Blog - Andrew Blackman https://andrewblackman.net/ A Writer's Life Sat, 04 Nov 2023 09:51:10 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.1 6585272 Borges Marathon, Part 13: The Circular Ruins https://andrewblackman.net/2023/11/borges-marathon-part-13-the-circular-ruins/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/11/borges-marathon-part-13-the-circular-ruins/#comments Wed, 22 Nov 2023 12:10:00 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9534 What happens when one man tries to dream another into existence? Jorge Luis Borges imagines this scenario in this thought-provoking story.

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The opening quote from Through the Looking-Glass hints at the theme of this story:

“And if he left off dreaming about you … ?”

We meet a “taciturn man” slipping unseen from a boat into the “sacred mud” in the “unanimous night”, knowing nothing about him except that he comes from “one of those infinite villages” on the “violent flank” of the mountain.

The use of so many adjective-noun combinations in the opening sentence is unusually repetitive for a careful prose stylist like Jorge Luis Borges, so it draws attention to those phrases and makes us notice some details that will be relevant later.

The man quickly finds his way to the circular ruins of the story’s title, but the circularity doesn’t end there. In fact, the whole story is circular. He uses the seclusion of the ruined temple to pursue his goal of dreaming another man into existence. He spends years on the task, becoming an accomplished sorcerer and eventually imagining a young man in such infinitesimal detail that he comes to life.

But the sorcerer is soon discomfited by the news of a man at a temple in the north who can walk on fire without being harmed. He fears that the youth he has created, his “son”, will realise that he can’t be harmed by things like fire and so will understand that he is not real.

“He feared that his son would meditate upon his unnatural privilege and somehow discover that he was a mere simulacrum. To be not a man, but the projection of another man’s dream—what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!”

When a fire comes to the ruined temple, however, it is the sorcerer himself who is unharmed.

“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him.”

And so the circle is complete. We realise that the whole story is being repeated elsewhere—perhaps at that other temple in the north, where the man was unharmed by fire. But that would mean that he is also not real, so somebody else is dreaming him. Where does it all end? The circular stories could spiral on infinitely through time and space.

The Circular Ruins extends the exploration of subjective idealist philosophy from previous stories such as Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. If objects exist only by virtue of being perceived, then what of people? Does our existence, too, depend on being perceived or imagined by another? And what would it feel like if we became aware of this other person dreaming us into existence?

This is one of those Borges stories that ends on a dizzying note, with a simple, laconic sentence opening up huge new possibilities that set your mind wandering. So much of the story is about the sorcerer’s determined project to dream someone into existence, and the ending makes us re-evaluate the whole thing. I found it fascinating and thought-provoking.

This post is part of my Borges Marathon, a slow reading of all of the short fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Please leave your own comments below and check out some of the other posts in the series.

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October Reading Roundup https://andrewblackman.net/2023/11/october-reading-roundup-3/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/11/october-reading-roundup-3/#comments Sat, 04 Nov 2023 09:50:57 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9551 My reading for October 2023 was dominated by the climate crisis and the horrific situation in Gaza.

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I’ve been travelling a lot and have got behind with these roundups, and with blogging in general, so here’s an attempt to restart. In October, I read mostly non-fiction books inspired by the twin crises overshadowing everything right now: Gaza and the climate. It sounds quite heavy, I suppose, but reading is the only way I know to cope with things that feel overwhelming, and I find that the context provided by a good book often helps.

Planet on Fire by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton

Planet on Fire by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton

There’s an urgency to this manifesto, which feels appropriate to the scale of the climate crisis and the speed with which things are moving in the wrong direction. The ten-point manifesto essentially involves repurposing the economy so that financing is directed towards the necessary green transition instead of profit, and more value is given to things like care and cooperation.

This quick sketch isn’t doing it justice, but it’s a vision that sounds like common sense to me, and yet it’s incredibly radical in a world hurtling in the opposite direction. The book was published during the pandemic and makes a good case for using the rupture as an opportunity for rethinking the way forward, but it feels as if that moment has already passed.

Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism by Kate Soper

Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism by Kate Soper

Kate Soper makes a valid and important point: environmentalists often talk about the sacrifices we need to make to live more sustainably, and yet the science shows that over-consumption does not lead to happiness. So is giving up the misery-inducing grind of consumer life really such a sacrifice? Soper suggests that it may, instead, be a chance to discover an alternative hedonism.

