Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the books category.
Craking the code
When idly browsing through the Daily Telegraph’s lists of 100 books and movies that defined the noughties (here and here, respectively) I couldn’t but notice a very interesting discrepancy. I had seen (if not always watched) 39 of the total 100 movies mentioned on the list but only read 2 out of 100 titles in books—one of those a rather bland novel that had me simply shrug my shoulders (The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith) and the other a complete atrocity against literature and civilization in general (none other than Da Vinci Code).
Now this had me scratching my head in puzzlement.
It could be that my personal criteria for approaching books and movies are somehow very different—that I am somehow a lot less discerning when it comes to movies than I am when choosing which book to read next, and subsequently my taste for literature is a lot more snobbish and eclectic than my choice of movies. It is also true that while it takes seldom longer than 2 hours to see a movie there are relatively few books that can be consumed in less than a couple of days (unless you’re Harold Bloom, of course, in which case you can read The War and Peace in the same time that it would take to watch Shrek), and thus the decision whether to see a movie is more trivial, so to say, less of a commitment. It is quite possible to watch movies rather passively, spacing out at home or in an airplane, while reading a book takes at least somewhat conscious effort. However, eventually I don’t think that all this would get us very far in explaining the 39:2 score. It must be something else why I haven’t read 98 out of 100 books that define the decade.
This all got me thinking a bit more deeply about this curious thing we refer to as a “taste”—as in “taste for music” or “taste for certain kind of literature”. When I refer to “books that I like” (or those that I don’t), and if I want to get beyond a simple ostensive statement—then what qualitative set of features am I actually talking about? It is quite easy to specify my likes and dislikes when talking about particular books (movies, songs, paintings or whatnot) but it is not easy at all to actually put your finger on what precisely do I like about them.
As the things are, there seem to be two principal ways of doing it. First, functional way, would be to say that even if there is such a set of qualitative features then it really doesn’t matter. This is why we are comfortable asking our friends “read anything interesting lately?” and then heed the recommendation, assuming that a certain level of interpersonal compatibility would also translate into similar tastes—if they liked it then there’s a good chance that so do we. And there seem to be pretty good grounds to believe that this is true. Pierre Bourdieu has done some research on that topic and found out that, although we are nominally completely free to like or dislike whatever the hell we choose, our actual tastes are remarkably similar to those of the other people in our immediate social surroundings. We learn to like things not because of their innate qualities but simply because other people like them and thus our musical, literary or whatever other sympathies cluster together. This is, of course, the idea behind phenomenons such as J.K. Rowling Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, the Beatles or Oasis. In the case of all those examples, their literary/musical merits (or respective lack thereof) matter a lot less than the fact that they are liked by so many. Incidentally, this is how amazon.com-s recommendation engine works—it ultimately treats us as members of a crowd, even if the crowd in question is a pretty small and elitist one. In music, this is how the self-proclaimed internet music revolution Last.fm operates, profiling you by the music you seem to like and then suggesting you artists from the playlists of people whose listening habits have a significant overlap with yours.
However, there are people who insist upon taking a different, ontological approach. Here’s an article on how Pandora, an alternative service to Last.fm, works—it’s an interesting and, at least to me, quite a counterintuitive idea. Last.fm is completely oblivious of the content it streams to you, differentiating between Britney Spears and Metallica only based on their different listener bases. Pandora, however, employs a bunch of specialists with PhD-s in musicology who pick every musical piece apart to its constituent parts and assign a numerical value to each of them. As a result, Pandora completely disregards who listens to (or even who performs) any particular tune and makes its suggestions based on what could be called a genome of the musical piece, a certain set of quantitative similarities rather than certain number of shared listeners. And with more than 6.5 million subscribers, they seem to be doing something right.
If this approach works with music then there should be no reason why shouldn’t we be able to similarly sequence the genome of literary works. If it is possible to quantify the level of “emotion” in a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo or tone of Fela Kuti’s voice then it should also be possible to score how “engaged” is Nabokov compared to, say, Kafka. And as it turns out, there are people crazy enough to try and do just that.
