Fiction


     Suite française  by Irène Némirovsky. Translated by Sandra Smith


When I opened this book, I had long forgotten how it had come into my library some years before. Fortunately, I have a semblance of a TBR shelf, so it didn’t get lost amid the many other volumes. I noted the publication date: 2004. Oh this looks like good historical fiction! Happy with my discovery and before reading a page, I traveled in my mind to June 1940, imagining myself glaring angrily at the Nazis, marching into Paris. I thought of Casablanca, as Rick made the plans that would tear him away from Ilsa until the moment she walked into that gin joint a world away.

But in Paris, the fear and chaos jumped off the page. Sounds and smells and human reactions felt almost too sharp, too acrid, details almost like someone had been there. It begins:

“Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn't sleep—the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?"

I felt confused. What a remarkable recreation of a moment, almost a century gone by now. The voice was almost of someone who had been there. The necessary research and grasp of the social subtleties staggered me. I reflected on great works of historical fiction I have read: Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series, Toni Morrison’ Beloved, and the delightful A Gentleman in Moscow from Amor Towles, for example. Surely there is historical fiction and great historical fiction!

Then I realized. The sights and sounds were fresh and believable not because of Némirovsky’s powers of reconstruction and creative authenticity. This was not historical fiction at all. She was there. A quick check revealed the truth: Némirovsky wrote the two novellas in this collection, probably not fully completed, nearly contemporaneously with the events they describe. The time frame is June 1940 to July 1941. The setting Paris and the French countryside. She was born a Ukrainian Jew in Kiev in 1903, fled to France in the face of the Russian Revolution, attended the Sorbonne, published a popular French novel in 1929, and was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1939. She was arrested in July 1942 in front of her daughters - the Nazis evidently not impressed with her conversion - and died in Auschwitz a month later. Her daughter kept the manuscripts unread for fifty years thinking they were journals that would be too painful to read. Prior to donating the material to a French archive, she read it. Published to critical acclaim in 2004, Suite française became a best seller in France.

Némirovsky’s achievement is astonishing. There are many surviving accounts of historical moments. They tend to be observational in the form of diaries and witnessed reports. She not only described the events around her in miniature journalistic detail, but was able to craft her narrative with social commentary, psychological interpretation, perceptive analysis, and fully realized though fictional characters. She was inside the heads of her French compatriots even as she herself was enduring the hardships of danger and escape. And description fails to do justice to her efficient and reflective prose:

“The three young men stood up and clicked their heels. In the past, she had found this display of courtesy by the soldiers of the Reich old-fashioned and rather affected. Now, she thought how much she would miss this light jingling of spurs, the kiss on the hand, the admiration these soldiers showed her almost in spite of themselves, soldiers who were without family, without female companionship. There was in their respect for her a hint of tender melancholy: it was as if, thanks to her, they could recapture some remnant of their former lives where kindness, a good education, politeness towards women had far more value than getting drunk or taking an enemy position. There was gratitude and nostalgia in their attitude towards her; she could sense it and was touched by it.”

This is a fine work, a time capsule of a fraught and crucial period. Journalism has been described as the first rough draft of history. Némirovsky’s novel has the persuasive integrity of good journalism, but the draft feels anything but rough.


                  



     Hello Beautiful  by Ann Napolitano


This is not the kind of book I usually read. For one thing, it takes place entirely on Earth, and in the United States of my own early life no less. No time travel, no apocalypse, no maps of mysterious terrain. I am not a heavy consumer of — I’m just gonna cover my bases and call it contemporary fiction. But I love good books regardless of genre.

I think it would diminish the reading experience to spell out too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that the story centers around a loving family of 4 sisters torn asunder, a damaged but beloved man whom they embrace, and a next generation living out the pain of the previous.

As I read this I thought a lot about whether it was a good book. I could recite some of the things that troubled me, but I don’t intend this as a critique. No book is perfect. Happy to discuss. Halfway through I wasn’t sure whether I’d recommend it, not yet aware that it would surge toward a powerful culmination. Whatever else I might say, Hello Beautiful succeeded in a vital way: I felt something. It moved me. In fact, it had me bawling toward the end. That’s always a good indicator of success in a novel.

