Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The events and political maneuvering make for gripping reading, but the two protagonists—Lorenzo de Medici and Leonardo da Vinci—could have been made more complex and interesting.

Beneath the gleaming facade of Singapore lies a palpable angst among its people. Through the perceptive analysis of interviews with 92 Singaporeans of different ethnicities, classes, educational levels, occupations, genders, and marital statuses, Singaporean sociologist TEO You Yenn puts her finger  on the sore spot in her new book Unease: Life in Singapore Families . Cannily she locates this gnawing sense of unease in the gap between national aspirations and familial realities. Singapore claims to be pro-family, and yet family life is hectic, anxious, and burdensome. What follows is a fine-grained examination of societal structure (institutions, policies, etc.) and culture (norms, values, habits, etc.), the former creating the latter, the latter reinforcing the former, including a chapter devoted to gender and another to class. The book would be of interest only to scholars and Singaporeans if it does not also have penetrating things to say about inequality. The problem of inequal...

Chloe is a good friend and poet. Her second book PERFORATED marks an advance over her first VIABLE. The strengths of the first are still present in the second: an intimate but unassuming voice, an observant tenderness towards self and others, the willingness to broach difficult subjects. In the second book, the personal references widen out into the world. The Italian touchstones are handled with greater range and depth. My favorites in this regard are the opening poem "Pantheon," which ends distinctively yet inclusively in the way an Italian dialect "relies on the plural/ second person, voi," and the poem "Etruscan Bronzes," concludes soberly about the transience of youth: These bronze figures, from their height of youth, artist's hand concealed by the smoothing of time, gaze upon a far-off horizon long buried.

An attractive quality of these poems is the outsider's constant searching for self and form. "Mirror" is not only the title of one of Zhang Zao's most famous poems but also a recurring trope in his oeuvre. Thoroughly grounded in both Chinese and European literature, he seeks "a new tension and melting point," as Bei Dao wrote in his personal recollection of the author, included in this book. How successful are his sonnet sequences, "Kafka to Felice" and "Dialogue with Tsvetaeva"? The Chinese originals strike as too full of words and ideas, and so lack the pressure cooker of the sonnet form. The free-verse experiments are more interesting, often ranging and strange. One has the great title "Song a Wall Driller and the Ultimate Ear," but the poem, in fact, pages 179 to 186, are missing from my edition.  The poem I like best is called "Fly." It has something of John Donne's playful eroticism, but also the concision I ...

A richly detailed portrait of a man who tries so hard to gain some measure of autonomy from a distinctly impoverished background and a stultifying dependent family. Mr. Biswas is not lovable, but he is finally admirable for his ceaseless efforts to find a place of his own. In his quest for a house, he also exposes the place and relations of the Indian people in Trinidad.

A very unusual gay love novel. It has romance, true, but the romance between the men is short-lived, whereas the lavender marriages continue in shadows and memories. The novel has as much, if not more, to say about the women who find themselves married to gay men as it does about the gay men themselves. And the lovers in the novel are not physically attractive. How could they be when they are disfigured by poverty, hard manual labor, and starvation, not only in rural China, but also in NYC, to which they emigrate with such hope? They are not ennobled by love; instead, they struggle to love and forgive. Finally, the novel is also a tender portrait of the Fuzhounese community living in East Broadway in NYC in the 80s, its scattering in the naughts, and the hardships of those who remain during the COVID pandemic. A genuinely poignant work, it deserves to be widely read by the LGBTQ community and beyond.

An immense scholarly achievement. Erudite, persuasive, and gracefully written, it is the kind of intellectual history that changes our understanding of ourselves, our ideas, our cultures, and our world. Yes, it focuses on the strain of anti-Judaism in Western thinking, but it is also about the making and writing of history more generally. Particularly I learned from its analysis of Marx. That in critiquing the evils of capitalism, Marx not only deployed the hated figure of the Jew, but also claimed the figure's reality in society. He thought he was doing sociology as well as economic theory, and so opened the possibility to future persecution of "real" Jews. It is too easy to slip from capitalism to Jewry in one's thinking. A fault that plagues the Left. 

