Luke Dittrich, “Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets”

 – e-book

 Read from October 2^nd to 24^th 2021

My rating: 

 

 The first part of Luke Dittrich’s study-cum-(auto)biography-cum-history of lobotomy was interesting enough, although I was a little amused, a little put off of by what Steven Rose maliciously called, in his  Patient HM review – a botched lobotomythat changed science, a „rather florid American style”. Unfortunately, the last hundred pages or so seemed to me unjustifiably long and slightly boring.

The big plus, however, is that I’ve learned a lot of interesting things (and even remembered some I had forgotten, like the story of Herophilus and Erasistratus from Alexandria, who, around 300 B.C., were the first to perform human dissection, on dead, but also on some alive).

Art Spiegelman, "Maus. A Survivor’s Tale

 

I : My Father bleeds History, New York 1986 ISBN 0-394-74723-2. – 160 p;

 

 

II And Here My Troubles Began, New York 1991, ISBN 0-679-72977-1 – 136 p.

Read from to September 9^th to 17^th to 24^th 2021

My Rating 

 

I haven’t read many graphic books until now, even though my own daughter is a quite well-known cartoonist. But even a neophyte like me can recognize a masterpiece, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus is definitely one, with its amazing way of developing the distressing theme of the Holocaust using a mixture of tools from different arts.

In fact, this is what fascinated me most, the way narrative conventions, like timeline fractures, narrative voices, styles mixtures (either collages or insertions of panels from other author’s books), transgress not only the boundary between fiction and reality, as it happens in any memoir, but also the boundary between drawing and writing.

Kevin Dutton, "The Wisdom of Psychopaths"

 -e-book

Read from August 26^th to September 8^th 2021

My rating:

 

The title of Kevin Dutton’s book, The Wisdom of the Psychopaths seems ironically oxymoronic, until you read the preface that’s it, and learn that the essay is built on the idea that there is something good in every bad, even in psychopathy, for some of its attributes, like personal magnetism and a genius for disguise, used in moderation, of course, make it adaptive (not different, in a way, from anxiety, for it is known that anxious people can detect threats better than the rest of us, a very useful quality in an hostile or unknown environment):

Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.

The challenging thesis formulated, the author proceeds to prove it, gathering information from studies, experiments, books and personal observations, to build an image of psychopaths contrary to many stereotypes we have about them.

Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened of"

  – ebook

Read from August 4^th to September 1^st 2021

My Rating:  

 

Part family memoir, part essay on death, Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened of is a touching, but also an often humorous meditation on the most faithful companion of us all.

The book eclectically gathers different attitudes towards Death (and expectations beyond it), from curiosity and indifference to terror, of his family or of artists, in what he calls a pseudo-therapeutic effort to overcome his own fear.

Oliver Sacks, "The River of Consciousness"

 – e-book

 

Read from May 30^th to June 16^th 2021

My rating: 

 

I must confess The River of Consciousness, despite its Borgesian title, did not captivate me as much as other Oliver Sacks’ books. However, Sacks being Sacks, I learned a lot from this one, too (even slightly irrelevant facts I bet I won’t forget as easily as more important ones, like the fact that there are people with Tourette’s who can catch a fly on the wings because their have a different perception of speed).

One of the most intriguing essays is The Fallibility of Memory, with the doubt it rises about what we remember, that is, what we think we remember. It seems that our memories, especially our earliest ones, are rarely reliable because our mind often mingles stories we were told or read with what really happened to us. Actually, the psychologist and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has proved (by experimentally implanting false memories in her subjects’ minds) that the so-called recovered memories of traumatic experiences, memories that ruined lives and families, could have been, in some cases, insinuated or planted by others (perhaps a therapist, a teacher, a social worker, an investigator and so on), in the minds of highly suggestible persons (children, a teenagers, bipolars, etc.).

Jeremy Butterfield, "Damp Squid. The British Language Laid Bare"

Read from June 3^rd to 7^th 2021

My rating : 

 

Jeremy Butterfield’s Damp Squid would be nothing more than a Linguistic 101, if the disinhibited, casual approach did not make the book a funny reading for everyone, not only for would-be linguists.