Apparently, a group of Swedish physicists undertook a study where they examined some of the formal properties of literary works by authors such as Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence and Herman Melville, quantifying the rate of appearance of new words in their texts, looking for a distinctive pattern, sort of “literary fingerprint”. If you find this intriguing, then here is the article itself, but be warned that it is not a stuff for the squeamish—I once used to be reasonably good with maths but what I found in there had me recoil in terror.
Once all is said and done, the proofs have run their course and the mathematical dust has settled, the authors come to a rather interesting (and very Borgesian) conclusion:
These findings lead us towards the meta book concept—the writing of a text can be described by a process where the author pulls a piece of text out of a large mother book (the meta book) and puts it down on paper. This meta book is an imaginary infinite book which gives a representation of the word frequency characteristics of everything that a certain author could ever think of writing.
Now, if we take this insight and approach it he way Roland Barthes might—claiming that, in terms of what they say or mean, books are “read” rather than “written”—then it would follow that when it comes to literary taste, each reader also has his or her meta book, consisting of everything that this particular reader would like, or find personally moving and/or meaningful. A kind of reader’s fingerprint, a receptive literary genome, if you like.
I do wonder what mine would look like.
Embodiment of beauty
In the foreword to his “Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway says:
“The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.”
As far as I’m concerned, he succeeded spectacularly. Hemingway was an avid hunter and even if you do not share his passion, or indeed even find it acceptable, you cannot but be drawn in and fascinated by his account of a hunting safari in Serengeti.
David Foster Wallace, who used to be a ranked juniors’ player in the US in his adolescence, does something similar in the article “Federer as Religious Experience” published about three years ago in NY Times’ Play Magazine, in which he talks about his experiences of watching Roger Federer play tennis. While there is nothing fictional about the story, it does read like as great a piece of fiction as any. The piece bears several hallmarks of his usual style(1) and the two depictions of particular balls played by Federer, against Agassi and Nadal, respectively, are positively poetic. There is a fair amount of technical discussion and detail in the article (which, again, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows DF Wallace) and it may well be that this is both a bit difficult as well as tedious to a reader who hasn’t played much tennis, but I honestly think that it’s well worth a bit of an effort to try and follow his explanations.
As it happens, I was lucky enough to watch another Federer-Nadal final at Wimbledon a year later, and can thus personally vouch for several things that Wallace says in the article about the top-level live tennis. I remember that feeling of being mesmerized by the combination of the intensity, raw power and ballet-like grace which really doesn’t come across in a remotely comparable way when watched from the TV. I fully agree with DF Wallace that only by being there in person you’re truly able to appreciate what he in the article terms as “kinetic beauty” – a human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body. And by beholding that beauty, you’re rather painfully reminded that you too have a body–of course, a rather simple and blunt instrument even in its theoretical full potential when compared to that of Federer–but are simply wasting away its potential. By watching Federer perform at the border of impossibility, and indeed, pushing that border, a kind of phenomenological point is driven home to a spectator: our bodies are not simply vessels for our minds and identities, they are our ways of being-in-world, our ways of interacting with time and space. And just like in, say, verbal conversation, there are different levels of proficiency and fluidness in all interaction.
Incidentally, a lot what Wallace is saying resonates with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s 2006 book “In Praise of Athletic Beauty”. Rather than looking at sports as a social practice or a form of amusement, Gumbrecht approaches athletics as an occasion for aesthetic contemplation, seeking and finding beauty, dignity and grace in disciplines such as bare-knuckle boxing or sumo wrestling–which are probably quite far away from most peoples’ idea of aesthetic experience. It’s a very worthwhile book to read no matter on which side of the camp–loving sports or loathing it–you happen to be.
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(1) Of course, there is also plenty of tennis-related stuff in the “Infinite Jest”. Oh, and if you are at all familiar with Wallace’s writing I do not need to remind you not to skip footnotes in his article.
Dead man talking
I just finished a book which was written about 130 years ago in Brazil. You would never tell―at least I wouldn’t have. Despite of having been published in 1882, “Epitaph of a Small Winner” by Machado de Assis reads like a very modern, if not postmodern, novel. The original title of the novel was Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and it opens like this:
The Death of the Author: I hesitated some time, not knowing whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, i.e., whether to start with my birth or with my death. Granted, the usual practice is to begin with one’s birth, but two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that, properly speaking, I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing, a writer for whom the grave was really a new cradle; the second is that the book would thus gain in merriment and novelty. Moses, who also related his own death, placed it not at the beginning but at the end: a radical difference between this book and Pentateuch.
