing on the name used for Myers in the credits since the first film—“The Shape,” an expression of his unknowability—Laurie tells the viewer, “The truth is, evil doesn’t die. It changes shape.” This is the wisdom of self-consciously confronting the inevitable. Until the destruction of capitalism finally liberates Michael Myers from interminable resurrections of diminishing returns, I’ll take it.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): Last weekend, as a joke, on a date, I saw Bros. Written by the abrasive comic Billy Eichner, directed by Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, etc.), and co-produced by Judd Apatow, the film was marketed with no small degree of self-satisfaction as the world’s first big-budget gay romcom. Unfortunately for the gentlemen involved, Bros has been a flop. The week before I saw it, seemingly all 14 of its extant viewers tweeted lengthy threads proclaiming it the final, not-kidding-around-this-time nail in the coffin of queer life and art. I couldn’t wait!
Bros, to wit, is about an uptight bachelor, Bobby (Eichner), the smirking host of a popular podcast, who inhabits his role as a public gay uneasily; his life has cursed him with the task of reminding gala dinner audiences that love is love, depsite the fact that he has never experienced this exalted state himself. All of that changes, sort of, when he meets Aaron (a pleasantly shirtless Luke Macfarlane); their bond lies in the fact that Aaron, too, is love-shy and neurotic, but in a hot-person way. Much of their romantic pursuit takes place in the course of fundraising escapades for the (fictitious) National Museum of LGBTQ+ History and Culture that Bobby is helming, and where he spends most of his time pouting about his obsolescence as a “cis white gay man.” I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a cultural object as devoted to the enunciation of identity categories as Bros; the reality star Ts Madison, for instance, plays an ostensibly major role but has little to do besides declaim her status as a Black trans women, like Death or Beauty in a medieval morality play. Like David Sedaris, who proclaimed himself “straight” this week in a one-man strike against the word “queer,” Eichner seems not to have gotten the memo that the LGBTQ+s around him might find him more charming if he tried a simple greeting like, “My fellow homosexuals!”
Bros is probably not the final nail in the coffin of anything, but it does feel like a vague, dubious achievement in the annals of masculinity: the achievement of a perfect standoff between heterosexual and homosocial scripts. A central question of the traditional romcom is whether a man and a woman can be friends (When Harry Met Sally famously said “no”). Male buddy comedies, by contrast, have often teased audiences by asking whether a guy and a dude could be more than friends, and screamed the answer (still “no.”) Bros would like to borrow from both canons, but settles instead for neither. What Bobby and Aaron have in common is a blockage around both platonic and sexual intimacy, as though they have never learned to eroticize either prohibition or invivation. Or maybe they just aren’t that into each other—it doesn’t appear that the filmmakers would know what the alternative looked like if they saw it. It is kind of interesting to watch a movie premised on such a total lack of chemistry in all its guises. But it probably won’t draw many passionate lovers, or haters, to Bros.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1938, with the Spanish Civil War still being fought and its eventual victor becoming increasingly certain, the great photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (born Dawid Szymin) published Death in the Making, a volume of photos taken in the first year of the war. Its cover showed what would come to be considered one of the greatest images of war ever produced: Capa’s shot of a Loyalist soldier at the moment he’d been struck and killed by a fascist bullet.
The photos in the book, which was reprinted in 2020 by Damiani and the International Center of Photography (ICP), and which is the subject of an exhibit at ICP that runs until January 9th, 2023, remain masterpieces of left-wing art—left-wing not just because they chronicle the early months of the defense of the Republic against the coup led by General Franco, but because of the people they capture. There are almost no photos of leaders on display (with the notable exception of the Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri, known to all as La Pasionaria, who appears once). Rather, we are presented with the factory and munitions workers, the peasants who have occupied the land they work even as they attempt to turn back the rebellion. The suffering of women features prominently, and not only in the lined faces of the peasant women or the embraces of the wives saying farewell to their husbands as they leave for the front. Women are shown as workers and fighters, too, playing an active part in the war.
The show and the book express the enthusiasm of the early period of the resistance to Franco and his troops: the children playing on barricades; the fighting men and women seen more often in street clothes than in uniform, some in helmets, some not. This is clearly a people’s war. The photographs and Capa’s accompanying text subtly present the Communist (rather than anarchist) position on how the war should be fought. The ragtag army of the summer of 1936 is shown being turned into a disciplined People’s Army, with the uniformed troops lined up in ranks carrying out military drills. A section of the show and a chapter of the book are dedicated to the Republicans’ protection and preservation of Spain’s artistic heritage—in this instance, the protection and preservation of church art. The church burnings and iconoclasm of the anarchists was not for Taro, Capa, and Chim.
