Category Archives: Reading Uncertainly

Reading Uncertainly? ‘The Sympathizer’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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The_SympathizerHow often do we take sides while harboring a suspicion that the other fellow’s view actually has some merit? Nguyen’s narrator, never named, but referred to as “The Captain,” states his position at the outset: “ … I am also a man of two minds … I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.”
The Captain is a Vietnamese, ostensibly working for the American forces at the tail-end of the Vietnam (or “American,” as it is called there) War, while acting as mole, an undercover agent, for the Vietcong and the northern forces. Born in North Vietnam of a Vietnamese mother and a father who is a Roman Catholic priest, he leaves for the south and is immediately enmeshed in contradictions. One of the first is the obvious double-meaning of the word “father.”
There he becomes part of an unusual three-man team, the “we” of this compelling take: Bon, an ardent anti-communist, Man, an equally committed communist, and The Captain, who deliciously equivocates through the saga. It is, in fact, a perfect elaboration of the yin and yang culture that dominates the Far East, from the I Ching, to Lao Tse and Confucius. Forces seemingly in opposition are in fact complimentary — they cannot exist without one another.
Nguyen, in the role of The Captain, argues men of “utter conviction” are “insufferable,” noting “The General”, to whom the narrator reports, “ … was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.” The narrator then goes on to puncture every conceivable balloon of human fatuity. We live, he claims, in a litany of contradictions.
Witness another character, “The Congressman”, who berates the “controls” of communism but then describes his “democratic” system as even more autocratic, using censorship and control, because, as he says, “Americans are a confused people.” The Captain comments: “ . that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American minds continuously whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and a nihilism scrawled by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.”
Here is a delicious story of the last days of that War and what followed in both the United States and Asia. “We are all puppets in someone else’s play.” And the story is often hilarious, too. The Captain describes, in three joyful pages, his attempt to masturbate with a dead squid!
Nguyen ends with yet another double meaning, “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom,” as The Captain finally realizes the two senses of this phrase. But he remains “the most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution.” A thriller in one sense but a social commentary in another and a challenging counterview to this year commemorating the end of that War.
Opposite ideas are indeed complimentary!
Editor’s Note: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is published by Grove Press, New York 2015.

Felix Kloman_headshot_2005_284x331-150x150About the author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.

Reading Uncertainly? ‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan

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The_Children_Act“Who am I to judge?” asked Pope Francis last year, when asked about the Roman Catholic Church’s view of homosexuality. An excellent question, as our lives are full of “judgments” rendered by a wide variety of personalities.

So with interest I turned to Ian McEwan’s latest novel. I’ve read most of his work, thoroughly enjoying his language, characters and situations, set in today’s England. The Children Act opens with a highly respected High Court judge, Fiona Maye, age 59, having a profound disagreement with her professor husband of many years, over his announced decision to have an affair with a younger colleague, just for the excitement of the sex. Her personal life is now in turmoil.

But her professional standing as a judge couldn’t be higher. She has a case for immediate decision involving Adam, a 17-year-old boy with advanced leukemia, who, along with his Jehovah’s Witness parents and the elders of his church, refuses a life-saving blood transfusion. His doctors have appealed to the court and she is about to decide. Fiona rules in favor of the physicians and the boy’s life is saved. Most of us would applaud this decision, but was this a rational decision? The story unfolds from that point. Who is she to judge?

McEwan traces Fiona’s thoughts as she tries to weigh the conflicting opinions, beginning with her own religious beliefs: “Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?”

After ruling against the parents, their church and the young boy’s own beliefs, and saving his life, she rationalized, “… that churchmen should want to obliterate the potential of a meaningful life in order to hold a theological line did not surprise or concern her. The law itself had similar problems when it allowed doctors to suffocate, dehydrate or starve certain hopeless patients to death, but would not permit the instant relief of a fatal injection.” So we have both “the law” and its interpreters trying to do their imperfect best …

This conundrum drew me back to Richard Posner’s Reflections on Judging, which I read in 2013. He too sees a “rising complexity” in our judicial systems, amplified by a “dizzying advance in technology” and in scientific knowledge. So is our judiciary system responding appropriately to these advances?  Unfortunately no, according to the good judge, who plies his trade on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as being a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

His considered opinion (in proper nautical language!), “The judiciary navigates the sea of modernity, slowed, thrown off course, by the barnacles of legal formalism (semantic escapes from reality, impoverished sense of context, fear of math and science, insensitivity to language and culture, mangling of history, superfluous footnotes, verbosity, excessive quotation, reader-unfriendly prose, exaggeration, bluster, obsession with citation form) – an accumulation of many centuries, yet constantly augmented. There is little desire to give the hull a good scraping.”

Fiona wrestles with her decision in the midst of her personal crisis, weighing all the future possibilities. Therein lies the remarkable and surprising aftermath in Ian McEwan’s compelling story.

If you are interested in the entire art of judging, do read both Ian McEwan and Richard Posner.