The main objective of the essay is to convince grammar police and other language nerds that language is not a holy instrument to be carefully approached and used, but a live organism, forever growing and changing. Therefore, the author browses The Oxford Corpus (the 2006 edition, with over two billion words taken from contemporary English all over the world) in search of examples and statistics to illustrate it. If you didn’t know (I didn’t 😊), the Corpus (created in 1961 under the name of The Brown Corpus, which gathered then an impressive million words) is a collection of machine-readable different texts, organised in 40 domains (business, religion, sport, weblog etc.), each with its own subdomains.

Mary Beard, "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome"

  – kindle

 

Read from December 24^th to March 4^th 2021

My Rating: 

 

 

In the Epilogue of her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard confesses that the book is the result of about fifty years of history researching, archaeological sites visiting, Latin language learning, Latin literature reading and books with Roman subject studying, because for her “the Romans are a subject not just of history and inquiry but also of imagination and fantasy, horror and fun.”

Ancient civilizations, she says, do not teach direct lessons, either military or political, and are not necessarily models to follow. However, we are supposed to learn a lot by simply engaging with their history, which is our own:

We do not want to follow Cicero’s example, but his clash with the bankrupt aristocrat, or popular revolutionary, with which I started this book still underlies our views of the rights of the citizen and still provides a language for political dissent: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ The idea of ‘desolation’ masquerading as ‘peace’, as Tacitus put into the mouths of Rome’s British enemies, still echoes in modern critiques of imperialism. And the lurid vices that are attributed to the most memorable Roman emperors have always raised the question of where autocratic excess ends and a reign of terror begins.

Lisa Smartt, "Words at the Threshold"

– e-book

 

Read from February 19^th to March 4^th 2021

My rating: 

 

 

 Maybe I wanted to read Lisa Smartt’s book, Words at the Threshold, because the agony has always been a painfully fascinating theme, with its thread of light under an otherwise firmly closed door, to take farther the metaphor in the title. Maybe because, like many others, I have always hoped to have an epiphany after hearing stories about it, in order to discover that death is nothing to be afraid of. Or maybe because apart from the fact that death is fascinating in its own terrifying way in any circumstances, it is when it robs you of a beloved that you need most to be reassured that it is only temporary, while desperately looking for explanations, for signs, for proof of another (better) world to alleviate your grief.

In such times, books like this one seem to help you cope. When my father died, I re-read Raymond A. Moody’s Life after Life for these exact reasons, somehow hoping to reconnect with my dad at another level. It did not happen, not in the way Lisa Smartt describes the reconnection with her own father, but it gave me peace, encouraging me to doubt the finality of death, to dream that sometime in the future...

Mary Roach, “Stiff. The curious Lives of Human Cadavers”

  – e-book 

 

Read from February February 2^nd to 18^th 2021

My Rating : 

 The horizon of expectations induced by the title of Mary Roach’s book, Stiff. The curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is, without a doubt, fulfilled. In fact, the whole book is a very interesting and pretty original effort to encourage people to change their belief that cadavers are gruesome, eerie, disgusting or simply boring, by proving that they are in fact some sort of superheroes, working for the ‘betterment of humankind’, that is helping us to test, experiment and understand the human body: they were the first ‘victims’ of the guillotine, the first subjects of the new embalming techniques, the first passengers to wear a seat belt. Moreover, that there is nothing disrespectful in relating amusing stories about them, for a cadaver is not a person anymore, it is simply an object without much dignity left:

Being dead is absurd. It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.

Mario Benedetti, "The Truce"

 –ebook

 

Read from to February 5^th 2021

My rating: 

 

The Truce is the only (I think) Uruguayan book I have ever read, but what an introduction to the Uruguayan literature I’ve been offered! Moreover, I have learned (via Wikipedia , of course) that its author, Mario Benedetti, was a prominent member of the influential Generación del 45 and that he is considered one of the most important Latin American writers. A skilled translator (the first to translate Kafka), a mighty journalist, a brilliant novelist and poet, winner of a lot of international awards, he was nevertheless haunted by the same feeling of the worthlessness felt by many of his generation, as his last poem, dictated to his personal secretary just before dying, reveals:

My life has been like a fraud

My art has consisted

In this not being noticed too much

I've been as a levitator in my old age

The brown sheen of the tiles

Never came off my skin

Oliver Sacks, "Hallucinations"

  – e-book

 

Read from January 4^th to 13^th 2021

My rating:

 

 In the Introduction of his Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks says that he conceived this book as “a sort of natural history or anthology of hallucinations”, and this is exactly what it is, a collection of first-hand testimonies from people whose common ground are hallucinations, either because of some medical condition (macular degeneration, migraine, epilepsy, narcolepsy, Parkinsonism etc.), or because of nightmares, shocks, use of some substances, or a combination of the two categories.