Light in Gaza ed. Jehad Abusalim

Light in Gaza ed. Jehad Abusalim

My position on Gaza is simple: I condemn all acts of violence. I reject the hypocrisy of defining non-state violence as terrorism while allowing states to butcher as many civilians as they like in the name of self-defence. When a US Senator openly calls for a place in which 2 million people live to be “levelled”, we’ve entered very dark times.

So I chose to read Light in Gaza, a compilation of writings by Palestinian people living in Gaza. It gives a fascinating insight into daily life in the Gaza Strip as seen through the eyes of the people living there. We learn about the travel restrictions and the violence of occupation, but we also learn about the culture, the bookshops, the libraries, the schools. We see that if this place is indeed levelled, it will be a crime that the world will never forget.

The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar

The Map of Salt and Stars by Zayn Joukhadar

Have you ever read a book that had all the right ingredients but just didn’t amount to a satisfying whole? That was my experience with this book. It had a compelling dual narrative featuring contemporary Syrian refugees following the same path as a band of medieval mapmakers, it had some beautiful writing in places, and yet… I think perhaps that none of it felt real—it felt like a perfect literary confection, so carefully plotted and tightly controlled that the characters struggled to breathe.

Ecology and Socialism by Chris Williams

Ecology and Socialism by Chris Williams

Back to finding solutions to climate change… This one covered much of the same ground as Planet on Fire, but from a slightly different angle. I liked the chapters on population growth, showing that population itself is not the problem—it’s how people live and how the resources are distributed. It’s an older book than I realised, so much of the climate science is already superseded, but most of the solutions will still be valid, if we ever start seriously trying to follow them.

How Was Your Month?

As usual, please let me know in the comments how your reading month was. I love hearing about your highlights and lowlights, as well as any comments on these books of course. Happy reading in November!

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Reading Australia https://andrewblackman.net/2023/09/reading-australia/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/09/reading-australia/#comments Fri, 01 Sep 2023 11:40:00 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9507 A roundup of my reading of Australian literature during a long road trip around the country.

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I recently completed a two-and-a-half month road trip around Australia, starting in Sydney and travelling around the perimeter of the country (with a quick drive down into the centre for Alice Springs and Uluru, as well as flights to Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islands) before returning to Sydney again.

The distances, of course, were enormous. Everyone knows Australia is huge, but somehow the true scale of it didn’t hit home until I found myself in the wide open spaces of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, where you can drive for days without seeing any human habitation beyond a few isolated road houses and servos (petrol stations). Traffic thins out to the occasional campervan and a few enormous “road trains” (lorries with three or four trailers tacked onto the back). Out there, other drivers started lifting a finger from the wheel to greet me as I passed, not to signal anything in particular but just to acknowledge the presence of another human being in this enormous and potentially hostile space. Here’s a stat to put it in perspective: if Western Australia were a country by itself, it would be the tenth largest in the world.

Luckily, I absolutely loved it. The feeling of vast skies and wide-open horizons has always given me a sense of possibility and wellbeing. And although the landscape was often pretty much the same flat, dry scrub for days on end, I found myself paying more attention to the small differences. The very sameness of it prompted me to pick out the subtle changes in vegetation or topography.

With so many days of driving along arrow-straight roads for hundreds of kilometres on cruise control, audiobooks really came into their own. It was a good chance to sample some Australian literature. So, inspired by Emma’s suggestion, here’s a roundup of the Australian fiction and non-fiction books I listened to as the miles and the hours and the time zones rolled by.

Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld

Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld

This is a poetic family saga spanning generations of Aboriginal women. We see Brigid trekking across the country to help her twin daughters escape from the welfare department officials who want to take them away to be brought up by white families. We see those twin daughters, one dark-skinned and one light-skinned, trying to navigate the racism and assumptions of those around them as they grow up. It’s a novel with plenty of magical realist elements, and sometimes the magic trumped the realism a little too much for my personal tastes, but it was a powerful and thought-provoking novel nonetheless.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

narrow road to the deep north

I picked this one for my roundup of the best books I’ve read so far in 2023, but it would also make it onto a list of the best books I’ve read, full stop. It’s bleak and beautiful, heart-wrenching and occasionally hopeful. It’s a story about lost love, surviving war and brutality, handling trauma, and so much more. The audiobook was voiced by Flanagan himself, and his simple, flat, understated narration complemented the prose perfectly.

The Yield by Tara June Winch

The Yield by Tara June Winch

In a heavily colonised space like modern Australia, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and languages were systematically suppressed and denigrated for generations, how do you recover the fragments of an almost-lost culture and piece them back together for a new generation? The Yield explores these questions as August Gondiwindi returns to Australia from the UK for her grandfather’s funeral and tries to help her family deal not only with grief but also with the impending loss of the family home to a mining company. She finds a surprising solution in the dictionary of their people’s dying language that her grandfather was compiling in his final days.