And thus begins the topsy-turvy ride of 160 fragments, where the book’s now-dead protagonist tries to tally up his mediocre life, taking potshots along the way at anything people would want to consider sacred and profound, and finally arriving at the conclusion that is referred to in the book’s English title―once everything is taken into account, he finished his life “a small winner”.
“Epitaph” really is a remarkable book―and not only in it’s own right, but also by the virtue of the enormous influence it has exerted on the Latin American literature. One of the early nods of recognition to Machado’s masterpiece was of course Oswald de Andrade’s (one of the founders of Brazilian modernism) 1924 book Memórias Sentimentais de João Mirama and it is probably safe to say that in some way or another, “Epitaph” has influenced every Brazilian writer of the 20th century. It has also been a major inspiration to both Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquéz, and the line of confessed admirers of Machado’s talent includes names such as Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag (who has written a foreword to the English translation of “Epitaph”), Carlos Fuentes, José Saramago, Harold Bloom and Woody Allen.
Of course, Machado de Assis had influences of his own. In “Epitaph”, the most obvious literary one is certainly Lawrence Sterne and his The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. In addition to that, there are several clear references to Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Voltaire’s Candide.
Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas is widely credited as being one of the earliest works of fiction that employed the technique known as “breaking the fourth wall”. This is precisely what happens in the first paragraph that I quoted above, where the protagonist is aware of the reader, and later in the book there are several occasions where the reader is directly addressed. While not exactly an original invention in general (the same technique was widely used and very popular in Ancient Greek theatre), it was one of the many radically new literary devices that Machado de Assis employed and that nowadays have became pretty much a commonplace (for example, think of Monty Python or Woody Allen, movies such as “Fight Club”, books like “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” by Stoppard, “Midnight’s Children” by Rushdie, “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Calvino, “The Name of the Rose” by Eco or “Breakfast of Champions” by Vonnegut).
But even without all those meta-considerations and an illustrious list of fans, “Epitaph” is a ton of fun―and this alone should be good enough reason to read it.
Glimpse of a beautiful mind
A few months ago, in Harvard bookstore, I picked up a thin pocket-sized volume titled This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. It waited in my bag for a proper moment since about two weeks ago and I finished it just today. For a book of mere 121 pages it certainly took me a long time to get through – and the reason was not it being tedious or difficult to read, quite to the contrary. The book is actually a transcript of six lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967, recordings of which were only recently discovered in an archive. In his talk, Borges masterfully strikes this elusive balance between simplicity and sophistication – in fact he shows convincingly that it is not at all necessary to compromise between the two.
However, there is one thing that makes those otherwise quite remarkable lectures on poetry (and literature in general) truly amazing. Borges had been gradually losing his eyesight and by 1960 he was almost completely blind. This means that those six lectures were delivered without notes, simply by walking up to the stage and starting to talk. And reading them one cannot but marvel at how Borges picks up a thread and then effortlessly follows it, without ever losing his bearings or repeating himself. While doing so, he often quotes lines poetry and entire passages by Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Tennyson, Rossetti, Frost, Cummings, Chesterton, Manrique, Omar Khayyám, Yeats, Coleridge, Whitman, Quevedo and countless others in English, Spanish, German, Arabic, German and Old English. The only comparable feat of erudition and command of the subject I can think of must be Auerbach’s tour de force and magnum opus “Mimesis” that was written in Istanbul, where the author was in exile without access to library – and thereby the veritable study of Western literature from Tacitus to Proust and Woolf was written similarly “blind” and out of memory, without taking a look at source texts or anything else that had been written on them. Giants such as Borges and Auerbach stand as towering monuments to the art of reading and imbuing, immersing oneself in literature with a seriousness and dedication that almost scares me.
Borges concludes his series with a deeply personal and intimate creed, by looking back to a long life lived with, in and by literature. He opens his last lecture by saying:
I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes – yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.
He reminisces a scene from his childhood, when he first heard his father reading “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by Keats, and describes an effect that this experience had on him:
I have toyed with an idea – the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face. I suppose when Judas kissed Jesus (if he indeed did so), he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. /…/ When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience. I have been feeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment I thought myself as being “literary”.