I heard the author say that were she not a writer she might well have been a psychotherapist. “Helping a person who is going through a hard time find a way to the other side feels like meaningful work”, she says. Indeed. Ultimately this is a novel about injury, pain and healing. Perhaps Napolitano doesn’t fully excavate the architecture of that pain, and there is much left unexplored in her characters. But no maps of mysterious terrain? I was mistaken. Not all maps are cartographic. I followed Napolitano’s path. It was uplifting and redemptive.







     Leviathan Wakes  by James S.A. Corey




I found myself needing some escapism recently.

It is two hundred years in the future. Humanity has spread beyond Earth alone to the Solar System. Mars, with its domed cities, thrives as a populous power base. The disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the outliers hemmed in by excessive governmental control - and their progeny - live in the asteroid belt and on stations around the moons of the gas giants.

The setup all feels so convincingly inevitable. If we live long enough we will expand beyond Earth to the nearby habitable places. Or more accurately, we will make them habitable. The more conditions on Earth suffer from unchecked modification imposed by human activity, the stronger the pull toward emigration. Mitigation too, let us hope.

The politics and the storyline in this first book and the subsequent novels in its series The Expanse are the invention of a duo writing under the name James S.A. Corey. The first six of nine books were adapted for a popular TV series available for streaming. That series is widely regarded for its engaging characters, well-developed plot, political intrigue, and effective execution. I loved the series, but had never read the original novels.

The strengths of Leviathan Wakes are twofold: its confident narration guided by a clearheaded sense of purpose and destination, and its believable world building. You reside in good hands when it comes to traversing the arc of a forthcoming storyline. The depiction of life on a Belter world is grimly plausible. Limited resources, recycled air and water, adequate small residences (“holes”). The people resort to available comforts in bars and brothels while carrying out low tech jobs…and yet there is a camaraderie, a Belter culture, a bonding around the rejection of planetary conventions and manners, as well as the ineluctable political unrest as Belters nurse resentment toward the exploiters in the inner Solar System who benefit from the resources and money generated in the outer system.

The Belt narrative has a police procedural disposition to it, and a noir execution that works. Away from but intercalating with with that story, a small ship, pursued by all, carries our protagonist band of determined spacers, navigating with realism and panache among the various interest groups.

For those who have seen the show, I would say that Leviathan Wakes is more immediately accessible. While the show was excellent, it took several episodes to settle in, and the book welcomes the reader immediately. The noir tone translates better in the book as well. If you could use some escapism like I did, or just like contemporary space opera with good characters, politics, world building and pacing, this may be just the prescription.





                          NonFiction


 Life As No One Knows It  by Sara Imari Walker


Is glee a word we can use these days? I feel like an anachronism just typing it. Sara Walker is one of the most unusual thinkers I’ve encountered. I became acquainted with her work through her appearances on various podcasts, and just to listen to her express her worldview filled me with, yes, glee. She talked about topics dear to my heart and no doubt to yours like the origin of life and the existence of alien intelligence. Except she was in so deep she had her own long-considered ideas and vocabulary. She rejected all the orthodoxies I’d ever heard, but to listen to her was to hear the beginnings of a scientific and philosophical project that made compelling and intuitive sense. It’s a lot to take in, and this book is her attempt to communicate clearly the ideas she’s working on.

Twitter has long been a place to find some of her concise and intriguing thoughts about life, physics and existence, most in the old 140 character format. For example, “We will only discover alien life when it is no longer alien”, and “Not every bit of matter will ever organize into something alive, we are the lucky bits that get to think, feel and communicate what it is to exist”, and “assembly defines where things exist in time in the same manner that spatial coordinates define where things exist in space”.

Sara Walker is a physicist, yet her career is devoted to matters that usually fall under the purview of biology or chemistry. She’s also readable and funny.  In Life As No One Knows It, she walks the reader through her journey to elaborate a theoretical and generalizable basis for life. She notes that while the “idiosyncratic details of biology” are vital to understanding life on Earth, they don’t matter if the goal is to understand life as a universal phenomenon:

“We need a description abstract enough to unify all things we think are life, anticipate the things we don’t think are life but are, and solve the question of life’s origin.”