"Ethnographies are mountains and endure," writes Dentan, but "theories are mayflies and don't." This work of ethnography is certain to endure like the mountain it is, and its theory about Semai peaceability is likely to be developed, strengthened, and affirmed by future ethnographers. To state its theory simplistically, Dentan argues that Semai peaceability originated as a functioning adaptation to Malay and British invasion, colonization, and child slavery. The Semai response to overwhelming violence, rape, and kidnapping is to flee, and when they cannot flee from the encroaching hegemonic state, to "surrender," in the author's specific sense of acting with the understanding that success is not within their control. The alternative is death and extinction. Semai elaborated this response into a religion of demon lovers (identification with one's oppressors), protective rituals, an egalitarian ethos, and a respectful way of raising kids, all des...

Yu-Mei is a good friend, and she gave me a copy of this, her debut novel. I read it over two afternoons and enjoyed it very much. It is tightly plotted, inhabited by memorable characters, and written in a lively style. A Singaporean on the run from the law encounters other overseas Singaporeans who are pursuing lives considered illicit in the country. It is a very clever conceit, executed with verve and pathos. It calls into question the untoward criminalization of Singaporean lives and loves.

It is a novel about family as much as it is about romantic love, a novel about art-making as much as it is about immigration, a novel about dispossession as much as it is about privilege, a novel about ghosts as much as it is about the living. As Sonia the fiction writer asks and answers herself, "What united these wayward stories? The ocean. When she swam, she felt swimming beneath her in the depths a chimera. She couldn't see its form, but it was still an intimacy." Desai makes me intimate with an ocean of feelings.

I read the novel quickly in two sittings, even though it is not terribly well written. The plot is only serviceable, the characters are cardboard thin, and the writing is merely functional. I kept reading to the end, even though the ending was disappointing, because, as I discovered on reflection, that the novel appealed to some of my own worst instincts. I like reading about success, especially literary success, and how it is not truly merited; it sates my envy of others. I also like having my biases confirmed—biases against the publishing industry, against white people, against wealthy and good-looking people; I like to be right. This is not to say that my biases are unfounded; they are an outgrowth of my interactions with a racist, classist and superficial society. However, the angel of my reading self likes to think that great literature challenges our preconceptions and enlarges our understanding, but that was not what happened with my encounter with YELLOWFACE.

 An acute account of Morocco's transition to modernity and independence as depicted through a well-to-do family living in the ancient capital of Fez. The earlier chapters, which establish the seemingly static world of the past, were too leisurely paced for me, although they offer pleasurable descriptions of the old medina and its physical and social environments. The story quickens with the entry of the second son Abd al-Rahman to a "secular academy," where he learns to question authority and, ultimately, to fight for national independence. The daughter Aisha is mainly used as an illustration of the intellectual and social restrictions confronting upper-class Moroccan women; her story does not become integral to the main political plot. The third and youngest son merely hovers at the periphery of the novel. Most interesting is the dark-skinned son from the patriarch's concubine and enslaved servant, whose understanding of his status leads him to become a judge, a cog ...

There are lyrical poems in James Fenton's Out of Danger, and then there are poems that are very nearly song lyrics. Both give pleasure, though arguably pleasure of different kinds. The book has keen observation, social conscience, and musical intelligence in abundance. Are the rhymes worn-out in places, like tires losing their treads? Maybe, but the Philippines and other South Pacific islands provide new rhymes and treads. Pádraig Ó Tuama is a genial, acute, and personable guide to these 50 poems about a range of outward-looking subjects. It is a good snapshot of contemporary Anglo-American verse, with a few oldies thrown in. I did not think that all the poems were as good as Ó Tuama said, but it would be a big surprise if I did. 