I don’t think I’ve had a moment like this, and I probably never will. I suppose most of us never will. And maybe this is the thing that ultimately separates us mere mortals from those few that are truly great.
Isn’t it ironic…
David Pogue reports in his blog that Amazon zapped two book from its’ e-book reader Kindle as “the publisher [had] changed its mind about offering an electronic version”. I.e. people who had purchased the e-book suddenly discovered that it had disappeared from their e-readers with money credited back to their account.
This is of course a bit strange and certainly provides much ammunition to the ranks of Kindle-skeptics and opposers of e-books in general. However, the otherwise silly and unfortunate incident acquires a whole new level of irony by the simple fact that the books so recalled happened to be Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. And the cherry on top of this hilarious situation is of course the fact that both books’ copyright has actually expired and the full text is available in many places on he internet (for instance here).
I mean… what were you thinking, Amazon?? In terms of PR blunder, this thing surely ranks at par with the recent news about Gazprom’s Nigerian joint venture.
Reflections from damaged life
Despite of having made myself a promise last year NOT to teach anything before I have the draft my dissertation finished, I agreed this week to doing a seminar in anthropology this fall in Tallinn. And although the idea is exciting right now I can already see myself wondering somewhere down the line in October that HOW THE HELL did I get myself into this once again. I guess my excuses are that 1) it is only two months and not the full semester, and 2) I was given a free reign to choose the texts and approach. Besides, it’s a graduate seminar so I really don’t feel that I’d need to overly restrain myself in choosing the reading material – both in terms of volume as well as difficulty. So I will pick three ethnographies (Jackson, Mahmood and Klima) and read them side by side with theoretical texts that have inspired as well as provided a structural framework for them (such as Adorno, Benjamin, Butler, Merleau-Ponty, and Sontag). All this should amount to a fun and interesting experience, at least for those who are able to consider reading ethnographies, critical theory and philosophy as fun.
One of the texts I will assign is Adorno’s “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life” and thus I braced myself to re-read it with attention. I must say that, now having managed to almost completely detach myself from what would normally be my quotidian existence, this is probably the perfect book for me to read at the moment. It consists of short but incredibly rich and allusive reflections on everyday matters, something that results from a towering intellect such as Adorno taking a step back and looking at life in a critical yet almost Proust-like (who also gets a formal nod at the very beginning of the book), slightly nostalgic and deeply ironic way.
Here’s a small sample for you:
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, delibration, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?
Stroke of genius
Yesterday I finished The Loser – a story of devastating consequences of meeting with perfection by an Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I must say it was one of the most impressive books I’ve read recently. Bernhard has a very peculiar style of writing that some readers find very much disturbing. For one thing the whole 180 page book is written as a single paragraph. But this is not all – translator’s note at the beginning of the book warns readers as follows:
Bernhard’s sentences are very long, even for a German reader accustomed to extended, complex sentence constructions. Further, the logical transitions between clauses (“but,”, “although”, “whereas”) are often missing or contradictory, and the verb tenses are rarely in agreement. Bernhard’s frequent and unpredictable underlining also defies conventional usage. Sometimes he italicizes the title of Bach’s compositions, sometimes he treats them like a common noun. On the other hand, he often gives the names of restaurants, towns, pianos, and people an emphasis that conventional German or English ortography exclude.
This all has a very peculiar effect and in a suprising way it all makes perfect sense. It is almost as if Bernhard deliberately writes badly – in that sense The Loser reminded me of a movie by Aki Kaurismäki titled Mies vailla menneisyyttä where the actors perform as if they were in front of the camera for the first time in their life. The effect of it, however, is that characters appear somehow very vulnerable and surprisingly… real – with their insecurities, anxiousness and distinctive lack of witty punchlines. And same goes for Bernhard’s Loser – it has a level of intensity and intimacy quite unlike anything else that I’ve read.
Bernhard has been compared, among others by George Steiner, to Kafka, Canetti and Musil as one of the most unique voices in 20th century German-language literature – or in European literature in general, for that matter. Bernhard had a very complicated relationship with Austria – being referred to as Nestbeschmutzer during his lifetime because of his less than flattering descriptions and critical views of his home country. However, this all was trumped by Bernhard’s very last text – his will – in which he prohibited the publication, performance or recital of any of his works within the borders of Austria for as long as the legal copyrights remain in force – a kind of a posthumous literary exile by one of the nation’s greatest writers.