The Dry by Jane Harper

The Dry by Jane Harper

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m not a big reader of crime fiction. But Jane Harper’s novel The Dry provided a welcome change of pace and was perfect to listen to on a long road trip. The mystery was well constructed, the characters were compelling, the writing was strong, and the resolution was satisfying: unexpected but also plausible. It’s really two mysteries in one: an apparent murder-suicide in the present and a teenage girl’s unsolved murder in the past, two crimes which may or may not be connected. And the fact that one of the police officers investigating the present-day crime is a suspect in the past one provides a nice extra twist.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Will Thornhill grew up poor in London, stole to keep his family alive, and was caught and sentenced to transportation to the new British colony in New South Wales. So when he and his wife Sal see a chance to acquire land on a wild stretch of the Hawkesbury river, it feels like a dream come true. They work hard and make incredible sacrifices to forge a future for their children. But what they refuse to acknowledge is that their dream comes at the expense of the Aboriginal people who already inhabit this stretch of river. At some point, the Thornhills’ dream must come into open conflict with the long-established lives of the original inhabitants.

It’s a very powerful way of fictionalising a formative moment in the history of Australia, and as readers we get the usual benefits of good fiction: the ability to stand in the shoes of all sides in a conflict and see things from multiple perspectives. Grenville doesn’t minimise the brutality of colonialism—far from it. By making the colonisers into sympathetic characters, she denies us an easy escape and forces us to confront the ways in which good people will do terrible things within a brutal, inhuman system.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

This was a recommendation by fellow writer Barry Walsh, although on the morning when I was about to tell Genie about it, she told me that she’d already lined up a book for us to listen to, and it turned out to be this book! What are the chances?

Anyway, I loved this sprawling saga of two working-class families sharing a house in Perth from the 40s to the 60s. It was very funny in places, very sad in others, and beautifully observed throughout. It’s one of those books that you’re sad to put down because you’ve got to know the characters so well by that point.

The White Girl by Tony Birch

The White Girl by Tony Birch

I loved the premise of this one: an Aboriginal mother makes her fair-skinned daughter try to pass as a white girl to evade the authorities. Like Where the Fruit Falls, this novel explores the horrific impacts of racism and the Australian government’s policies on Aboriginal people during the long decades of the Stolen Generations. I found the first novel more successful, though. This one had some great features, but also too many times when the characters’ actions felt forced or unrealistic. I’m happy I read it, but I wouldn’t whole-heartedly recommend it to others.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

I was planning to read more Australian non-fiction, but I was enjoying the novels so much that this turned out to be the only one. The book overturns the traditional view of Aboriginal people as hunter-gatherers with no particular attachment to particular lands, showing us instead the extent to which Aboriginal people shaped the land in complex and innovative ways. This was farming, but it didn’t look like the farming that Europeans knew, so they claimed that Aboriginal Australians had no claim to the land—a convenient position to take, of course, since it’s much easier to justify taking land from nomadic hunter-gatherers than from settled populations whose attachment to particular tracts of land often stretched back longer than the existence of European nations.

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

A teenage boy spends a summer in rural Tasmania shooting rabbits and pursuing his secret dream of buying a boat. That’s the basic plot of Limberlost, and it sounds quite dull, but this is a novel where there’s so much going on under the surface. The boy’s father and older sister are terrible communicators, so it makes sense that so much of the emotional drama in this book goes unspoken, but we pick up on it as readers through the small but telling details that Robbie Arnott allows us to see. There are strong undercurrents of fear and isolation, of worries about the boy who’s gone off to war, the fate of the struggling orchard and more. And the skilful way in which Arnott flashes forward to much later periods in Ned’s adult life shows us the impact of this summer on the rest of his long life and gives the book a much wider resonance.

Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran

Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran

My final Australian novel was actually set mostly in Sri Lanka—it’s another multi-generational family saga, but this time the family is from Colombo, and only in the later sections does one branch move to Sydney. The book explores the impact of a horrific civil war on ordinary people. Because of the huge scope of the book and the way it jumps around and skips forward constantly, I didn’t feel a strong attachment to many of the characters, but I admired the way Chandran was able to weave so much of the politics and history of a nation into the story of a single family.

What are Your Favourites From Australian Literature?

So that’s it for my two and a half months of reading Australia. Have you read any of these? And I’m aware that this is just scratching the surface of Australian literature, so I plan to read more later. Do you have other recommendations? Let me know in the comments.