She believes a new physics is necessary to explain life. I do her a disservice to try to summarize her careful and stepwise arguments. But I can’t convey even the gist without at least offering some of her prose. Her understanding is phrased in statements honed over years of effort, and mine are not. This is in fact one of her starting points. Physical objects, including of course life, and the consequences and products of life (like careful phraseologies, or screwdrivers) are contingent on what came before, “and it is precisely the chains of contingency necessary to assemble them that cause these objects to be far too improbable to be explained within current theories of physics.” Said another way, life exists in lineages that have a causal history, and have been the objects of selection and evolution over time. This is a far more general description of life than describing qualities of the specific objects like bacteria and baboons that exist on Earth.

Screwdrivers don’t arise through random fluctuations in the universe, and she and her collaborators argue that without an evolutionary process, the existence of a screwdriver is physically impossible. This leads to a conjecture, one her work has set about to investigate:

“Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many unique, recursively constructed parts.”

She seeks a testable theory, one that can be studied in the lab. This effort has a name, Assembly Theory. I will not deny you the benefit of hearing her far more cogent account. But her work formalizes the notion that the objects made by life are constructed. There is a minimum number of steps necessary to make any object. The focus is on complex molecules, and the idea is that objects that are part of the lineages we call life are distinguishable from nonlife in their ability, in quantity and reliability, to assemble complex molecules. Life utilizes greater numbers of steps in assembling the components of which it is comprised than does nonlife. This is because the information for construction is retained in the lineage called life, and has been selected and ramified over vast quantities of time, and is available for use in construction. The retained information can be further selected, allowing for the production of novel objects.

If true, the implications of this project can seem radical; if seen another way, illuminating and simplifying. Life is the only physical system that uses information, and that information is causal. Life on Earth is a lineage that stretches back to and is contingent on what happened at the very beginnings of the planet. Time is thus an essential element of life. The products of human technology (the “technosphere”) are part of the lineage of life on Earth, so they are life. A screwdriver is life. AI is life as it emerged from the same historical and causal lineages as the rest of life on Earth. Alien life will be very different from life on Earth, but will still have been constructed based on the principles elaborated in Assembly Theory. It will exist in quantity, ie it will have many copies, and will have been constructed from of a process utilizing many steps.

One day, maybe even soon, we could encounter alien life. How will we even recognize it if we do? Surely its structure and history will be very different from that of life on this planet. If Walker is right, we may be developing just now the theoretical tools to approach this possibility, lest we pass it by without noticing in our incomprehension.




The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook  by Hampton Sides



To a bibliophilic teenager, the Age of Exploration once thrilled, alive with swashbuckling and romantic adventure. At that time, heroic European explorers were rarely acknowledged to have discovered lands and coastlines long occupied by people of other cultures. No longer are such histories tenable, not in the present era where these discoveries are understood in multiple contexts, including as the forerunners of colonial exploitation, and often the precursors to the collapse of indigenous cultures on a massive scale. Charles Mann describes the process in the Americas in two influential popular books 1491 and 1493, the first an account of the flourishing of Pre-Columbian civilizations, and the second their crumbling in the face of imperial theft and cataclysmic infectious disease.

Hampton Sides, an American history writer, aims to tell the story of James Cook from a more nuanced perspective. Captain Cook has played an outsized role as one the last great explorers of the period. He made prolific contributions to the map of the Pacific, and to the study of the natural history of vast regions. But in recent years, people from New Zealand to British Columbia have rejected monuments and geographical names memorializing his career. Sides aspires to include the perspectives of those Cook encountered along the way as he tells the story of the third and final voyage.

Cook enjoyed a singular nautical reputation in 1776, having retired at 46 following the completion of his second voyage. On his first voyage in his ship Endeavor, he circumnavigated the globe, observed from Tahiti the rare transit of Venus across the sun, made first contact with the Maori, and charted hitherto unknown regions of the South Pacific. His collaboration with botanist Joseph Banks yielded a wealth of scientific data. His second voyage expanded his explorations in the Pacific, tested a new marine chronometer which for the first time allowed accurate measurements of latitude, and made the first foray south of the Antarctic Circle.