To walk through the exhibition and then read the book is to journey through a world in which the title of André Malraux’s great novel about the war—L’Espoir (Hope)—was real. The armed workers with their clenched fists carried with them the possibility of not just a new Spain, but a new world. There is no hint here of the ugly splits that occurred within the Republican camp, the Communists’ crushing of the anarchists and the independent revolutionaries of POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). The book should be on every reader’s holiday gift list, the exhibition on the must-see list of everyone in or passing through New York. They are moving monuments to the last good cause.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): Since editing Jewish Currents Contributing Editor Noah Kulwin’s interview with the journalist Vincent Bevins on his book The Jakarta Method two years ago, I’ve been meaning to read Bevins’s account of how US Cold-War-era intervention in Indonesia, Brazil, and elsewhere supported deathly and authoritarian political movements in the name of anticommunism. I finally got around to it this month, and I’m glad I did. Through interviews with coup survivors as well as long-term on-the-ground reporting and archival research, Bevins offers an intricate and heartbreaking account of Indonesian politics in the 40s and 50s. He chronicles how a moment of possibility after the country freed itself from Dutch rule—during which the country’s independent Communist Party built an impressive coalition and was seen as a leader among Third World socialist movements—gave way to a 1956 anticommunist coup, followed by the mass killings and imprisonment of up to a million Indonesians for suspected “communism.” This was supported by US military training, intelligence, and propaganda.
Bevins also chronicles how the events of Indonesia reverberated around the world, serving as a template for similar violence in Latin America, including in Chile, where, Bevins shows, right-wing groups began graffiti-ing ominous “Jakarta is coming” messages in public in the months before Pinochet deposed Allende in a 1974 coup. (That coup led to the killings and forced disappearances of tens of thousands of the new regime’s political opponents.) Bevins chronicles the excitement and energy of young leftists in Indonesia, Chile, and elsewhere who took a flexible approach to communist ideology and put their faith in social democratic movements, only to learn that their countries’ fate would be influenced less by their successful democratic organizing than by the heavy hand of the CIA and its anticommunist allies.
After finishing The Jakarta Method, it’s tempting to want to insist every American be made to learn about this history of US foreign policy—and sobering to remember the major right-wing backlash that currently rages against any attempt to make educational progress in that direction.
Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): If, like me, you prefer your prose poignant but plain-spoken, you really shouldn’t read Meena Kandasamy’s writing. Don’t get me wrong: having interviewed her, I’m convinced of Meena’s literary genius. I also like complex novels as much as the next person and get why stories need to contain non-linear chronologies, unreliable narrators, or a roving point-of-view. But Meena’s madness goes much, much further. While her new book Exquisite Cadavers and her bestseller When I Hit You are better known examples of Meena’s stylistic defiance (and might well merit their own reviews), it is her first novel The Gypsy Goddess that really inaugurates the genre of mutilated novels.
The book is ostensibly “about” a horrific massacre that took place in 1968 in a South Indian village, where upper-caste landlords locked 44 low-caste peasants—including pregnant women, infants, grandmothers—in a thatch hut and then set the hut afire to punish their crime of demanding higher wages. However, the book doesn’t so much depict a massacre as commit one, hacking and tearing at every conventional way of telling the story. The first chapter is about the novel’s first sentence. Meena shares several versions of it, imagines readers’ reaction to each, then revises it. A few pages in, she asks, “Are you still hunting around for the one-line synopsis and the sixty-second sound bite? Do you want me to compress this tragedy to fit into Twitter? How does one even enter this heart of darkness?” The sheer magnitude of the tragedy that is a peasant’s life in Tanjore district, then, seems to defy every attempt at painless narration.
It can be hard to stay with this generous explanation for the book’s tortured form, especially when the author spends time reproducing scathing criticisms of her book, (“its English [is] a crime against the language”); spending another chapter on a dozen possible titles for the novel, explaining that the one she settled on has nothing to do with the book, only with the publishing industry push to sound catchy; yet another chapter on an imagined Q&A with a confused reader (Q: “Why can’t you follow a standard narrative format?” A: ‘if that’s what you want, go read the following academic articles’). Is any of this self-indulgence really necessary to do justice to the story? I’m not sure I know. What the broken novel does do, though, is equip you for what is to come. “Hate is haphazard,” Meena writes, “with a mind of its own, and a reckless impatience...Even if we stylistically try to recreate the texture of every other old-maid’s tale...hate is not always obedient to plot.”