By the way, if you want to discover more about Australian literature, I can recommend ANZ LitLovers LitBlog, particularly the First Nations Literature Reading List.

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Best Books I’ve Read So Far This Year https://andrewblackman.net/2023/07/best-books-ive-read-so-far-this-year/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/07/best-books-ive-read-so-far-this-year/#comments Sat, 15 Jul 2023 09:42:50 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9484 At the halfway point of 2023, here are the highlights of my reading year so far, including a Saudi Arabian novel, a history of Algeria and an Australian masterpiece.

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I haven’t been doing my usual monthly reading roundups this year, so here’s a summary of the best books I’ve read so far in 2023.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

I read this book recently, and it instantly became the best book I’d read this year, and one of the best books I’ve read for a very long time. It’s a story of lost love, missed opportunities, the brutality of war, small moments of unexpected humanity and compassion in the midst of barbarism and suffering… Loads of huge themes, all handled masterfully. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Flanagan himself, while driving for thousands of kilometres on deserted roads in Western Australia, and the bleakness and beauty of the prose moved me to tears on several occasions.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

This innovative Sri Lankan novel starts off with the death of Maali Almeida and then follows Maali into the afterlife, where he has seven moons to work out who killed him and help his loved ones to find the photographs that will reveal the truth. It’s a wonderfully creative novel that explores themes of sexuality, mortality, love, friendship, political corruption and much more. The structure and execution reminded me of the Turkish novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak, which was one of my best books of 2019.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

I’ve written here about the urgent need for us all to write about climate change in better ways, ways that overcome catastrophism and inertia and provoke serious conversations about how we can overcome this crisis. This is a novel that avoids far-future post-apocalyptic hellscapes and instead deals with the horror that is to come in just the next few decades. But while remaining clear-eyed about the inevitable suffering that we have already locked in by our stupidity and greed up to this point, it also provides a realistic tale of a pathway towards collective survival. At times, the story and characters get a bit lost amid the detailed ideas and theories, but Robinson has tackled huge, urgent topics head on, and I applaud him for it. There’s loads in here to think about. It’s a wake-up call and a prescription for possible action, and we’ll need more books like this if we are to survive much beyond this century.

A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne

A Savage War of Peace	by Alistair Horne

I spent three weeks travelling around Algeria earlier this year, and I wanted to understand the history of the country. This book gave me all the understanding I could have wanted, and a lot more besides. Did you know that more than a million Algerians died in the war to gain independence from France in the 1950s and 60s? More than a million. I didn’t know that, and I think that if a European country kills a million people in the middle of the 20th century, it should be common knowledge. This book tells the whole tragic story in all its brutal, barbaric, senseless detail. It was very, very tough to read, but as a comprehensive account of an important moment in history, it was a thoroughly impressive achievement.

Spare by Prince Harry

Spare by Prince Harry

Yeah, I’m surprised too. I’m sure I’m not the target audience for this book because (a) I never read celebrity autobiographies and (b) I have zero interest in the Royal Family unless we’re talking about abolition or reparations, neither of which are covered in this book. And yet I found Spare to be a well-written and compelling account of Prince Harry’s life so far, giving me an insight into all the pressures of life as a prince, the toxicity of the media, and the strain of life in a toxic family.

Because I don’t really pay attention to the Royals, a lot of what I read was completely new to me. Although I had a vague idea of how intrusive and mendacious the British media and paparazzi can be, I was shocked by the details and by the level of vitriol, which increased exponentially after Meghan came on the scene and threatened to upstage the rest of the family. The odd thing is that Spare doesn’t match most of the accounts of it in the media. Although the book does criticise other members of the family, it’s not the all-out attack on William and Charles that it’s often presented as. Instead, it’s primarily an attack on abhorrent media practices, and I found it to be a very compelling one.

The Consequences of Love by Sulaiman Addonia

The Consequences of Love	by Sulaiman Addonia

I also travelled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the year, and I loved this novel set in the city in the 1980s. It’s the story of an illicit love affair between Naser and a veiled woman he only knows as Fiore. The affair could mean death for both of them if discovered by the brutal morality police who stalk the city and send the guilty off for a public beheading, but neither of them can stop.

That’s It!

It was hard to pick just a few books out of the dozens I’ve read, but I didn’t want this post to be too long. There are lots of other excellent books I’ve discovered this year, such as Danny Boy by Barry Walsh (review here), Crossing by Pajtim Statovci, The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McGurdy, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

Have you read any of these books? What are your favourite reads of the year so far? Let me know in the comments below.

