I don’t want to criticize this book too harshly. It’s well-written and readable, and my wife really loved it and got a lot out of it.
The author’s main argument can be summed up as: “Work sucks sometimes, but you are not your job, so don’t take it personally.” Each chapter is a mini-profile of someone who has experienced the suckage of work, and how they have learned the lesson that they shouldn’t have felt so bad about it, and that they should focus on what really matters.
But the things that suck about work still suck, whether you take it personally or not. It’s easy in hindsight to make the case that you should detach from the job, but it’s not so easy when it’s happening to you. I found myself wishing for justice from the employers who caused the suckage, but I suppose that would be another type of book.
My main takeaway from this book is to try to see social issues in terms of insecurity instead of inequality. It’s easy to blame inequality on greedy wealthy people, which amplifies the divisions between people, whereas insecurity is a function of the capitalist system, and affects everyone. The reason that greed is such a powerful force is because everyone is afraid is losing it all, no matter how much they have.
I’m not sure if the book really sticks to this idea, though. We get the historical background of the origins of capitalism, which is a story about barons and commoners, which brings us back around the division between haves and have-nots all over again.
While I appreciated the historical and especially the Canadian context in this book, it felt overall like preaching to the choir. (I’m already quite the socialist.) It’s also written in a somewhat academic style, which made it increasingly skimmable towards the end.
Things that are spirals in Uzumaki (lit. “Spiral”): dust devils, tongues, snails, water draining from bathtub, smoke, people who have turned into snails, people in general, hair, a hurricane, growths from a skin condition, staircases, etc.
This horror manga series was not the most narratively satisfying, but works great as a creative exploration of the visual motif of a spiral. So much in nature takes the form of spirals, so there’s nothing inherently scary about the shape, but when it invades and twists human bodies, the result is effectively stomach-churning.
I’m not going to pretend I know anything about the publishing industry, but I like to imagine myself as an author, and so as I read this book, I found myself constantly feeling indignant about the pressures and injustices that the industry puts artists through. I credit Kuang for making an outsider feel like an insider.
I’m a sucker for long, meandering sentences as a stylistic flourish, and this book contains plenty of those. Mohsin Hamid maybe overdoes it with this technique, but I’m cool with it.
(Spoilers follow)
I think the book can be divided roughly into two halves. The first is a realistic look at life in an unnamed city as it falls under civil war. I guess it’s meant to evoke Syria but there may be further references beyond my ken. I found myself missing the specificity of time and place, and was carried through mainly by the romance between the main characters.
The second half kind of explains the vagueness of the first. Forced to flee their home, the couple travels through “doors,” literal portals that lead to other parts of the world. Unlike their origin, their destinations are named: Mykonos, London, Marin. They find themselves living amongst other refugees from all over the world.
The book rolls to a heartbreaking end as the relationship of the couple deteriorates under the pressure that all of the refugees face as a group. Despite their diverse backgrounds, the citizens of the West just see them as a single mass of unwelcome intruders. Their city was unnamed, because their identity is irrelevant to their opponents: it doesn’t matter where they came from.
The premise of this book tickled a morbid sense of fascination in me: it asks, what do we do with the art of monstrous men? (Think Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby.)
More on that later. I actually engaged most with the book when it took a slight digression to discuss a type of “monster” that we don’t talk about often: a mother who abandons her children to pursue art. The author wonders if parenthood is incompatible with creativity, and dares to ask if she would have been a better writer if she hadn’t become a mother. Even though there’s a distinct feminist slant to the book, I found myself identifying with this section as I follow my journey towards potentially becoming a father.
Back to the original question: what do we do with the art of monstrous men? I wasn’t sure that I really needed an answer, frankly. I’m of the opinion that there are no hard and fast rules for this kind of thing. Always strive to know the truth, and if it makes you uncomfortable, then you can choose to stop engaging with an artist’s work. But on the other hand, you should still enjoy what you enjoy, as long as you acknowledge the truth, however ugly it may be.
As summed up in Monsters:
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
Years ago, I took a work trip with my closest colleague and my girlfriend, who is now my wife. You might think that my colleague would be the third wheel, hanging out with a couple. Or, you might think that my wife would be the third wheel when my colleague and I talked shop. But somehow, I felt like the third wheel for most of the trip because the two of them were both much more talkative than me, and I sort of disappeared from the conversation.
Of course, they might have both felt like the third wheel, too.
The graphic novel Roaming perfectly captures this experience of spending a short, intense period of time as a trio. Set during a trip to New York City, the three characters each have moments of feeling like the outsider to the other two. Relationships are ultimately defined in pairs, but one can’t possess another fully, even though we sometimes want to.
It’s with great guilt that I must admit to not finishing this one. The forced exile and internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII was a shameful event, and deserves to be carved into the literary record. However, as a novel, I was not able to engage with it.
To me, the narrative voice feels both too distant and too close. It begins from the adult Naomi’s memory of her childhood, resulting in a lot of “I was a child then, and I don’t remember/didn’t understand what was going on.” Then it transitions to a long epistolary section, with Aunt Emily narrating the period leading up to their family’s relocation, which has a lot of “Everything is chaos, I don’t know what’s going on.” And when we shift to Naomi’s first-hand experiences in the Slocan encampment, it becomes overly descriptive, focussing on too many details of the surrounding forest.
I know all of this is meant to evoke Kogawa’s subjective experiences, but I felt that the story might have been better served with a more objective and consistent narrative style. It was too structurally fragmented for my tastes.
Not to toot my own horn, but most of the mathematical concepts covered in this book are things that I already knew. It’s enjoyable to read, but it felt like a superficial tour of the most famous ideas in math and physics. When we reach the latter topics (e.g. relativity, string theory), the connection to the original focus on zero becomes a bit tenuous.
I had one big problem with this book. It repeatedly insists that the West rejected the idea of zero for much of history, while the East accepted it much earlier. But then, most of the book is about Western mathematicians and philosophers, while the East only gets a few pages. If the book is supposed to be about zero, it needs to give us more details about the ideas that the East developed.
An improvement over the first entry, mostly because the cast of characters is more diverse. The core characters that span both books (the crew of the Rocinante) are growing on me, which is what you want in a spacefaring series. If you’re looking for more heady ideas, or a more thematically rich story, this isn’t it. This is more like an action thriller than an intellectual exploration.