 Elaine Castillo's book of essays How to Read Now features a lit bomb on its cover. By its devastating critique of Nobel prize-winner Peter Handke's fascist sympathies and beloved Californian writer Joan Didion's settler-colonialist views, the book is necessarily blowing up Castillo's relations with certain influential parts of the literary establishment. If you have enough of coddling book reviews that read more like publishing blurbs than literary criticism, you will keenly appreciate Castillo's take-no-prisoners, and razor-sharp, approach to reading these and other white authors. The courage and honesty is undeniable.  More than attacks on individual authors, however, How to Read Now wants to destroy the harmful ways in which readers are expected by authors and publishers to center white experience: to treat it uncritically as "universal," "existential," and free of political taint, whereas the work of BIPOC writers is treated as mere ethnog...

  The novel stakes everything on our interest in the narrator (his lover Erica is a thin, almost cardboard, character). Changez's story—from love to hate for America—is credible, but herein lies the problem. It does not offer any surprising or complex insight into the predicament or psychology of such a character. The same premise treated by Dostoevsky of "Notes from Underground" or even Murakami of "Norwegian Wood" would have resulted in an indelible portrait of mature dissent or youthful wistfulness.

 It's nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden's middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden's travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.

 Flaubert's contemporaries praised Sentimental Education for taking the moral pulse of his generation. Reading it at this radical and reactionary time, I think it takes the moral pulse of my own generation. Here are the fanatical ideologues on the left and right, the cynical opportunists, the pure-hearted idealists, the private egos, the public facades, the loves, the lusts, the confusions, the contusions. After Frederic Moreau and his friend Deslauriers have gone through so much personal and social upheaval, how does one read the ending of this highly ironic yet deeply passionate novel? It's not simply nostalgic, that's for sure: They told one another the story at great length, each supplementing the other's recollections; and when they had finished:  'That was the best time we ever had,' said Frederic. 'Yes, perhaps you're right. That was the best time we ever had,' said Deslauriers. (translated by Robert Baldick and Geoffrey Wall)

 I read Nabokov's third Russian novel The Luzhin Defence while on vacation in Penang, after picking up the book in Kuala Lumpur. The novel is very enjoyable. There is a deep paradox in Nabokov's treatment of his chess-playing protagonist: it is at once warm and cold. The warmth comes from the Bildungsroman mode, the loving recreation of a Russian setting, the tender analysis of exile, the sympathetic understanding of artistic passion. The cold comes from the art of fiction itself, since the author knows that his fictional creation cannot escape whatever fate he is designing for him. The logic of chess underlines, in this novel, the logic of fiction. Appropriately, I started reading Sandi Tan's novel Lurkers when I returned from Malaysia to Singapore. Appropriately because Sandi grew up in Singapore. Her first novel The Black Isle is obviously based on Singapore. It is nothing like any Singaporean novels that I have read. She has lived in Los Angeles county for many years n...

 Raymond Willimas' Border Country is a superb novel. I'm surprised that it's not better known. How does one measure the lives of an individual and their community? Social science and theory render them abstract and general, like the mountaintop view of a farming valley, but a novel, such as this, can describe the minute but all-important particulars. The style is plain, as befits the "blunt truculence" of this Welsh village on the border with England, but it is always evocative; so much is said by not being said. The occasional lyricism takes off from the road and soar into the air. How does Matthew/Will Price go home after leaving it for London and a university lectureship? In his own words: "Only now it seems the end of exile. Not going back, but the feeling of exile ending. For the distance is measured, and that is what matters. By measuring the distance, we come home." The stories in Diane Oliver's Neighbors just got stronger and stronger as I r...

 It is an odd experience to read these two slim books one after another, Hervé Guibert's My Manservant and Me (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) and Augusto Monterroso's The Gold Seekers  (translated by Jessica Sequeira). Both books were written towards the end of the lives of the acclaimed authors. Both play with the conventions of a memoir, Guibert by fictionalization, Monterroso by fragmentation. There the similarities end. Whereas Guibert focuses on the decrepitude of age and the ambiguous help that youth can give, Monterroso searches for the origins of things in childhood and the influence of the adults at the beginning. Not just the contents but the ambitions differ too. My Manservant and Me aims to be a small masterpiece, but The Gold Seekers , which covers only the first fifteen years of its author's life, ends intentionally incomplete. Although both books contains surreal elements, yet their approach is very different. Guibert gives a surrealistic twist to life,...