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Shadows on the Tundra: A Lithuanian Tale of Gulag Survival https://andrewblackman.net/2023/06/shadows-on-the-tundra-dalia-grinkeviciute/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/06/shadows-on-the-tundra-dalia-grinkeviciute/#respond Thu, 15 Jun 2023 11:20:42 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=7168 I've read gulag memoirs before, but Shadows on the Tundra affected me even more deeply than the others—perhaps because of the age of the narrator, or perhaps the Lithuanian history that I didn't know before, or perhaps just the stark horror of the scenes that Grinkeviciute depicts, combined with nostalgic glimpses of life back home, when her giddy innocence reminded me of Natasha in War & Peace.

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The story of how Shadows on the Tundra came into existence is almost as amazing as the book itself. As a 14-year-old girl, Dalia Grinkeviciute was deported with her family from Lithuania to a Siberian labour camp. Seven years later, in 1949, she escaped home and wrote her memoirs on scraps of paper which she buried in a jar in the garden to keep them safe from the KGB.

But then she was arrested again, and when she returned years later, she couldn’t find the jar. Only in 1991, after Grinkeviciute’s death, was the manuscript finally discovered and published. It went on to become a Lithuanian classic, and the original handwritten copy is now housed in the National Museum in Vilnius.

Shadows on the Tundra Dalia Grinkevi?iut?

The tale itself is brutal. Shadows on the Tundra starts with a seemingly never-ending journey on trains, buses and boats across the USSR to the Arctic coast in the far north of Siberia. The conditions are unbearably cramped, food is scarce, but soon things get much, much worse. The 450 Lithuanian deportees are deposited in the uninhabited tundra on the shore of the Lena river with some wood, bricks and other basic provisions and are put to work building the barracks that will house them through the long Arctic winter.

The senselessness of it all is astonishing. They work long, sixteen-hour days of manual labour in sub-zero temperatures for a small ration of bread. Soon the snow comes, so deep and thick that their barracks are buried in it, and they have to dig out a tunnel from a window to reach the outside world. No heating is provided, but when they “steal” firewood from the state’s ample supply, they are arrested and punished.

Unsurprisingly, people start dying at a horrifying rate. Starvation and hypothermia are obvious dangers, but diseases like scurvy and dysentery are also rife. They could be cured easily with just a slight improvement in diet, but instead the bodies are piled up in the snow. An Arctic winter is also completely dark, of course, so the horror of this life is hard to comprehend. It’s a miracle that anybody survived.

Throughout Shadows on the Tundra, Grinkeviciute never explains the reason for this brutal punishment. Only in the Afterword are we told that it was part of Stalin’s mass deportation of the political, economic and cultural elites from Lithuania and neighbouring Baltic states as a way of exerting control. The whole project is senseless. Later in the book they begin canning fish, and they continue even after the fish have rotted—the impossible targets simply have to be met.

Amid the horror, there are poignant glimpses of Dalia’s normal life back home only a few months earlier.

“I was taking a shortcut through Vytautas Park and about to skip down the steps, when suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks, entranced by the sight before me. The sun was golden, the city aglow at my feet, the air smelt of blossoms. For the first time in my life, my heart throbbed with the joy of springtime, which was my springtime too. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and felt incredibly happy. ‘Ah, life, how splendid you are. And youth—how splendid too! What a joy to be alive!’ My eyes, wide with excitement, welled up with tears of adolescent bliss and I headed full tilt down the hill, drawn by the siren call of the theatre, of music and the rapture of young life.”

I’ve read gulag memoirs before, but Shadows on the Tundra affected me even more deeply than the others—perhaps because of the age of the narrator, or perhaps the Lithuanian history that I didn’t know before, or perhaps just the stark horror of the scenes that Grinkeviciute depicts, combined with these nostalgic glimpses of life back home, when her giddy innocence reminded me of Natasha in War & Peace.

My only disappointment was that the story ended in 1943, with Dalia still marooned in the Arctic, shivering in a small yurt where “a piercing wind was blowing in from the sea and the waves were crashing madly against the shore.” I wanted the impossible—to know about Dalia’s escape, her life in hiding back in Lithuania, being arrested again and then, much later, trying to put a life together from the ruins of her youth.

But she didn’t get a chance to tell that story. What we have is a fragment, but it is a powerful and important fragment. It’s a story of survival in the harshest circumstances, of the kindnesses and cruelties that come out in those circumstances, of human nature at its worst and best. It’s a story I’d recommend to anyone.

If you enjoyed this post, please check out more of my book reviews, or sign up for my free newsletter.