Who am I to judge? Uncertainty bedevils us all!

Editor’s Note: Review: Ian McEwan’s ‘The Children Act’ is published by Nan Talese/Doubleday, New York 2014 and Richard A. Posner’s ‘Reflections on Judging’ is published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2013.

Felix Kloman_headshot_2005_284x331-150x150About the author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.

Reading Uncertainly? ‘Sea Room’ by Adam Nicolson

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Sea RoomWhy do islands so often seem to be symbols of disconnection when, in fact, they illustrate multiple connections to the past, present and future?

Adam Nicolson, a privileged Englishman (Eton, Cambridge and Parliament) explores these thoughts through the medium of the three rugged Shiant (pronounced “Shant”) Islands, in the middle of The Minch, a rushing, spilling, tumultuous tidal spillway between the mainland of Scotland and the Hebrides islands off its northwest coast. They were purchased by his father, deeded to him and are now the possessions of his son.

But, as he cautions early in this story of the seasons in Scotland, “My islands are not a place from which to exclude others … Land … is to be shared.” And so he does in this captivating exploration of essentially three rocks “owned” by millions of birds: puffins, kittiwakes, fulmars, gannets, and eagles comprising a veritable, “… theatre of competition and enrichment.”

I first heard of the Shiants through Robert Macfarlane, in his story of trekking and sailing both land trails and waterways, The Old Ways (Penguin, New York 2012), when he and a friend sailed a small lugger from Stornoway, on the Island of Lewis, to spend two idyllic days and nights there. He too found them far from lonely with the evidence of past habitation, the teeming avian population (primarily puffins) and a copy of Nicolson’s Sea Room about the islands’ former residents.  Macfarlane noted the, “delusion of comprehensive totality … a boundedness” of islands, in light of the reality of their connectedness to the sea, to other islands, to the mainland, to history, and to present inhabitants.

“Sea room” to me, a long-time sailor with modest service in the U. S. Navy, means always maintaining proper distances between my ship and the shore, other ships, and especially the bottom. To Nicolson it also connotes a “room,” a place near the sea, from which to appreciate both motion and stability.”

And he does appreciate the seasons. “Spring here is always beautiful for those uncertainties … It is the season of uncertainty … Summer … is languor … Autumn hangs on like an old tapestry, brown and mottled, a slow, long slide into winter … and winter itself, of course, has persistence at its heart, a long, dogged grimness which gives nothing and allows nothing … “

This is a very human exploration. Nicolson’s approach: “I never think things through. I never have. I never envisage the end before I plunge into the beginning. I never clarify the whole. I never sort one version of something from any other. I bank on instinct, allowing my nose to sniff its way into the vacuum, trusting that somewhere or other, soon enough, out of the murk, something is bound to turn up. I’m wedded to this plunging-off form of thought, and to the acceptance of muddle which it implies.”

Nicolson advocates “ … an excited ‘what next?’ as the motivating force in life, a stodgelessness, an inability to plan.”

His enthusiasm, however, in investigating the past of his islands leads too often to simple conjecture. In 11 consecutive pages, I found the following words and phrases: “a possibility – perhaps – maybe – no record – almost certainly – might have been – probably – is it? –  one can only imagine – no way of telling – guesses – may have been used – may well be – suggests – may be dated – would have been seen – another version – might well have been – fragmentary at best.” Almost a fictional novel , but he remains a thoroughly engaging tour director for the Shiants and the lore of Scotland.

So isn’t it time to explore our islands? How many of us have been ashore, lifting rocks and staring at the mainland, on some of the Lyme islands: Selden Neck, Brockway, Notts, and the evocatively named Calves, Goose and Rat? What are their histories?

I think I will try one of them this summer …

Editor’s Note: Sea Room by Adam Nicolson is published by Harper Perennial, London 2001

Felix Kloman_headshot_2005_284x331-150x150About the author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.

Reading Uncertainly? ‘How The Mind Works’ by Steven Pinker

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How_the+Mind+WorksWhy is reading, at least for me, so soothing, stimulating and confusing, all at the same time? Why does my mind react so strangely at times to what I am reading?

Four years ago, I tried Steven Pinker’s monumental (some 800 pages of small type!) suggestion that we humans are actually becoming less violent, in The Better Angels of Our Nature. So it was only natural that I stepped back in time to read How The Mind Works, his equally long tome of 1997, updated to 2009, describing the innumerable quirks and ramblings that emanate from inside our heads.

A noted professor of psychology at Harvard University, Dr. Pinker attempts, and succeeds, I think, in synthesizing, “An emerging view of human nature,” one replete with frequent humor, quotations from numerous other sages (ranging from Plato and Pascal, to Bierce and Mencken, including Monty Python, Peanuts and Woody Allen!), and solid scientific evidence.

But he begins on a “note of humility,” saying, “We don’t understand how the mind works and I have not discovered what we do know about how the mind works.”

