Wednesday 29 December 2021

”Saving Beauty" (”Die Errettung des Schönen") by Byung-Chul Han - a short introduction


 “Saving Beauty“ (“Die Errettung des Schönen“) by Byung-Chul Han:

As the last book of a colorful variety of 58 books I read this year, which all were novels, this one is not. It is a collection of 14 short essays of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, a cultural theorist and lecturer at the University of the Arts, Berlin.

In them Han deals, in short sentences and a precise, concise prose, passionate and engaging with the concept of beauty in today’s consumer culture. Han paints a dystopian picture of our society and how it lost track of beauty.


Han argues that beauty has lost its edge and has been turned into something merely smooth and pleasing, like the impeccable smooth surface of a smartphone, Brazilian Waxing or the sculptures of Jeff Koons. The smooth has become the signature of the present. Anything that is not positive has fallen victim to the need for a fast, unobstructed flow of information and capital. Han paints beauty as having declined from being inextricably linked with the sublime, to the empty, self-centred notion it has now become.


Why do we find smooth things beautiful today? The smooth does not hurt. It does offer no resistance but produces instant Like and gives immediate pleasure. Beauty in its smoothness has become central to the subject, in an almost autoerotic way. It embodies today's positive society. Because of this smoothness the encounter with true beauty fails, the charm of beauty is lost. True beauty, being strange and different, being something of the other, always must contain something negative and obscure. In place of the beautiful steps the pleasing. The alterity or negativity of the other and the alien is eliminated altogether. But negativity, being an invigorating force of life, is also an integral part of true beauty. 


Only what is not smooth can free the self from its narcissistic cocoon, from permanent self-affirmation and narcissistic mirroring. Without negativity, without the injury it inflicts, there can be neither poetry nor art. Thinking only is provoked as a result of the experience of the negativity of the injury. True beaúty also has to inflict pain.The kind of beauty which is a consequence of aesthetic distance is lost in a culture dependent on images of rapid effects and affects. For Byung Chul-Han beauty is not a momentary glow, but a silent afterglow. The refinement consists in the reluctance. 


Han ultimately separates the fundamentally different forms of the beautiful based on the attitude we adopt towards it: there is something beautiful that is easy to have and smooth and that confirms our auto-eroticism. And there is something beautiful that only cautiously reveals itself to the viewer.


The crisis of beauty today consists in the fact that beauty is reduced to its givenness, to its use or consumer value. In order to make it more readily and easily consumable it has to be smooth and without friction and negativity. 


In order to save beauty, Han argues, we have to reunite it with the sublime and return to it the negativity of the other. The saving of beauty is the seeing and thus the saving of the other. We affirm the differences, the alienness of the other and thus save beauty. And we are saving ourselves from the grip of consumerism. Beauty needs the difference of the other, and a ‘contemplative distance’ that allows us to linger, to plunge into and thereby, to lose ourselves and experience the sense of our own finitness.


This collection is not a structured, congruent or consistent look on beauty and its role in our contemporary society. Han does not present a closed theory of beauty, rather he strings together interesting, insightful, surprising fragments and leaves it to the reader to piece them together.



 -Byung-Chul Han (b. 1956) studied metallurgy in Korea, then philosophy, German philology and catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich. He is a lecturer and teacher of cultural theory at the University of Arts in Berlin. -




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Friday 24 December 2021

”A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amos Towles - review


 “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amos Towles:

At the end of a year of avid reading I happened upon a book which in its tone if not its subject is a little different from what I am usually drawn to and I came upon it, as so often is the case when something lasting and remarkable happens, by sheer happenchance. A bit of an unusual novel for me, but it proved to be perfectly suited for the time of year, Christmas being just underway, New Year not far, the passing of the year, as is natural at such times, closely and vividly felt.

The book took a short while to persuade me to stay with it but in the end it succeeded. I think it is the ultimate book to read in a quarantine/lockdown.