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The Social Life of DNA https://andrewblackman.net/2023/05/the-social-life-of-dna/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/05/the-social-life-of-dna/#comments Mon, 15 May 2023 11:40:00 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=8166 We all know about the physical properties of DNA and its contributions to medical and scientific research. But what interests sociologist Alondra Nelson is the social life of DNA.

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We all know about the physical properties of DNA and its contributions to medical and scientific research. But what interests sociologist Alondra Nelson is the social life of DNA.

Specifically, she tells us how African-Americans are using DNA to gain greater understanding of their connections to Africa which were so brutally severed by the institution of slavery, and what effect that’s having on movements for racial reconciliation and justice.

The Social Life of DNA

In The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Nelson takes two different approaches:

  1. She tells the stories of individual people who have taken DNA tests that revealed their links to specific areas and ethnic groups in Africa.
  2. She also tracks broader social movements that have sought to use DNA for larger goals like seeking reparations.

The individual stories are interesting in showing how, despite the aura of scientific certainty surrounding DNA analysis, there are still lots of things that it can’t tell us. Nelson makes an important point about “DNA spillover”:

“DNA spillover occurs when an individual’s experience with one domain of genetic analysis informs his or her understanding of other forms of it or authorizes its use in another domain.”

For example, a woman called Pat believed that the results would be trustworthy, citing her experience working with DNA in a crime lab. But whereas DNA is reliable in determining whether a hair strand at a crime scene came from a particular person, it’s less precise when it comes to tracing someone’s origins back hundreds of years across large populations for which limited data is available.

Many DNA tests, for example, rely on analysing strands of DNA that are passed down either from mother to daughter or from father to son. What that means is that they can tell you where your father’s father’s father’s father (etc.) came from, and the same for your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. But picture your family tree as an inverted triangle, with you at the bottom and your ancestors fanning out above you. This approach tells you only about the people on opposite edges, not about the huge number of people in-between.

People also interpret the results differently, depending on their own desires and expectations and how the results fit in with what else they know from traditional genealogy and/or the family’s oral history.

For example, although Pat was a big believer in the power of DNA, her results conflicted with what she thought she knew. Instead of affirming that she was descended from the Khoisan people of southern Africa, they placed her with the Akan of Ghana. This left Pat disoriented and not fully trusting her results. Other people, presented with two places of origin, one maternal and one paternal, chose to identify with one more than the other.

The Social Life of DNA weaves these individual stories into a larger story of the way DNA is used in social movements. I found it fascinating to read the story of the African Burial Ground in New York City, discovered in the 1990s and dating back to the 1600s. The graves were originally excavated and analysed in a very destructive and disrespectful way, before the local community pressured the government into arranging a proper analysis of the remains, which revealed much about the hard lives of the people buried there and the places they had originally come from. DNA formed a huge part of that analysis, and one of the scientists then used what he’d learnt to set up one of the early consumer testing companies, specifically targetting African-Americans.

Nelson also shows how DNA results have been used in the reparations movement—for example, in the Farmer-Paellmann v. FleetBoston class-action lawsuit in 2002, the plaintiffs used DNA results to prove that they were descended from enslaved African people and thus had a right to sue the corporations that had profited unfairly from their coerced and uncompensated labour. The case was unsuccessful, but the story illustrates how DNA can be used to deal with the past and reopen conversations about historical injustices.

The Social Life of DNA is a very interesting and thoughtful account of the ways in which DNA is being used to shape identity and push for racial reconciliation in America. Although Nelson is a sociologist and the tone sometimes veers into the dryness of academia, the book is aimed at a general audience and is mostly quite readable and engaging. As the science improves, it will be interesting to see how the social life of DNA shifts and evolves in the decades to come.

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Dominoes by Phoebe McIntosh https://andrewblackman.net/2023/03/dominoes-by-phoebe-mcintosh/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/03/dominoes-by-phoebe-mcintosh/#comments Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:38:25 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9451 Dominoes by Phobe McIntosh explores important issues of race and identity, while through its heart runs a classic tale of star-crossed lovers.

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The premise of Dominoes, the debut novel by Phoebe McIntosh, is fascinating. What if you discover that the man you’re about to marry may be descended from people who owned your ancestors as slaves?

It’s a fascinating question to consider because it poses all kinds of other important questions about the way past injustices continue to shape the present, about race and reparations, identity, and so much more.

Dominoes explores the question through the relationship of Layla and Andy. Layla is a mixed-race woman and Andy is a white man, and they both share the same surname: McKinnon. In a normal world, this could be just a cute coincidence, but ours is not a normal world. It’s a world shaped by centuries of brutality, particularly in the Caribbean, where Layla’s family came from. So Layla is gradually forced to consider the possibility that Andy’s McKinnon ancestors were the slaveowners who treated her McKinnon ancestors as property.

