Last fall, I travelled to Italy and purchased a few books by Italian authors. The Singularity by Dino Buzzati tells the story of a secretive government project taking place at a military base. At the beginning of the novel, we follow an engineer named Ismani who has been recruited into the project, but is told nothing about what he’ll be doing. The first third of the book has a satirical bent, as Ismani and his wife try to cut through military bureaucracy to find out just one little bit of information about the project. It’s a futile exercise as one soldier after another dodges their questions, and I thought it was a little bit funny, but in hindsight, it does kind of feel like the author himself was stalling to get to the meat of the story.
Ultimately, it’s revealed that the secret project involves the creation of a supercomputer, and in a further twist, the scientist in charge of the operation has imbued the machine with the consciousness of his dead wife. To me, it became predictable rather quickly, because in our time, we’ve seen this type of story depicted many times. (For example, the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”.) But I have to give Buzzati credit for being prescient because he wrote this in 1960.
I recently visited Porto, Portugal, and one of the top attractions there is a bookstore called Livraria Lello. It’s got a beautiful interior with a curvy, kind of sexy, central staircase, making it just as picturesque as the numerous churches that you find in Europe. In fact, it’s become so popular that they charge admission to get in, and there’s a queue of eagerly waiting tourists/customers outside the door. Fortunately, the ticket price is applied to any book purchases, so naturally, I bought something.
The store sells a bespoke series of classic public domain works called “The Pop Collection”, and I picked one by a Portuguese author: Love of Perdition by Camilo Castelo Branco. To add even more local flavour, the novel was supposedly written while the author was imprisoned in a jail just around the corner from the bookstore. The book is small and fit nicely inside my satchel, and I carried it with me for the rest of the trip, reading it while sitting in public squares or park benches. It was cool to come across mentions of places—Viseu, Coimbra, and of course, Porto itself—that I had visited days before.
I’m spending a lot of time talking about the context of my reading experience because sadly, I didn’t enjoy the story itself very much. It follows a young couple who fall in love, but are kept apart because their fathers hold a grudge against each other. Their passion is unstoppable, and they refuse to give each other up, resorting to violence and eventually murder.
The setup of State of Wonder really drew me in: there’s a scientist, Dr. Swenson, who has gone into the Amazon jungle to develop some kind of miracle drug, but she’s stopped communicating with the Big Pharma bosses who hired her. The company dispatches another researcher, Anders, to find her, but months later, Swenson sends the shocking news that Anders is dead. Now, it’s up to his colleague and friend, Marina, to follow him and investigate the circumstances of his demise.
What seems to be a plot-driven thriller slows down quite a bit. Swenson does not want to be found, and Marina doesn’t seem to try very hard to advance her mission. She just gets stuck in the town adjacent to the jungle, distracted by the odd Australian couple who Swenson has hired as assistants. This middle section really dragged for me and felt like a needless narrative detour.
Things get more interesting when we do finally meet Swenson, along with Easter, a deaf indigenous boy who she’s taken under her wing. I enjoyed the character dynamics between the two scientists: it turns out that Swenson taught Marina in medical school, and even though they’re both professionals now, Marina still acts in a deferential way towards the older woman. And Swenson herself has a brusque, no-bullshit manner that I found entertaining.
I started the pasttwo years with what I called “optimistic non-fiction reads”; it was kind of a coincidence and I resolved to continue the trend annually. I don’t think that Searches by Vauhini Vara quite fits the bill, but I’ll try to give the most hopeful interpretation I can.
This book was born from “Ghosts”, an article published in The Believer magazine. In it, Vara prompts OpenAI’s GPT-3 with the start of a piece of writing about her sister’s death from cancer. GPT completes the story, using the “knowledge” it has gained from consuming and training on a vast corpus of writing. Then, she repeats the original prompt, adding a few more sentences to her story, and again, GPT attempts to finish the piece. Vara repeats the exercise nine times, and with each iteration, she writes a bit more of her truth. GPT’s completions vary wildly, sometimes giving a happy ending where her sister survives, other times inventing a wistful memory from their childhood, and yet other times spiralling into gibberish.
It’s a powerful piece and worth reading on its own. Expanded into a book, Searches explores the history of the Internet age, and how tech companies take their users’ data to relentlessly drive profit. The biggest asset of companies like Alphabet, Meta and Amazon is what they know about us, and this business model has evolved into the current trend of large language models, whose knowledge consists of basically all text on the Internet.
It’s impossible to talk about this book without mentioning The One Trick at its centre. You might say it’s a spoiler, so consider yourself warned.
The story is narrated by a nameless woman who works as an actor in a stage play. She meets a young man, Xavier, who claims to be her long-lost son and is seeking a reunion. But she maintains that she never had a son, having had a miscarriage earlier in her life. The third point in the novel’s central triangle is her husband, Tomas, whom she believes is suspicious about her meeting with Xavier because of her past infidelities.
Here comes The One Trick: halfway through the novel, we get a “Part Two” title page, and suddenly, Xavier is indeed her and Tomas’s son. He asks to move back into their home, and they have to re-adapt to his presence. This puts a strain on the family, especially later, when his girlfriend starts to live there too.
The book really drew me in because of how it confused me. Even before the Trick, it makes you question what is reality for the narrator.
A short story collection that I picked up on my recent trip to Italy. The cool thing about it is, the stories are published as “parallel texts,” with the original Italian prose printed on the left (even-numbered) pages, and the English translation printed on the right (odd-numbered) pages. I don’t know Italian, beyond briefly dabbling in Duolingo, but I still tried to scan my eyes across the two pages to make connections between the vocabularies. I think it would be a great learning aid for someone picking up a new language.
It made me think about the process of translation as a whole. For this book, they seemed to have tried to maintain a strict alignment, i.e., the paragraphs start and end at the same vertical position on both sides of the page. I wonder if they were particularly rigorous because of the format of this book. If they didn’t need to present both texts side-by-side, would they take more liberties with sentence length and structure?
This was a vacation read, started on my recent trip to Italy, which involved long rides on a tour bus. It was not the best environment for intense attentive reading, and this novel fit the bill. The prose style is simple and sometimes a little bit quirky, which I appreciated for a light read.
The story follows a teenage girl named Frankie. Over the summer holiday, she meets a boy, a fellow outsider, and together they create a piece of art that they photocopy and post all over town. The poster features a poetical phrase1 that she composes:
The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are the fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
The emotional core of Freedom, for me, was the love triangle between married couple Walter and Patty Berglund, and Walter’s rock star best friend, Richard. The three met in college, and for Patty, it was the classic choice: lust for the wild and dangerous musician, or the comfort of the responsible nice guy.
The book has an interesting structure, starting with a section told from the perspective of the Berglund’s suburban neighbours. It’s got a gossipy feel, like they see the cracks in the marriage, but can only speculate on the couple’s true nature from a distance.
Then, we get a chapter that’s taken from Patty’s therapeutic journal. She writes about her life story in the third person, but inserts running commentary as “the autobiographer,” often with self-deprecating or rueful reflections. I thought it was a really compelling way to dive into a character.
I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.
I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.
The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.
Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.
The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.
For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.