The time is 1922, the place is Moscow, the main protagonist is Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat of the finest order, a real fine gentleman of the old school. He is sentenced to life-long house arrest in Moscow’s finest Hotel, the Metropol, by a Bolshevik’s tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt.


Slowly we become immersed in his story and his world, which consists, naturally, of an aristocratic past and his slow accommodation to his new life sentence in the grand Hotel. Here he learns to live life at its fullest, regardless of the circumstances, here he discovers the depths of humanity in all its shades, varieties and colors. Cozy and warm inside the Metropole, a whole separate world exists. 


We watch with the Count, who has lost his family, his possessions, his social standing, as everything he loves about Russian life is systematically uprooted by the new regime. The chill of this is certainly felt but for the Count and his friends at the Hotel the passage of time is observed as a ”turn of kaleidoscope“ or a magic lantern that throws its images on the wall, much as in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. 


Count Rostov is a man of impeccable personal standards and refined taste, an aesthete and bon-homme par excellence. He is a follower of routines and rituals and in possession of a kind, wise heart. He is eloquent and an insightful observer of live and people. Unlike many other novels about Russia this one does not linger on the dreary life and ubiquitous pain of the Russian people. There is the looming threat of the political regime, but politics mostly stay lurking in the shadows and don’t come to the fore.


The tale is elegantly rendered and clever, the prose is, congruent with the times it depicts, a little antiquated but nevertheless precise, poetic and, as is the whole of the book, very very charming. Spread across four decades the tale is brimming with personal wisdom, philosophical musings and charm. It is a stylish novel befitting a stylish gentleman and its tone is light, easy with gentle funny digressions, winning in its mannered but at the same time very pleasant ways. There is a wonderfully charming and colorful cast of characters. 


There are themes of romance, parenting, loyalty, friendship and survival. There is suspense, family drama, food, art and wine. There always is humor and in these times of quarantine the book shows that maintaining connections with people you like and love is the main force with which to keep sane. 



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Thursday 9 December 2021

“Intimacies“ by Katie Kitamura - review


 “Intimacies“ by Katie Kitamura:

A mysterious novel about a woman adrift in her own life and a new city. A story which constantly asks: Where do I belong? It is a tale that at first seems to be all too familiar but soon morphs into something bewilderingly strange.


After discovering that her new boyfriend Adriaan is a married man with a family, the narrator, a young woman interpreter who recently moved to The Hague to start a contract job at the International Court, feels that “the appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself“. This feeling extents to almost every aspect of her life, personal and professional.


Very little do we know of the narrator’s life or history. She came to The Hague by way of New York, her father has just died and her mother has returned to Singapore. Her age and ethnicity are never precisely mentioned. Despite this little information we slowly begin to establish a connection with her.  


We are offered an interesting insight into the inner workings of the International Court, we get a sense of how it is to constantly maneuver between meanings and languages and furthermore we form the impression of both the importance and the futility of the International Criminal Court. We learn that the Court primarily prosecutes crimes against humanity in African nations, becoming an "ineffectual" instrument of "Western imperialism”. 

At her work in the Court, responsible for translating legal proceedings for the defense of a genocidal former heads of state who is accused of cruel injustice against ethnic minorities, she and the accused develop a predator-prey dynamic, with the narrator simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the accused's ruthlessness and absence of remorse. 


Despite her skill and discipline “great chasms between words, between two or more languages“ open up without warning. There seems to be a strange dichotomy of presence and absence simultaneously at work.  “Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,” she reflects, “You can be so caught up in the minutiae of the interpreting act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning.” 