So it is that after Meena finally writes “Fuck these postmodern novelists” and gets into the “actual” story of the war between landlords and Communist peasants (it is less “postmodern” than the first half of the book, but only just), the story itself is as haphazard as the hate driving it. By the time the beatings, rapes, murders, and massacres appear interspersed with lawsuits, formal letters of complaint, association meetings, and gatherings at tea shops, you’re listening not because of attachment to a specific character whose humanity Meena has convinced you of but because of the intense believability with which the fury of the powerful and torment of the downtrodden scream off the pages in a discordant cacophony: refusing to explain themselves to the unconvinced reader, refusing to do work to make you care about these burning bodies or despise these arsonists, just putting you in front of the violence and leaving you there to do what you please. The choice to engage, to read the list of 42 names and descriptions of the bodies recovered, to figure out who the “I” is in each chapter—the assassin? the murdered?—and whether to believe them, is left to you. The author is too busy undermining her own authority as a storyteller and prose’s power to help you understand. This is what happens when a poet writes a novel. Read at your own peril.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Faced with the corpus of a prolific major writer, there’s something thrilling about beginning with a minor work. Certainly there’s much to recommend starting with the most celebrated masterpieces—the books where the writer’s vision finds its fullest expression—and deferring the rest until one’s finished what’s most essential. But the imperfection and obscurity that often mark minor works can make them particularly potent sites of entry, allowing more direct access to a writer’s idiosyncrasies and obsessions than the achievements whose acclaim may unwittingly conceal the work itself.
I felt this way about Exteriors, a 1993 book by Annie Ernaux, which I’d never heard of before I saw it at my local bookstore last weekend. (It was the only Ernaux they had; perhaps the more famous ones flew off the shelves after last week’s announcement that the French novelist and memoist had won the Nobel Prize.) Exteriors, translated into English by Tanya Leslie, compiles a selection of diary entries from 1985 to 1992, each briefly detailing a scene Ernaux observed in her home city of Cergy-Pontoise, a planned community built outside Paris in the 1970s. The project is conceived as a departure for a writer whose central subject is her own life. Here she aims to look only outward—and no further than exactly what sits before her eyes. “I have sought,” she writes in the preface, “to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.”
But Ernaux understands that even if it were possible to strip away all interpretation, to write merely what one sees would remain a way of writing about oneself, a self that emerges in the shape of what attracts its attention or escapes its notice. The book ends by articulating this principle; Ernaux, seeing a stranger who reminds her of her mother, reflects, “So it is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the subway or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan or in the Galeries Lafayette; in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again.” An index of surfaces thus becomes an account of the self distributed over space and time, returning to itself in endlessly shifting iterations.
This is not to say that the self subsumes those it observes: Exteriors is also a glimmering archive of other lives, whose richness springs forth like a shadow from the glimpses of gestures, scrawls of graffiti, bursts of overheard laughter. In the manner of Elizabeth Hardwick’s autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights, Ernaux perceptively evokes the worlds through which she passes, leaving some scenes’ meanings open, working others into aphorisms of startling brilliance: In songs one remains locked in desire. All storytelling operates along the same lines as eroticism. The transmission from reality to symbol is a form of release. As the entries accrue, this partial record of seven years of waiting rooms, subway cars, and supermarkets seems to exceed its own bounds even as it remains fixed within them, affirming the infinity latent in the most mundane encounter.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Though I’ve had the novels of Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness in my library for years, I’ve assiduously avoided reading them for just as long. I’ve assumed these works describing lives lived in rural Icelandic would be noble and uplifting. If there’s anything I hate, it’s noble and uplifting.
But my wife and I recently traveled to Iceland where, unlike most tourists, I fell in love not just with the landscape, but with the Icelandic language, which I am now studying. So I decided the time had come to read Laxness, and to start with what is widely considered his greatest book, Independent People. Reading this novel has been described as “life-changing,” and if that’s an exaggeration, it’s only a slight one.