The author also hopes that the stories in this book “will help defuse the often cruel misunderstandings which surround the whole subject”, for although in many cultures hallucinations are a part of spiritual practices tried to be induced by meditation, drugs, or solitude, in modern Western culture, they are often stigmatized, considered either a sign of madness or of a grave illness of the brain.

Gregor von Rezzori, “The Snows of Yesteryear”

– kindle 

Read from August 17^th to September 21^st 2020

My rating: 

 

The Snows of Yesteryear is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Not only the characters portrayed are fascinating (the telluric Cassandra, the neurotic Mother, the burlesque Father, the fairylike Sister and the down-to-earth Bunchy) but also, but especially the reconstruction of a lost era and of a lost land are truly magical: an era of bygone sunny even-when-cloudy days lived in a town that, belonging first to an Austrian defunct empire, then to a Romanian ephemeral kingdom and finally to a dystopic Soviet Ukraina, changed its name accordingly “from Czernowitz to Cernăuţi to the present Chernovtsy”. The narrative voice tries and brilliantly succeeds to recapture the spirit of that era in which

We did not live our own lives. Our lives were being lived by our period.

Arthur Hoyle - "Mavericks, Mystics and Misfits. Americans against the grain"

– e-book

 

Read from February 17^th to March 12^th 2020

My rating: 

This review has been published by Across the Margin 


Bricks in the (foundation) wall 

I have known and read the biographer and the essayist Arthur Hoyle for several years now. His debut book, The Unknown Henry Miller A Seeker in Big Sur, impressed me with its thorough research, its ample information, its true passion for the chosen subject. Henry Miller is America’s voice, America’s iconic image, Arthur Hoyle kept reminding us, and he should not to be forgotten by his fellow Americans. 

In his second book, the author continues to look for the essential qualities of the American soul in the life and work of other personalities who refused to conform to the norm, drawing, with the same firm and gifted hand he accustomed us to, the complex portrait of that America rendered unique by its brilliant seekers, from one restless Henry Miller to other Mavericks, Mystics and Misfits. As he explains in the Introduction:

These individuals have been chosen because their life stories, though often at variance with the direction of the mainstream society around them, exhibit certain endur­ing qualities of the American character that persist despite the changing circumstances of time and place.

Sandra Newman, "The Western Lit Survival Kit"

An irreverent guide to the classics, from Homer to Faulkner - e-book

Read from 10^th to 27^th of September 2019

My rating:

My, my, this Sandra Newman, what a cheeky, irreverent hussy, to pleonastically put it! Daring to desecrate the Cathedral of Literature by entering it with an impertinent whistle only to deliver her Western Lit Survival Kit with no respect whatsoever for the holy names inside. How all its saints must have shuddered, including the Shakespeare God. Obviously, nothing is sacred anymore. Think of all those authors you have always tiptoed around, whose oeuvres you did not run the risk to open out of awe and/ or fear of not being the ideal reader they expected you to be, becoming the laughingstock of this brazen, sparkling American who sanctions mercilessly all books that don’t provide enough fun in reading.

Moreover, forcing me to take a walk down memory lane, to remember myself from the age of seven, from that moment when I took a book in my hand and discovered I could read in my mind, since then not to let one single day pass without reading at least ten pages, but usually much, much more. Why? Obviously, because I was having fun. When has this changed? I suppose when I decided to build a career on them books, by studying Letters. In a moment, to read what I liked irreversibly changed into reading what I had to. This habit is so ingrained now, that when I like a book too much, I look at it suspiciously, subconsciously considering its accessibility a fault. It took Sandra Newman’s essay to figure out that I am nothing more than a literary snob. And to finally admit that, yes, people, reading should be having fun. Even if it is about masterpieces, especially if it is about masterpieces. And this essay is a funny, although never superficial guide into oeuvres so great everybody knows about, but nobody reads anymore because they are not credited with fun. And many of them have it in loads. If you know where to look, that is.