Outside of work she looks for what anyone moving alone to a new city would be looking for, namely friendship and love. Cracks in her professional and private life open up and widen. A mugging takes place outside her friend’s apartment and she develops an obsessive interest in the victim, an antiquarian book seller. Her boyfriend Adriaan asks her to await his return in his apartment while he flies to Lisbon to divorce his estranged wife, but days become weeks and he stops texting and her sense of insecurity increases. The novel slowly acquires an uncanny atmosphere of threat though it is not clear where that threat originates. “I want to be in a place that feels like home,” she thinks but “where that is, I don’t know”. 


She keeps functioning apparently normal, does what everyone else does, she eats, works at her job, makes friends, maintains friendships but at the same time is adrift and unsteady. Her attentions are mostly directed outward, towards others, their lives, their problems, only rarely do her thoughts turn inward and when they do they heighten her sense of being lost and adrift. She often uses the words Intimacies or Intimate and seems to crave these conditions while being aware of their elusiveness. 


The intimate situations she is involved in are mostly described from an observational distance, she describes her friendship with her woman-friend Jana, talks of her relation with her boyfriend Adriaan, speaks of an intrusive approach of a man at a private party. Once she briefly reflects on her former family life, she meets the sister of the mugged book seller and the bookseller himself whom she later watches in intimate embrace with a woman not his wife. The strangest intimacy she develops with the accused criminal president at her work. In all these cases she mostly confines herself to just watch and describe. It is not exactly a voyeuristic view she inhabits but a cooly detached, almost scientific one.

We try to connect with her but her cool observant way makes it hard to establish a real emotional bond. Kitamura brings us into intimate spaces between people while keeping her distance.


This is a tale of the familiar inability to create a coherent narrative of our own life. The summary of the novel’s plot does not do it justice, there is more at issue than just the story, themes of duplicity, questionable morality, politics, sexual tension. Intimacies is a novel for the brain. In her cool detached tone Kitamura does not offer pre-configured easy judgement on moral questions. The right behavior, the sole and righteous position on complex issues is left to the reader.


In sparing, clear, assertive and straightforward prose, in interesting contrast with the complexity of her characters, and her quiet observational mood Kitamura creates a confounding, labyrinthine tale of someone in search of a personal narrative. And as we all know, within the labyrinth, there, at the heart, lurks a Beast.



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Sunday 5 December 2021

“NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. The STARS." by Joyce Carol Oates - review


 “NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. The STARS.“ by Joyce Carol Oates:

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

               A Clear Midnight (from Leaves of Grass) - Walt Whitman 

    

At almost 800 pages the latest intimate family novel by Joyce Carol Oates is a hefty monster, but quite an exhilarating, rewarding, interesting, gripping, spellbinding, heart-wrenching and thoroughly enjoyable one. The subject, which could be described as “the story of coming to terms with the death of a loved, revered and dominating family member”, is treated with warm feeling and the characters are painted with a credibility that rings very true. 


It is a brooding, pondering, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, a chronicle of a family, disrupted and then reconfigured, following the death of its patriarch. It also provides a condemning, accusing snapshot of contemporary American life, class and race relations and police brutality in the US at the end of 2010. It was written before the disturbing video of the death of George Floyd, a 46 year old black man who died as a result of being brutally restrained by a white police officer on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, has newly motivated the Black Lives Matter movement. 


Tragedy hits a white, well respected family. 

John Earle McLaren, known as Whitey, a rich elder successful businessman in Hammond, a small New York town, formerly its mayor, stops his car on the highway to intervene with two cops brutally treating a "dark-skinned" motorist. Not recognizing McLaren as a popular, respected citizen, enraged by his interfering, they knock him down, taser him and in consequence Whitey suffers a stroke and heart-attack and spends what’s left of his life in hospital and dies. A death which shatters all of his family as a whole and each family member individually in unforeseen ways. Grief can do crazy things to people. The novel accompanies each family member, after the death of Whitey, on their way to cope and come to terms with the tragedy.


Whitey loved each member of his family and in return was well loved and adored by each one. 