The novel is based on a solo show that McIntosh performed at various theatrical venues—here’s an extract to give you an idea:

Layla’s character development through the book is very interesting. At the start, she is quite apolitical and unaware. She’s young and in love, and she doesn’t really pay much attention to what’s happening in the wider world. The person who really forces her to confront the past is her best friend Sera, and in doing so she also forces her to confront and understand her identity.

There’s a pivotal and poignant flashback scene that beautifully explains the dynamics of Layla and Sera’s friendship and their different experiences of race. The two of them are refused entry to a Soho bar, for no reason other than that they’re black. For Sera, this has happened many times before, and she just wants to get out of there and go somewhere where she’s not judged for her skin colour. But for the light-skinned, blond-haired Layla, it’s new territory. She refuses to believe that the bouncers are racist, then believes that their behaviour is some kind of anomaly that the managers of the bar will correct when she tells them about it. She uses some white friends as cover to get them into the bar, feeling triumphant about eluding the bouncers, but Sera is miserable and just wants to go home.

A similar dynamic comes out in other parts of Dominoes. Although Sera and Layla are true “besties” and are incredibly close on a personal level, their responses to issues of race and identity are very different, and this creates tension in their relationship. This is why Sera takes the extreme step of forcing Layla to confront the McKinnon family history, berating her and finally even refusing to attend the wedding. It’s an extreme reaction, and I think it’s the only part of the book that’s not quite believable—I can see why she’d press the issue, but refusing to attend your best friend’s wedding is a huge leap. But I can also see that it stems from a much deeper divide in their friendship. Maybe it’s the last straw for Sera.

Anyway, Sera’s role in the novel is important, both in exploring issues of racial identity and in forcing a reluctant Layla to go delving into the past. The search takes her to Jamaica, where she finds answers—not so much in the facts of the McKinnon family history as in a greater understanding of where she comes from and what’s important in her life.

The character of Andy is also well drawn. McIntosh does a great job of showing the love between Andy and Layla—their relationship is very believable and very sweet, without being cloying. Andy is caring and thoughtful, and he’s also a well-meaning “ally” who’s on a Diversity & Inclusion panel at his workplace. And yet his tweets also reveal areas of alarming ignorance on issues of race and police brutality.

And then there’s Andy’s family. When Andy’s mother loses her phone, she asks her husband to “check with the little coloured girl at the till”. There are other incidents like that, which are not blatant enough to negate their overall friendliness towards Layla but do contribute to her growing doubts about joining the family.

The novel is set in the last few years, so in the background all the time is the growing awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. Again, Layla, Sera and Andy respond to it in very different ways, providing a fascinating perspective on this pivotal moment in recent history.

Dominoes is a novel that book groups will love because there are so many interesting questions to discuss and debate. It would also be a great gift for that person in your life who simply doesn’t understand why people keep talking about slavery and other historic injustices when they “all happened so long ago.”

Dominoes shows very clearly that the past does matter, and that historic injustices have a way of perpetuating themselves right up to the present day unless they are dealt with and properly rectified. It provides a great way of exploring and thinking about contemporary questions, while through its heart runs a classic tale of star-crossed lovers. It’s a thought-provoking and very enjoyable novel.

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Borges Marathon, Part 12: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote https://andrewblackman.net/2023/02/borges-marathon-part-12-pierre-menard-author-of-the-quixote/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/02/borges-marathon-part-12-pierre-menard-author-of-the-quixote/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2023 20:39:01 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9457 In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, Borges plays with ideas of authorship and originality by inventing a French Symbolist poet who embarks on the impossible task of composing Don Quixote.

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Welcome to this gradual journey through the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Today I’m reviewing “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. For other Borges stories, see my Borges Marathon page.

Many of the stories in the “Garden of Forking Paths” collection are extended thought experiments, and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is no exception. In this case, Borges plays with ideas of authorship and originality by inventing a French Symbolist poet who embarks on the impossible task of composing Don Quixote.

Pierre Menard’s aim is not to compose a new Quixote—Borges is disparaging about “those parasitic books that set Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannabière, or don Quixote on Wall Street.” He doesn’t want to update Quixote in any way—he wants to compose the original Quixote, just as Cervantes did in the early 17th century.

But this doesn’t mean copying or transcribing either. It means:

“Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes.”

Once he has accomplished this, Menard hopes to be able to compose Don Quixote just as Cervantes did, making his own work match the original word for word.

