after (bruce greyson)

This non-fiction work is a studious account of the author’s investigation of near-death experiences (NDEs). Bruce Greyson is an academic who has studied NDE’s over the course of forty years, compiling exhaustive data. The book cross references experiences and anecdotes, seeking to get to the heart of the matter. The fact that in the end, it doesn’t seem to reveal as much as it promises to in the book’s blistering opening chapters is perhaps inevitable. This is the reality of the Meta-Physic, the thing that has happened that maybe hasn’t happened, the thing that might be beyond the body or might be a projection of the the mind, a mind which might exist outside of the body or might not. This moment in history, when death is so adjacent, could be a good time for Western culture to begin a more serious interrogation of the way we are conditioned to treat the issue of our passing, and Greyson’s book might be a good starting point to assist in this process. However, if there was one thing that disappointed slightly about the  book it was its reluctance to interrogate how many other cultures have incorporated the idea of the “after” into the present. For these cultures, there is no doubt about the existence of something beyond the grave. Perhaps this is material for another book, with Greyson’s focus here adhering rigidly to his attempt to situate the NDE within a Western medical-academic process, a focus that in the end leaves the reader as dependent on their prior assumptions as ever. 

á rebours (joris-karl huysmans)

In the literary twitter feeds I follow, the name of Huysmans pops up with a frequency which would have surprised and perhaps alarmed him. If anyone set out their stall to occupy a marginal seat, distanced from the mass of society, it was he. I read Á Rebours twenty years ago and remembered approximately nothing from that first reading. Which I take to be commendable. The book flourishes in spite of the fact it foregoes all those elements of the craft they insist a novel requires. Character, plot, action, movement. One of the finest chapters is when the book’s vapid protagonist, des Esseintes, deciding to escape his torpor with a visit to London, heads to the environs of the station in Paris. In the restaurant whilst waiting to catch his train, he observes a host of travellers, many of them English, and feels as though he has effectively visited London, without the need to actually go there. There can be few finer metaphors for the wonder of literature than this London-which-is-not-London chapter. We can scale mountains and reside in palaces using that device known as literature without ever having to leave our beds. Other chapters ramble through the margins of ecclesiastical literature, horticulture, French literature, perfume, and so on. The chapter on obscure ecclesiastical texts is essentially the author showing off his knowledge, and is utterly wonderful. Huysmans reminds us that self-indulgence has the capacity to be a grand thing in the sphere of artistic endeavour. Of course, the world of des Esseintes, the author’s protege, is astonishing in its imaginative range. And we, the readers, bask in wonder at this range, even when we query the need for its peacock display. The book is a celebration of the marginal, the forgotten, the undervalued and overlooked, reminding us with its convoluted genius that the margin may well be far closer to the centre of human endeavour and excellence than it is ever given credit for. 

east west street (phillipe sands)

We went to Krakow last year. It’s a fetching city. This was in the last days of open borders and the streets teemed with happy tourists snapping away. Sands’ book focuses on the city of Lwow, which is in neighbouring Ukraine, but as the book makes clear (and perhaps the title alludes to), the borders in this region in the first half of the twentieth century changed frequently. Krakow was the seat of government for Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of this region, and one of four key characters in the book. Ironically Frank is the only one who loses his own life as a result of the war. The other three principle characters, Leon, the author’s uncle, Lauterpact and Lemkin are all Jewish, and all lost their families in the holocaust. Sands interweaves the stories of the four men’s lives, in the course of which he investigates various mysteries related to his family history. The author is a human rights lawyer, (there were moments when I might have liked more observations from his work, drawing out the way in which the work of Lauterpact and Lemkin has impacted our understanding of more contemporary issues), and the book builds towards the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, including Frank. Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin, though obviously driven by the same agenda, had competing views on the basis of how the trial should be prosecuted. Lempkin was a pioneer of the idea of genocide, a concept which Lauterpacht rejected, choosing to emphasise the transcendence of individual human rights. East West Street traces the way these two schools of thought emerged from the shared root of Lwow. The terrible history of this part of the world, which experienced the second world war with a psychotic ferocity, and whose history of pogroms and racial discrimination existed long before the arrival of the Nazis, is in stark contrast to the elegance of its architecture and its culture. This contradiction haunts history. The trappings of civilisation are no guarantee against the triumph of the most venal barbarism. Watching interviews this past week with young Israelis talking about the need to exterminate the Palestinians, using the very language that was used against their grandparents during the events the book documents, is a terrible reminder that the cruelty of history is endemic, that ‘civilisation’ is nothing more than a word.