His widow, Jessalyn, has been the perfect  American wife and mother, a woman as if straight out of a Ladies House & Home Magazine, bestowed with wealth and a glamorous big house who never had to care an instant besides the “women“-tasks of being wife and mother. Her life has come to a standstill without sense, meaning and purpose and she plunges into isolated grief, then slowly emerges into a new life that includes a tentative new relationship with a man she has met at her husband's grave. Jessalyn, in all her innocence and development, is one of the very likable characters of the novel.


Of her adult five children, all of them brilliantly drawn characters, this can't be as easily said. None of them is emotionally adult and their father’s death puts a heavy strain on the fragile relationships of the brothers and sisters. 


The oldest son Thom, handsome, successful but also elitist and mean-spirited, married with children, runs one branch of the family business efficiently but struggles with family life and a true sense of living. He embarks on the task to revenge his father’s death by sueing the responsible officers and the police department of the town.


Even less likable than Thom is Beverly, the second oldest. Her marriage is stale and blemished, her teenage kids are disrespectful and egotistical and she is well on her way to become an alcoholic and drug addict. Furthermore is she a shocking bigot and a racist. She in particular is incensed that her “unworthy” siblings receive equal shares of the inheritance. She in particular is enraged by her mother’s “strange and unworthy“ behavior so soon after her father’s death.


Lorene, the third oldest, is probably the least likeable character in the book. She is a high school principal, the youngest ever in these parts. She is a single woman without attachment, overachieving, overreaching, competitive, mean, manipulative, narcissistic, hates everyone but herself, is intensely emotionally disturbed but undergoes a transformation that might lead to redemption.


The two youngest, some years apart from their older siblings and thus forming a natural bond, are the most sympathetic of the McLaren clan. 

Sophia, the prettiest and nicest, is lacking in self-confidence. She is a biological researcher increasingly dissatisfied with her work at the laboratory that involves experiments on live animals. Furthermore she struggles with an affair with an older, married colleague. 


The youngest son, Virgil is the black sheep of the family. Thom, Beverley and Lorene all feel but contempt for him and disapprove of his way of living. He is a local artist, lives in a sort of commune and his social life is an enigma to his family. He flirts with death and late but not too late discovers where love is leading him. He gradually allows himself to express the desire he feels towards another man despite believing his father would have been disappointed in him. His mother and younger sister Sophia love him.


Over the course of a year we follow everyone on their way to come to terms with the tragedy. Everyone handles it differently, not always good. Everyone encounters obstacles and everyone sacrifices something on their way to grow into their new selves. The greatest struggle for the three eldest children in the McClaren family is their prejudice towards lower class and non-white individuals. Much to the dismay of her children Jessalyn, after a period of hopeless grief, surprisingly recovers and finds new strength and meaning in a relationship with a non-white man.


All of the characters seem to walk on unsolid ground, they permanently shift in their ways and our evaluation of them is also based on unsteadiness. Which only makes them more real. In the end, everyone looses, gains or endures, some experience unexpected happiness and the tale ends, in spite of all the grief and sorrow, on a note of hope.


Apart from the main theme of loss and grief there are other themes as well. Sometimes it seems to veer off in the direction of a comedy, at other times more in the direction of a courtroom drama. There are many philosophical musings on life, love, death or the nature of art. The scope is large and not every strand of the story is successfully or satisfyingly resolved. But this, we curiously find, is not necessary, the novel works out fine as it is. 


Through inhabiting the (mostly) white character’s casual elitist and racist minds, showing their categorizing, evaluative automatism, Joyce Carol Oates exposes how prejudice, willful ignorance, racial and social discrimination is a common form of mind in contemporary America as well as the institutionalized racism in large parts of the American police force.


With this truly wonderful novel Oates once more reminds us of one of the great forces of Life: it’s unpredictability.



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“Old God's Time“ by Sebastian Barry - review

  “Old God's Time” by Sebastian Barry: It is somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in Dalkey at the Irish sea and widower Tom Kettle, f...