Catherine Nixey, “The Darkening Age”

 – e-book

Read from May 26^th to June 26^th 2019

My rating: 

I don’t know whether the beautiful province of Quebec, which has been my home for about fifteen years, now, has got the most places with saints’ names in North America, but it is sure you will see them on almost any plate on the road. Yet, Québec is also one of the less religious places I know of, despite (or because of) the fact that, until just some fifty years ago, the Catholic Church was maybe the most powerful instance in the country. And if you ask the Quebecers about that period, their smile fade and they reluctantly acknowledge some of the rules they had to obey were positively medieval. 

Was it this constraint they experienced that have made them so adamant that religion have not part in their lives anymore? Probably, and I would like to believe they closed, thus, the long period of abuse and persecutions Christianity is guilty of, but I know it is only wishful thinking. At the end of the day, this is a period that few have dared to denounce, and at their own risk, from Celsus in the second century, who was the first Greek intellectual to contest the new religion and whose work was afterwards destroyed (and whom we know only because Origen, a Christian apologist, wrote Contra Celsum, in which he polemically quoted from his On the True Doctrine some 80 years later) to the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon who, in his Decline and Fall, will blame the Christians’ indolence and disregard for the public welfare for the fall of the Roman Empire, and who will see his study banned by The Catholic Church and himself becoming a pariah in the English society.

Michelle Obama, “Becoming”

 – e-book

Genre: memoir 

Read from April 14^th to May 28^th 2019

My rating: 

“When they go low, we go high.”

How these Michelle Obama’s words, which I think are the quintessence of this amazing woman’s personality, sound truer and truer lately! I so needed her memoir (which was all I’ve expected it to be and more – the story of a proud, uncompromising woman), to restore even a little my confidence in a humanity that seems to have lost all its sense of value nowadays. 

Afua Hirsch, the “Guardian” journalist, says in her review,  with that English candour (I know she’s not born in UK, but still) that always makes you smile just a little bit exasperated, that if Michelle Obama were British hers would be a class tale. But isn’t it though? And not only a class tale, but also a race and a gender tale. For the message M. Obama sends, loud and clear, is that you can become anything you want not necessarily in spite of, but also because your modest origins, your skin colour and your, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s expression, second sex. 

Her astonishing parcourse, her majestic tenue, her exemplary story is yours to discover in a book that will help you become, too. Meanwhile, I leave you with some quotes that can better than any of my words illustrate the multiple facets, each one bright and shining, of her personality. The first one, dealing with the death of her father, helped me grieve somehow more peacefully the loss of my own, this spring:

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open I the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful —a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.

The next ones show that you can erase or at least attenuate the negative connotation of difficulty, obstruction, ugliness and use them as steps in your becoming:

If I’d learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void. If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

*

There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as something more than what it was.

*

We understood that we represented the nation and were obligated to step forward and be present when there was tragedy, or hardship, or confusion. Part of our role, as we understood it, was to model reason, compassion, and consistency.

It is true that sometimes you may feel, together with her, that all her and her husband’s efforts, dictated by reason and compassion, have been futile, that mankind never learns:

Since Barack left office, I’ve read news stories that turn my stomach. I’ve lain awake at night, fuming over what’s come to pass. It’s been distressing to see how the behavior and the political agenda of the current president have caused many Americans to doubt themselves and to doubt and fear one another. It’s been hard to watch as carefully built, compassionate policies have been rolled back, as we’ve alienated some of our closest allies and left vulnerable members of our society exposed and dehumanized. I sometimes wonder where the bottom might be.

But she also gives you hope for change given that nothing has been built in one day, and makes you aware how a solid foundation stone Obama family put in place so that tomorrow have less the consistency of a dream and more the consistency of reality: 

There are portraits of me and Barack now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, a fact that humbles us both. I doubt that anyone looking at our two childhoods, our circumstances, would ever have predicted we’d land in those halls. The paintings are lovely, but what matters most is that they’re there for young people to see—that our faces help dismantle the perception that in order to be enshrined in history, you have to look a certain way. If we belong, then so, too, can many others.

Because in the end, and this is one lesson everybody should learn thoroughly,

It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others.