Naturally, he doesn’t get very far. Before his death, he only manages to complete a few fragments. Nevertheless, Borges enthusiastically reviews these fragments, commenting on the differences between the Cervantes and the Menard, even though the words are identical.

The point, of course, is that we read texts differently depending on when and by whom they were written. It’s a humorous story that pokes a bit of fun at pompous literary criticism, but it also makes some serious points. We would read Don Quixote differently if it had been written by a 20th-century French Symbolist poet. We’d read it with the history of Europe in the intervening four centuries in mind, and we’d have different expectations of it as a text.

I don’t think it’s really an interesting enough concept to sustain the story, however. Other thought experiments in recent stories, like a world with no objective reality and a review of a non-existent book, have been more interesting to me. “Pierre Menard” was interesting but not one of my favourites. The style is deliberately dry and pedantic because it’s mimicking a certain style of literary essay, so that doesn’t help either.

One question I had as I was reading was why Borges made Pierre Menard a Symbolist poet. I think there’s probably some significance to this, but I don’t know enough about the Symbolist movement to understand it. If anyone knows, please leave a comment to enlighten me!

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Danny Boy by Barry Walsh https://andrewblackman.net/2023/02/danny-boy-by-barry-walsh/ https://andrewblackman.net/2023/02/danny-boy-by-barry-walsh/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:22:49 +0000 https://andrewblackman.net/?p=9468 My review of Danny Boy by Barry Walsh, a novel of beautifully drawn relationships and the sometimes funny, sometimes painful experience of growing up on a council estate in 1960s London.

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Some books just put you right into a place and time, and Danny Boy is one of those. The place is a Pimlico housing estate, and the time is the 1960s. Barry Walsh clearly knows this time and place well—it was also the setting of his debut novel, The Pimlico Kid—and it shows in the lovingly detailed descriptions of people and places and the habits and mores of the time. As a reader, you really feel part of this world.

For Danny, though, all that matters is that he’s sixteen years old and he’s busy navigating the uncertain borders between boyhood and manhood. He’s bright enough to stay at school, but feels jealous of his friends who are working and have more money to spend. He’s desperate to lose his virginity, but he doesn’t have the heart to pursue girls as relentlessly as his friends do—or claim to. And then there’s the lure of gang life, exemplified in the menacing figure of Gasping George, the local gangster who has snared Danny’s friend Nobby and is clearly trying to reel Danny in next.

Danny Boy by Barry Walsh

Danny has secrets and shame to overcome too. His friend’s younger brother, Jinx, has never been “right” since falling from a wall while playing at a bomb site years earlier. Danny witnessed the whole thing and was the one who rushed to get help, perhaps saving his life. But as the story goes on, Danny’s role in Jinx’s accident gradually shifts from witness and saviour to something much murkier.

Danny’s relationships with friends, enemies, potential girlfriends and others around the estate are beautifully and sensitively drawn. With Jinx, he is patient and loving when so many others are irritable and try to get rid of him. It’s endearing at first, but as we understand more about what really happened that day at the bomb site, it starts to look more like over-compensation.

With his friends, Danny Boy is often in performance mode, saying and doing what he thinks he needs to say and do to be “one of the boys”. With adults, he’s often the good, well-behaved boy among his more rebellious friends. At school, he’s bright; on the estate, he often tries to play that down. With girls, he’s nervous and defensive, hiding his true feelings and not knowing what to say.

The most beautiful relationship in the book is with Liam, an old Irish nightwatchman who discovers Danny one night exploring his old home, which is slated for demolition. Liam becomes an unlikely mentor, an outsider who gives Danny the chance to talk about things he’d never dare to mention with his friends and family. He’s patient and non-judgmental, even when Danny finally dares to talk obliquely about his guilty secret.

As you’d expect from a tale about a teenage boy and a group of friends, there are plenty of adventures and escapades in Danny Boy. There’s the camping trip to Devon that ends with his friend Dodds being caught in a tent with the naked fiancee of the trip organiser. There are drug-fueled trips Up West, one of which ends with a night in a police cell. There are run-ins with Gasping George, disastrous dates, punch-ups at dances, etc.

The real appeal of Danny Boy, however, is in the gradual maturing of Danny and, sometimes, his friends, as they come up against the realities of adult life, some of them very harsh, and begin to make decisions based on more than just the momentary whims that ruled them as children. It’s a compelling story about a difficult, complicated summer in which many things are changing all at once. Some of it’s funny, some of it’s tragic, and as a reader, you feel it all, which I suppose is a sign of a story well told.

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