He cautions, “… our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder principle.” We do know, “the mind is a product of the brain and the brain is a product of evolution.” That leads him to “the central idea … that the mind is a system or naturally selected organs of computation.” He notes, “We increasingly understand ourselves in terms of the inner workings of our minds, their origins in the natural world, and their interplay with the contents of culture and civilization.”

Pinker explains further: “The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life; in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants and other people.”

Many of his succinct “definitions” made me come to a complete halt, frequently with a laugh, followed by serious reflection:

The tongue: “a boneless water balloon, controlled by squeezing.”

The computer: “the most legalistic, persnickety, hard-nosed, unforgiving demander of precision and explicitness in the universe.” (Could a computer actually become a “thinking machine?”)

Life: “a series of deadlines”

Winter: “the best insecticide”

Our brains: “… take up only two percent of our body weight but consume 20 percent of our energy and nutrients.”

Information: “…  the one commodity that can be given away and kept at the same time.”

Mathematics: “… ruthlessly cumulative.”

The stock market: “a large industry of self-appointed seers hallucinating trends in the random walk of the stock market.”

Jewish dietary laws: “Talmudic sophistry and bafflegab”

Status: “the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allow you to help others if you wished to.” (But Pinker notes that these “assets” must be conspicuous to be of any use …)

Music: “an enigma – a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.”

And humor: “an anti-dominance poison, a dignicide.”

But “problems continue to baffle the modern mind: consciousness in the sense of sentience, the self, free will, knowledge, and morality.” Pinker suggests that you “step outside your own mind for a moment and see your thoughts and feelings as magnificent contrivances of the natural world rather than as the only way that things could be.”

And comments in conclusion, “Our bafflement at the mysteries of the ages may have been the price we paid for a combinatorial mind that opened up a world of words and sentences, of theories and equations, of poems and melodies, of jokes and stories, the very things that make a mind worth having.”

We human beings, surmounting by our minds, are extraordinary, complex and yet strange adaptations.

What a read!

Editor’s Note: ‘How The Mind Works,’ by Steven Pinker is published by W. W. Norton, New York 2009.

Felix Kloman_headshot_2005_284x331-150x150About the author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.

Reading Uncertainly? ‘Amnesia’ by Peter Carey

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Amnesia by Peter CareyPeter Carey’s latest view of our future is either ominous or optimistic. I’m inclined to the optimistic — good on ya, mate!

And how could I not read this novel, since the lead character is named “Felix”?

Felix Moore is an aging, cantankerous, left-leaning newspaperman, who is caught in the middle of an international computer hack, the “Angel Worm,” purportedly engineered by the daughter of an old friend.

He is “commandeered” into writing a biography of the young lady to try and help her escape both prison and expatriation to the United States.

First, Carey’s words are a colloquial and colorful evocation of Oz. Back in 1988, my wife and took a four-month sabbatical to Sydney, and, to prepare for it, I read an Australian history and some of its novelists. First on the list: Oscar and Lucinda, Carey’s 1988 winner of the Booker Prize, and that naturally led to reading, over the ensuing years, nine more of his works. I’m hooked.

In the 40 years covered by this story, Amnesia opens up a more complex Oz. I’ve been to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, walked their streets and beaches like Baudelaire’s loyal flaneur. I’ve strolled alongside the Yarra River, rowed and sailed on Sydney Harbor, chartered a powerboat on the Hawkesbury River, lived in Neutral Bay and Mosman.

The places in this novel recall many scenes. But it requires frequent checking of local state maps for Victoria and New South Wales: have you heard of Katoomba, Coburg, Rozelle, Wodonga, Pittwater, and Wiseman’s Ferry? I had to look them up …

And strange birds interrupt conversations: magpies (including a robotic one!), kookaburras, whipbirds, lorikats, king parrots, butcherbirds, pelicans and cockatoos. Sounds from trees, too. Australia is a noisy country.

Underlying this tale is computer hacking, “…  a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states.” Edward Snowden is the most obvious recent example, along with the Sony releases, following Julian Assange.

Carey seems to suggest that this may be the wave of the future. He shifts back and forth from the first to the third person, never uses quotation marks, and hits the reader with short, punchy chapters of two to four pages. And throughout is a latent skepticism of the United States and its continuing intercessions around the world. John LeCarre has also drifted in this direction.

He writes of the elusive and complex young woman hacker, “She was born into the Anthropocene age and easily saw that the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.” The ominous implication — elusive, ubiquitous malware, worming its way into every nook and cranny of our lives.

On the other hand, can anyone or any state hide anything any more?

Oh yes, I did learn how to pronounce the name of Gough Whitlam, Australia’s prime minister in 1975. It sounds like “cough!”

The Economist thinks Amnesia may corral Carey a third Booker Prize this year, following Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. Read any or all of his books.

Editor’s Note: Amnesia by Peter Carey was published by Alfred A, Knopf, New York 2015

Felix Kloman_headshot_2005_284x331-150x150About the author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.