Cook’s remit from the British Crown for a third voyage had a primary objective: search for the elusive Northwest Passage, a shortcut to Asia and its lucrative wares and markets, but this time from the western side of North America. The details of the Alaskan coast and the waterways to the north and east were still unknown, and Cook’s mapmaking, surveying, and captaincy were much respected. He was well regarded for his maturity, steadiness, tolerance, and judgment. But he assumed a second task as well. A Polynesian man named Mai had arrived in England in 1774 on Cook’s companion ship during the second voyage. A talented individual, he had learned English under the sponsorship of Joseph Banks, absorbed much of English life and culture, and won the affection of many prominent Englishmen. King George III promised Mai would be returned to his people. The King had a broader concept in mind, one in retrospect naive and imprudent. He would send animals, plants, seeds with Cook from the Royal farmlands to Polynesia to establish English-style farms for Mai’s countrymen. Apparently the limitless supply of seafood and fresh fruit the islanders enjoyed made little impression on His Majesty.

Sides narrates Cook’s unprecedented journey: Near disaster in New Zealand; the return of Mai, whose sojourn in England apparently inflated his ego and sabotaged his interactions with his relations; a happy holiday in Hawaii; the search for the Northwest Passage in Alaska. (Spoiler: he didn’t find it.) And evoking Magellan’s fate two centuries earlier, Cook’s violent death during the unhappy return to Hawaii. Cook’s last voyage paints on an immense canvas geographically and culturally, and the cast of characters is similarly diverse: British explorers, Polynesian Islanders, western North Americans, even Siberian indigenous people. Predictably, this mixing yields both exhilaration and tragedy.

What of Sides’ project, to tell the story from multiple points of view? Credit him with trying. The reality is that Cook’s voyage is amply documented, and the sheer volume of that information dwarves what can be known of Polynesian perspectives. The Maori and Polynesians preserved history in oral traditions. There are no records to review. Sides presents what can be inferred from English accounts, and from the events they described. He attends to obvious differences in attitudes toward private property and sexual mores. He uses the case of Mai’s return liberally, elaborating on the British attempts to make sense of the ill will he seemed to generate. There are Maori and Polynesian scholars today whose perspectives Sides presents. Cook’s death itself has been the subject of much analysis over the centuries. Was it a demonstration by angry or anxious Hawaiians that their god Lono was in fact all-powerful, and that Cook was not a god after all? Or as some scholars of Hawaiian culture of the period argue, was he well understood to be mortal all along, and his death the result of hubris and miscalculation?

Cook’s voyage is arguably the last great odyssey of the Age of Exploration. But in another sense, it is the first of a newer age of European science, one grounded less in the Enlightenment astronomy and physics of Galileo and Newton, and more located in the naturalism and dynamism of the Romantic period. Cook precedes the subsequent seekers and colonialists. Could their consequences be reflected in Star Trek’s famous Prime Directive: the principle of noninterference in the development of newly discovered alien cultures? First Contact is an illuminating, thrilling but risky undertaking. Cook is an end and a beginning. His story is instructive and well told here, the limits of broader perspectival inclusion notwithstanding. Alternatively, in our era of polarized points of view, perhaps the story is all the more instructive because of how those limits constrain the fullness of our understanding.




     Objectivity  by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison



I picked up this book because I’ve always liked Galison’s work on the history of science - first reading Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time - and because of what felt like the provocative challenge of the single-word title. What is objectivity in science? Can we study the universe without the human being as interpreter between nature and reality? Is there a truth outside of human model-making?

Objectivity is a thoughtful and persuasive work of scholarship in the history and philosophy of science. The authors possess a masterful grasp on a huge body of scientific history. The elegance of the prose resists anything but direct quotation, and the text is illuminated with sumptuous and abundant illustrations, many in color. It’s an intellectual feast that comes laden with surprise and sufficiency. Surely scientists of different eras have attempted to represent nature in their work with accuracy. Less obvious, both to scientists themselves and to us the reader, are the ways those depictions have responded to the social and epistemological concerns of the day.

Daston and Galison are interested in what the concept of objectivity has meant in the science of roughly the last two hundred years. They take a historical approach to sorting out the complexities that follow, arguing that a modern understanding of the term dates only to that period. They are curious about what motivated the various approaches to subjectivity and objectivity in science. What competing and intersecting strategies have been used to address those concerns? What does this history tell us about the changing role of the scientist over time, something they term “the scientific self”? The authors attempt to clarify the dense philosophic challenges of this material by focusing on how they have played out in practical scientific work.