Over the length of this epic work, a Nordic Zola novel, Laxness tells the story of the archetypal “independent man,” Guðbjartur Jónsson, known as Bjartur, working his holding in the Icelandic wastes, refusing to accept assistance or any ties, either of family or friendship or class. Bjartur, who struggles mightily to maintain and sustain the land and sheep he purchased with such difficulty, represents not only the Icelander who has fought nature and isolation for the thousand years of settlement in the country, but also—in his insistence that only independence matters, that any compromise with others, any acceptance of help from others, destroys that independence and must be rejected—the egoism and individualism that for Laxness the Communist is the cause of the perpetuation of the real enemy, capitalism.
Bjartur is a profoundly unpleasant character, perhaps the most profoundly unpleasant hero of any great novel ever published. The deaths of those near to him matter less than the loss of a sheep; losing his children and wife to death merits little more than a shrug: Life is that way, has been that way, and will always be that way. Misfortune for the greater world, in the form of World War I, causes the price of Icelandic products to rise, and thus is a good thing. He and his fellow farmers’ only regret is that the war didn’t last longer. Bjartur is not only independent and disagreeable but also indomitable, and the one chink in his seemingly impregnable armor is his confused feelings for the girl he raised as his daughter, Sollilja. Laxness keeps the humanity this injects into Bjartur subterranean, saving the key moment in their troubling relationship for the final few pages of the novel.
Even a society as small Iceland’s is subject to the blandishments of wealth, and just as in 2008, when the crash crushed Iceland harder than almost any other country in the world, Bjartur is buried under debt taken on in the expectation that the good times will last forever. Laxness tells us that “the free man of the famine years has become the interest-slave of the boom years.” There’s one cause for the miserable life of the crofters: “The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty forever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man’s protector, but his worst enemy.” But it is Laxness’s genius that his own hero doesn’t seem to accept this lesson. There is no neat tying-up of the tale.
I’ve always held up The Magic Mountain as exemplary of the kind of book whose continuation you’d kill to learn. I can think of no higher compliment for Independent People than to say that I regretted not being able to follow the characters of this magnificent novel across the wastes, hoping against hope that things will work out.
The French writer Annie Ernaux just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so we’re re-upping this recommendation of her novel, A Girl’s Story, from September 2021
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I just finished a strange little book of autofiction, Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story. The author, now in her 70s, returns to the summer of 1958, when she was 18—her first summer spent away from her parents as a counselor at a camp in Normandy. Intoxicated by her newfound freedom, she fools around with the boys at the camp, one after another. The sex acts she describes are awful—she does not know yet how to experience pleasure or how to ask for it, and it’s just as well, because her “partners” are not the least bit interested. The others at the camp, men and women alike, treat her with derision and scorn. But she is unfazed. She is instead deliriously happy, “edified by the pride of experience, the possession of new knowledge.” Later, she reads Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; with greater consciousness paradoxically comes a delayed feeling of shame at how she had been treated (“a girl’s shame”).
I connected to the subject matter (as I imagine many women, especially those who went to sleepaway camp, would). But it’s almost tangential to what’s at the heart of the book: the question of our relationship to our many selves through time. The author asks herself again and again why she is writing this book, this collection of scraps (sometimes there are only lists of evocative films or remembered song lyrics on the page, or a close reading of a single photograph). Sometimes “the girl of ’58,” as she calls her, is “she,” sometimes it is “I.” She is not grafting meaning onto events so much as undertaking an experiment of re-living, seeing if she can manage to exist in a past moment. It is a book that perhaps might not have been published by a less accomplished writer (Ernaux has published some 20 books of fiction and memoir); it is resolutely unsure of itself. I’m glad about that. The experiment, in this case, is more profound than a tidier work would have been.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): Early next year, a new magazine of Black radical thought called Hammer and Hope will be making its debut. Excited for its arrival, a few of us decided to read the book that inspired the magazine’s name: Hammer and Hoe, historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s classic account of the Black workers in Alabama who organized with the American Communist Party during the Great Depression. The narratives of CP organizing that I’ve absorbed over the years, from Richard Wright’s Black Boy to Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism to Dorothy Healy’s California Red, have been centered in the big cities of the North and West. I knew in an abstract way that the party was, improbably, present in the South as well, and that its organizing there helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement—but had little idea of what this looked like. Reading Hammer and Hoe, I learned that the party itself was initially dubious about heading south, but ultimately chose to do so in the late 1920s—with alternately inspiring and terrifying results.
