Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
Miroslav Sasek – München / Munich (2)
This book evokes memories of the seventies, when I was a little boy in school, and many textbooks had illustrations in a style similar to Sasek’s. These are lovely and slightly odd renderings of everyday life in Munich several decades ago, and the slight mismatch between the english and german versions of the text, and the terseness in general, only add to this piece of nostalgia. And I don’t even like Munich all that much.
A very inventive story and cool story, with the same weakness Stephenson’s other books have in my opinion, a forced ending. Creating complexity, just to then shoehorn it into some resolution so readers can feel better is not something I approve of. Otherwise it’s quite flawless, though. It’s also quite interesting to see how Stephenson obviously churned on the themes he scratched upon in this novel for the later Diamond Age, and then took them into more realistic contemporary fiction with the Cryptonomicon.
For years I had suspected that the historic truth is being stretched and bended, possibly even mutilated, in order to make Dresden into the innocent symbol of allied war atrocities dominating the German discourse of the bombings. Now, having read Schubert’s book on the subject, I am better equipped to dispel the myths, and predictably find my inferences confirmed. No liquid phosphor rained down, the city was not full of fugitives or innocents any more than any of the other cities inhabited by Nazis was, and the local industry was neither insignificant nor unimportant for the war. Dresden has turned into a monumental tool for relativists, for whom the outcome – the destruction of human life and property – is the only determinant of the morality of an action, and for whom dead Nazis and their dead victims form one soppy canvas to paint a kitschy portrait of their nationalism disguised as benevolent peacefulness upon.
I came across this book on one of the shelving carts in the main UC Berkeley library while searching for a completely different one that had gone missing (and sadly hasn’t been located since). Its author, briefness and subject matter immediately commanded my attention, and after having read it, I’m happy I stumbled upon it. This brief treatment of Hegel’s work is a small miracle, capturing his theory of history, dialectics and the master/slave dichotomy rising from his theory of Selbstbewusstsein, and in turn giving rise later to Marx’ alienated labor. A wonderful introduction, and a solid argument for libraries where books are accessible rather than being ordered from closed stacks through a catalogue.
With the Cryptonomicon in mind, I expected a story similarly overfraught with meandering detail, but found myself pleasantly surprised. A well worked out future world, centered on changes in politics brought about by the development of nanotechnology, provides a nonintrusive background for a neo-victorian play on education and the value of the individuum that is as much fun as it is solid. While the psychology and character development, as is so unfortunately common in Science Fiction, take second stage after the geeky technostuff and the equally geeky ramifications of the technostuffs effects, the result is a delightful study. While the end is maybe a bit forced, this still makes me want to read Snowcrash now, Stephensons debut.
I consider this a great book, not so much because I agree with what Searle says in it. In fact, I don’t agree with hardly anything he says. But it does provide a nice, comprehensive introduction into the philosophy of mind, and it lists several recent major arguments in the field. Searle’s deliberately naive style, calling whole schools of thoughts “complete desasters”, is fun to read, and invites counterarguments. The downside might be that it encourages half baked criticism and opinionation much like what I’m putting down here. Did I say downside? Upside, I meant. So let’s start ranting.
Not much happens in this cute little comic, a bird investigates a human walking and napping in the woods, another bird gets eaten, and a snake behaves out of character of species, but the reduced, calm way its drawn makes this a little gem. The bird exploring the sleeping human is particularly endearing.
Trondheim’s marvellous style, applied to a quirky story of alien mishaps, told in hardly decodable symbol language and asynchronously. The result is a delightfully trippy little comic book. An interesting side note concerns the preface, which seems to have been written specifically for the american edition (which I assume is otherwise identical to the french edition, unless there are different kinds of unintelligible geometric symbols in the two cultures) and mentions a camping trip of Trondheim’s into the Catskills. Merely translation of ideas rather than words, or an attempt to conceal the European original of the work for sales’ sake? 
I like LeGuin’s work in general, but this tale of freedom and repression is not her best work. Two groups of exiles coexist on a wild, uncharted planet, one composed of the descendants of prisoners, the other of political exiles, sent away for their disturbing pacifism. When some people in the city try to increase their power and wealth by exploiting the pacifists, whom they perceive as weak, a struggle ensues, that ends in a murky compromise and further exile for a subgroup of the pacifists, who realise that they can only live their dream in complete isolation.
I’m not sure whether entering a field of knowledge through a basic introduction, or from the middle of an ongoing controversial debate is preferable. Bix’s book represents both aspects, being aimed at those familiar with Japanese history, arguing the case for a change in the perception of wartime emperor Hirohito, from benevolent onlooker and powerless figurehead to bearing full responsibility for Japanese war atroctities and aggression both before and during the second world war. At the same time, it adresses the general reader, using the Sh?wa emperor’s biography as the focal point for depicting the making of modern Japan. The balance between these two different books is worked out fairly well, with some passages dragging on a bit too long, due partly to an overabundance of detail and a flurry of Japanese names and concepts that are sometimes not introduced well enough to properly keep track of for the non-initiated reader. 