You would be right to imagine that the topic of objectivity is vast. This is an ambitious study. Despite 400 pages, the authors perforce constrain the scope of their work. They focus on the scientific atlas, which has presented the working objects of science over centuries and in fields as far apart as anatomy, meteorology and physics:

“Atlases are systematic compilations of working objects. They are like dictionaries of the sciences of the eye…Atlases are intrinsically collective. They are designed for longevity: if all goes well, they should serve generations within a scientific community…Since at least the seventeenth century, scientific atlases have served to train the eye of the novice and calibrate that of the old hand. They teach how to see the essential and overlook the incidental, which objects are typical and which are anomalous, what the range and variability of objects in nature are.”


And more essentially, “They are the guides practitioners consult time and time again to find out what is worth looking at, how it looks, and perhaps most important of all, how it should be looked at.” Science needs “working objects”, standardized in ways that allow for cooperation in generalization and comparison.

I was immediately reminded of the trees in the northeastern US regarded as type specimens. These are considered some of the most characteristic examples of their species. Many of the largest and most accessible are situated in the village greens of the small towns in NY and New England. Protected sometimes for centuries in these public spaces, they make a wonderful excuse for a day trip on a weekend afternoon. The early atlases Daston and Galison present contain type specimens.

The authors look to the advent of mechanical image-making - especially photography - in the mid-nineteenth century to ground their analysis. Before this, they term the approach to the scientific atlas as “truth-to-nature.” The model was scientist as learned sage - botanists and anatomists like Linnaeus, Albinus and even Audubon - who attempted to illustrate the fundamental form of the objects under study. These atlases displayed beautiful and carefully-rendered drawings. Often the images didn’t conform to any actual specimen, but rather to an idealized type, a characteristic exemplar of the object under examination. But the precision of photography in mid-century raised new concerns. Had the images created for atlases been influenced by their maker? Had the learned sage imposed aestheticized improvements on the images? How far from the reality of nature had this embellishment ventured? The authors call the new approach “mechanical objectivity”. This conveys the value (an “epistemic virtue”) placed not on verisimilitude but on non-intervention. The scientist was now a worker who rejected his own will in favor of unadulterated unbiased images. Self-restraint was essential. Even artifacts of the photographic process should be included in the service of automaticity and the eschewing of human bias.

By the early twentieth century, mechanical objectivity began to break down. The limitations of photography and mechanical imaging alone as tools became appreciated. Identical photographic plates might obscure or expose different aspects of an image. What of retouching photographs? The absolutism of mechanical images worked against the very purpose of the atlas: to provide useful and accurate working objects.

Daston and Galison use the term “trained judgement” to describe a subsequent approach to images. Young scientists were educated and trusted to build expertise, to develop pattern-recognition capabilities. Objective technologies remained more useful and important than ever, but interpretation and judgment could sort out the important, the salient, from the background. Interpretive vision, not the blind sight of mechanical objectivity, served the practical need of the scientist. No longer the learned sage nor the self-abnegating worker, the new scientific persona was that of trained expert. Judgment supplemented objectivity. The epistemic virtue that emerged valued explanation and efficacy over a pure but less useful objectivity.

The authors close with a mention of a new role for images, not as mere passive bearers of the working objects of science, but as tools for manipulation by the user. Nanotechnology images, for example, are sometimes intended and used interactively. Computers can be used to cut, alter, rotate and use images for purposes. The authors describe this as a shift from “image-as-representation to image-as-process.” The future of images in science may differ considerably from those of the past.

Nonetheless, the primary focus here is to channel the conversation to a narrow piece of the scientific method. To show how scientists have in fact dealt with one aspect of how we can come to know things, how we study them, and what ethical and epistemological concerns - not necessarily explicitly conscious - have influenced their approaches. These influences and choices reflect changing human values.  And with different notions of what produces good, useful science comes an evolution in the status of the scientific persona. The idea of what it is to be a scientist shifts along with the process of doing science itself. The authors have made a considerable contribution to the history of scientific work. Objectivity integrates a wealth of challenging material, offering us greater insight into how we extend scientific knowledge.





John James Audubon, Crested Titmouse, 1828-1837








Camilla Golgi, Untersuchungen über den feineren Bau des centralen und peripherischen Nervensystems, 1894