Just before the Depression, Communist Party leaders—who had initially seen the region too backward to organize in—began to take seriously the idea of organizing in the South after adopting the position that Black Southerners constituted an oppressed nation and a potentially revolutionary class. When organizers went to Birmingham, a city selected for its high level of industrialization, the party made few inroads with white workers, who with few exceptions hated and feared the prospect of interracial struggle. But Black factory workers and farmers alike eagerly got on board. Indeed, the party’s “outside agitator” status—its alien character as an internationalist organization rooted in the urban North and taking direction from the USSR—was not frightening to but welcomed by Black workers with little attachment to the state, and already practiced at clandestine organizing (union locals sometimes disguised their meetings as Bible study groups, for instance).
At the same time, the level of violence Black organizers encountered was staggering: The Klan, other militias, and state authorities tortured and murdered workers and their families for going anywhere near the union campaigns sponsored by the CP. Organizers were thwarted in a different way by Black middle-class organizations like the NAACP, which cherished their position as mediators between Black workers and white authorities. Kelley’s meticulously researched book makes clear that, given these circumstances, the improbability of organizing a Black workers’ movement in the South was in fact a near impossibility, and the fact that communist organizing took hold there at all—in the process, improving labor conditions for thousands of miners, steelworkers, and sharecroppers, and creating links between local Black radical traditions and an international workers’ movement—is the kind of 20th-century marvel we can only hope to see more of in the 21st.
Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): The weather has begun to get colder on the East Coast, and I find myself turning to “comfort” media: things that I’ve consumed and loved in the past. In my case, this means cartoons that I watch and rewatch, and comics that I read and reread. A few years ago, discovering that it was no longer online, I purchased the volume of Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell. I then lent it to a date (I should know better than to do that) and never got it back, but reordered it recently in anticipation of seeking coziness during the darker, shorter days ahead.
DCIGTH takes place in a version of New York City in which humans and mythical creatures live all together, navigating their joys, mistakes, crushes, losses, and aspirations. Darwin’s pet is a talkative manticore, his landlord is a minotaur, and a trio of stoner angels crash rent-free on his couch. Through a series of events in their younger lives that were largely outside of their control, Darwin’s best friend Ella has terrific karma—which, in this world, is acutely measurable—while his is abysmal. The characters’ choices and friendships are the heart of the story, and the art is gorgeous. The book has adult themes (drinking, sex, career blues) so it’s not for kids, but I feel a special kind of nostalgia when I curl up on the couch with a compelling comic book.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This has been a big year for the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese officer in World War II who, having been given an order to hold his position on an island in the Philippines until relief arrived, did so until 1974, 29 years after the war’s end. Earlier this year, Werner Herzog’s short, spare novel about Onoda, The Twilight World, was published in the US, and I recommended it highly here. We now have Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Forest, by the French actor-turned-filmmaker Arthur Harari, opening today. It is anything but short or spare, clocking in at nearly three hours. Some of the details in the film don’t appear in the novel, and vice versa. Onoda, we learn in the film, was not an ordinary soldier, but part of an elite unit: His dedication to the order to never surrender was that of someone specially trained for this purpose—which does little to change the maniacal nature of his commitment.
Onoda was not alone in his holdout. While Herzog’s book speaks of the comrades who stayed with him for varying periods before they were killed, the focus is on Onoda’s own mind and activities. But in Harari’s film the pointlessness of this last stand is multiplied by the filmmaker’s more thorough treatment of the small cadre of first three, then two, then one, then zero fellow soldiers. When, just a few years after the war’s end, a Japanese delegation (including Onoda’s father) goes to the island to track him down and convince him that the war is over, Onoda and his sole remaining followers become a perfect example, in miniature, of mass delusion, interpreting the straightforward message to give up as a coded command to continue their resistance.
Nature, Herzog’s great bugaboo in his films and in his Onoda novel, is in Harari’s film less an enemy than a supplier, its lushness not a disguise for hell, but a provider of shelter and tools. There is likewise no madness in Harari’s Onoda. With the exception of his demented breaking of the coded message that isn’t one, he remains a well-trained officer throughout the film. Even when a tourist brings him his superior officer, long-since retired from the military, who finally convinces him that the war is over, his reaction is an emotionless one: stoic acceptance.