the monster enters (mike davis)

Mike Davis’ book, an updated version of The Monster at our Door, written in 2005,  is about the threat of Avian Bird Flu, and the devastating effect that would have on society were it to turn into a pandemic. There is an introduction, written at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, when the book was reissued. The most terrifying thing about the book isn’t what he gets right - the shortage of PPE, the governmental confusion, “Pandemic planners admitted that the  bulk of the  public… would simply have to cower in their homes” - but what hasn’t happened this time round. Because Davis, an analyst of slums, of mass production farming methods, of the way in which human demographics have become a time bomb, predicts that if the Bird Flu pandemic ends up being as bad as is feared, it won’t be millions dying, but billions. Presently, according to World of Meters, we stand at 3 million official Covid deaths, though that figure is sure to be higher and is still rising at an alarming rate, but we’re not yet in the territory that Davis predicts. For all the way in which society has felt threatened by terrorism, bio-terrorism, (Davis is very good on the way the war on terror allowed an emphasis on military spending, even in the realm of biological threats), the greatest danger to our way of lie, whatever that is, was always likely to come from a virus. Should we ever come out of this rolling Covid nightmare, one hopes that those who regulate budgets pay more heed to the Cassandras. Davis’ final observations on the way the pharmaceutical industry works only add to the sense that the free market is a long way from being the best socio-political mechanism for the future welfare of the human race.  

at night all blood is black (david diop, tr. anna moschovakis)

Diop’s novel adopts the voice of a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French in the trenches of the first world war. Alfa Ndiaye is no ordinary soldier: he’s a cold-blooded killer who curates a collection of hands of the enemy soldiers he’s killed, a collection which succeeds in freaking out his fellow soldiers, both black and white. The reason he adopts this habit is because he’s seeking revenge for the death of his great childhood friend, Mademba Diop, whose lingering death he witnessed and has appeared to tip him over the edge. After being sent away from the front line, Ndiaye reminisces about his time in Senegal. One of the most interesting chapters is one where he recounts how his father refused to accept the chief’s order to convert to a monoculture of peanuts. The chapter is fascinating but tangential. Other chapters describe the loss of his virginity in detail. I had a female friend who would say with some vehemence how much she hated the word “moist” and she would have taken some umbrage with this book where there’s a surfeit of moistness. Indeed, there’s much about this slight novel which feels awkward. Ndiaye feels a like a conveniently literary creation. Perhaps there are layers of subtlety which passed this reader by, but the depiction of the psychotic Senegalese seems to lack any real sense of conviction. Horrific events are glossed  over and feel like they are included for effect as much as any desire to truly investigate the soldier’s plight. It feels as though Alfa Ndiaye’s narrative, as told by the author, is in danger of selling him short. 

darkness at noon (arthur koestler, tr philip boehm)

Darkness at Noon was an essential text of my adolescence. One of those books that everyone had to read. A time before the fall of the iron curtain, when the cold war still wrapped the planet in an icy embrace. At the same time, we in Britain weren’t sacred of being imprisoned for out political views, unlike someone my age growing up in the country I now live in, and many others. We thought, reading the book, that we were being given an insight, allowed to eavesdrop, on a world that was ‘over there’, the land of the bogeymen. We weren’t aware of what our government had been doing in the likes of Kenya, Borneo, India, even Northern Ireland, at the same time as Stalin & co were waging their ideological wars against their own citizens, a war that Koestler examines with forensic skill. Then for a long time, I guess after the fall of the wall, all that jazz, the novel seemed out-dated, belonging to another era. In truth, its meticulous intellectual tone does sound like it emerges from another mindset, on that predates Tarantino, Baudrillard, and all the other high priests of historical relativity. However, the content seems, if anything, even more pertinent now than it did back in those adolescent Winchester days. Koestler examines a state where the personal and the political cannot be divorced. For decades we inhabited the false idea that these Siamese twins been successfully and surgically pulled apart. But it was never that simple. Sooner or later they were likely to collide once more. From China to the USA to Europe (including the UK), from Guantanamo detainees to Uyghur camps to Catalan rappers,  the liberty of political expression, and the punishment for deviating from the received status quo, is ever more in the balance. Darkness at Noon reads like a voice from the near-past bearing warnings about our near-future.