The film, along with its grim realism, contains moments of deadpan comedy. Years into their wanderings around the island, Onoda’s last remaining comrade tells him he couldn’t have had a better commander—to which Onoda responds that he couldn’t have had a better second-in-command. All is well in their army of two.
Before you go:
Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our upcoming event, “Reporting from Occupied Territory: A Conversation with Palestinian Freelance Journalists.”
On Tuesday, October 18th, at 12 pm Eastern, join journalists Lara Aburamadan and Dalia Hatuqa for a discussion about autonomy, precarity, storytelling, and politics,
moderated by New York Times Magazine contributing writer Rozina Ali. This event is co-sponsored by Jewish Currents and the Freelance Solidarity Project.
Strangely, as a young teen, when I was just beginning to think about politics, I thought abortion was wrong—if the war in Iraq was wrong because it would kill thousands of Iraqis, shouldn’t terminating a pregnancy be wrong too? That was how I thought about the issue. I no longer believe that, but my feelings on life, abortion, and babies have only grown more complicated upon witnessing my wife Emily go through labor, and then raising our Shayna together. Rabbi Miriam’s brazen defense of the right of a person to terminate a fetus was most provocative because Miriam, like me, also has a baby (also named Shayna!). Miriam said of her pregnancy: “Slowly slowly my future child became more and more real. And I was elated to meet my baby. I felt I loved her and in some intimate and ineffable way I felt I had a relationship with her. But in a beautiful Jewish contradiction, I also did not believe she was alive in me. She was not a person, not yet.” To be honest, I’m still struggling with how I feel about that—is it really the case that the fetus who became my beautiful daughter was not living, not a person, until her head came out into the world?
To be clear, even if I was sure a fetus was a living being of some sort, I would still be pro-abortion rights, a position in line with Sophie Lewis’s own provocative argument that “if the labor of pregnancy is productive of life, then interrupting that labor is—logically speaking—productive of death.” I am convinced intellectually by Miriam—and she marshals a powerful argument—though emotionally I’m unsure. I think it’s because I’m uncomfortable with the thought that my daughter Shayna, as a fetus, was not a living being. I doubt I’ll be able to come to a sure footing on the question. My continued wrestling with the issue is a testament to the power of Miriam’s sermon.
Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): I woke up to
an email in my inbox with the subject line “Welcome to Post-Fascism.” It
was a magazine newsletter referring to the fascist Giorgia Meloni’s
victory in Italy’s recent elections, an outcome that seems to have
shocked observers around the world. I know precious little about Italy,
but because some of that comes from the fiction of Elena Ferrante, this
outcome did not shock me. Ferrante’s magisterial Neapolitan Quartet probably does not
need me to recommend it because almost every major figure in the
literary and critical establishment has been recommending it for years.
But where most reviewers want you to read Ferrante for the books’
breathless prose, their candid depictions of womanhood, and their
haunting portraits of friendship, I urge you to read her books for their
portrait of a society structured from bottom up by reactionary forces.
The books follow the lives of two girls growing up in the slums of 1950s
Naples amidst the country’s postwar recovery, coming of age during a
burgeoning communist movement and growing old at its decline. Reading
the book jackets, you’d learn that the story is one of these women’s
complicated friendship, but it is equally a story of violence both
intimate and impersonal, inflicted variously by parents, siblings,
lovers, neighborhood strongmen, factory overseers, husbands, children,
the police, and most of all friends. Spectacular instances of organized
violence sometimes appear in the foreground (eg. a prominent fascist
moneylender is stabbed in his home; the local communist is arrested for
the murder) but more mundane forms of repression are constant (a father
throwing his disobedient daughter out of the window, boys hurling rocks
at girls who shamed them at school, brothers fighting for their sisters’
‘honor’).
And ultimately, the daily repressions are what determine the characters’ life trajectories. Perhaps the pivotal moment in the first book, My Brilliant Friend, is when a father refuses his daughter, the protagonist Lila, an education, setting her up for a lifetime of subjugation at home, at work, and beyond. The villains, it seems, are always those who love us, and our basest social instincts are always the ones we exercise at home. In the second book, The Story of a New Name, Lila observes as much on her wedding night as her husband, son of the dead neighborhood fascist, forces himself on her. “He was never Stefano, she seemed to discover suddenly, he was always the oldest son of Don Achille [who] was rising from the muck of the neighborhood, feeding on the living matter of his son. The father was cracking his skin, changing his gaze, exploding out of his body.”
Even if you kill the fascist, the fascism remains in the children, in the small gestures and big, in their love as much as in their hate. Even amidst a revolution without, relations and habits of domination remain protected and nurtured within—even amongst the revolutionaries themselves—ready to flower again when the time is right, as it now seems to be. Giorgia Meloni promises to protect “god, family, country,” and while Ferrante’s book says little about the country and less about god, it bares the fascist entrails of the family for all to see.
Mari Cohen (assistant editor): God Save the Animals,
an addicting new record by the singer/songwriter/producer Alex G (stage
name of Alex Giannascoli), has a sonic template that I like to call—as a
compliment, to be clear!—“summer camp gone wrong.” The album assembles a
collage of beautiful and catchy guitar-backed melodies that are
frequently hijacked by pitched-up or pitched-down vocals, eerie layered
choirs, and distortion. It’s a fitting mood for the lyrics, which
wrestle in ways both touching and unnerving with the grand business of
life and its meaning, as Giannascoli fumbles with the promise and peril
of religion as a guiding light.
At times, religiosity is
considered in a dark, even mocking light: “God is my designer/Jesus is
my lawyer,” an autotuned voice croons on “S.D.O.S”; the song “Blessing”
offers a creepy whispered mantra that sounds more like a curse: “Every
day is a blessing / as I walk through the mud / if I live like the
fishes / I will rise from the mud.” (In a testament to Giannascoli’s
daring, he released this very weird song as the album’s first single.)
At other times, like on gorgeous love song “Miracles,” the reach for the
divine seems sincere, resulting in an expansive humanistic vision: “I
pray for the children and the sinners and the animals too/and I pray for
you.” The song, incidentally, also includes one of the more romantic
lines an indie softboi can come up with: “You and me/we got better pills
than ecstasy.” (If I’ve put you off by suggesting “God Save the
Animals” is a Christian record, don’t be alarmed—the album also includes
such lyrics as “I have to put the cocaine in the vaccine/walk out of
the doctor with immunity.”)
Overall, it’s a rare feat when an artist can lean into strangeness and surprise without sacrificing the simple pleasure of an easygoing hook—so it’s my pleasure to spread the Alex G gospel.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer):The
time is long since past when baseball was the great American pastime.
Though attendance is still high, it’s football and basketball that rule
the roost these days. But if sports have long been a way out of poverty,
especially for immigrants and their children, baseball remains a way
out of despair. While Dominicans and Venezuelans are prominent on the
field, those most desperately clinging to baseball as an escape route
are the much smaller group of Cuban peloteros for whom the sport is a
way to save both themselves and their families.
The Last Out, showing on October 1st on PBS’s show POV and
streaming all of October at PBS.org, follows a group of Cubans who,
enticed by an American agent to defect, temporarily settle in Costa Rica
in the hopes of attracting bids from American teams. Despite the
complexities of their situation (Cubans cannot be signed by American
teams unless they have legal residency in a third country, a process
that, as we see in the film, can take a long, long time), the three
players we follow are full of optimism—nay, certainty—that living the
American dream is just around the corner.
If in general the life
of an aspiring ballplayer is tough—an infinitesimal fraction of those
who are signed ever make it to the majors—our protagonists’ are
infinitely more miserable. Their agent, Gus Dominguez, who invests in
their futures by supporting them minimally until they are signed (when
he will receive 20% of their bonus), at first seems fine enough, but we
eventually learn he has spent five years in jail for smuggling Cuban
ballplayers and is in bad odor with the bigwigs in the sport. Tryouts
held to spotlight the players are poorly attended and fruitless, and
they begin to slack off in their training, which makes the prospect of
being signed grow even more remote.
Like so many immigrant tales, The Last Out
is a story of disillusionment. One player, appropriately named “Happy,”
is expelled from the agent’s program and eventually takes the long,
dangerous trip from Costa Rica to the United States. (He gets closer to
the majors than anyone else when he meets the Cuban-born Houston Astros
first baseman Yuli Gurriel. Gurriel—who is the son of one of Cuba’s
all-time great players, and who won the American League batting title in
2021—is the fulfillment of the players’ dream.) Another, a promising
pitcher, simply disappears, though the filmmakers later track him down.
The third player, a pitcher casually considered lazy and unserious, is
the only one still playing ball at the film’s end—though in the
Dominican Republic, not the US, where he plays “alongside major
leaguers.”