A little shyness goes a long way
Salman Rushdie is a mean writer. He writes books like very few other people can, positively shining on every page. But I somehow feel that he would be a very poor rapper.
It came to my attention through the blog of Austin Kleon of the Newspaper Blackout Poems fame that Kanye West, a rapper, former college dropout and self-proclaimed proud non-reader of books, has… well, published a book, called “Kanye West presents Thank You And You’re Welcome”, sired in collaboration with a ghost-writer J. Sakiya Sandifer.
One should not judge a book by its cover so I braced myself to go and hunt it down somewhere in Palo Alto bookstores – a valiant attempt that was ultimately doomed to failure and caused some mildly embarrassing moments at Stanford bookstore when I was trying to explain a very helpful salesperson what exactly am I looking for.
Thus I have no alternative but to rely on the review above (and few more rather venomous reader opinions at amazon.com) – which is possibly no big loss as, apart from the covers, the teaspoon-deep book consists of 52 pages of “thoughts and theories” many of which are empty and even those that aren’t might as well be. Which is hardly surprising considering that the author – or should I say presenter – loathes books saying that “sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed”. Amen, brother.
I mean, it’s fine not to like books for them being so “wordy” and think that it is better to “get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life” – nothing wrong with that. But people who think that “being a non-reader is helpful when writing a book because it gave one a childlike purity” really should stick with rapping or whatever else they do and NOT write books for other people who actually like them being not only “wordy” but also not completely devoid of any meaning and content.
It is a situation in fact similar to a condition suffered unaware by certain new aspiring students of philosophy, who have somehow gotten an idea that philosophy is something best done on one’s own and preferably uncontaminated by the thoughts of people who have tried to deal with same issues in the past – as then the originality of the thinking would inevitably suffer. The result of such an endeavor more often than not carries a similar quality of “childlike purity” and while no doubt a source of much joy and self-realization for the person in question it causes a lot of embarrassment and torture to everyone else exposed to the eventual results.
Dedicating the book to his late mother, Kanye West is quoted saying “My mom taught me to believe in my flyness and conquer my shyness. She raised me to be the voice to allow people to think for themselves, to find their own way.” Thank God that Mrs. Rushdie didn’t press upon little Salman’s flyness to the extent that he would have concquered his shyness to become a rapper.
Enormously pleased
So I finished not one but two books today – Giorgio Agamben’s The State of Exception that I had been reading for a couple of days, and Luis Ferdando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans that I started only yesterday. Agamben was rather exceptionally good and thought-provoking, and surprisingly readable at that – a rare treat among the good books of philosophy and thus comes highly recommended.
Regarding Verissimo’s little book: if you happen to be a fan of either Borges or Poe – or especially if you happen to like both – then do yourself a favour and get it. The whole book is a homage to those two writers (JLB in particular) and their different short stories, with plenty of others such as Lewis Carroll, H. P. Lovecraft, and a 17th century occultist writer John Dee thrown in for a good measure, and further peppered with references to yet more characters, books and stories, both known and obscure. If you know all this stuff, it is great fun. Unfortunately this also means that if you don’t, you really need not to apply – I’m afraid that for someone who hasn’t read Borges, Poe or Carroll – or doesn’t like them – Verissimo’s short novel would probably be very silly and tedious.
I will have to be in LA by June 11th, so that leaves me almost two weeks that I have to make up my mind about. Main choices are 1) staying at Stanford, 2) going to Las Vegas for WSOP or 3) flying to Hawaii for a week – so I am open to suggestions!
Chatwin’s unbearably light touch
Now already more than ten years ago, when traveling in South-East Asia I noticed Unbearable Lightness of Being in the book-exchange shelf of a Bangkok hotel and traded it immediately for Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game that I had just finished (and been rather unimpressed with). I had long intended to read Kundera’s famous novel and got started with it with a great enthusiasm.
For some reason the book never worked for me. I found it irritating, pretentious and even banal, and was constantly cringing whenever another lengthy description of terrible conditions of living in a totalitarian state came up on its pages – not to mention that in retrospect I also think that Kundera misunderstood Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return, but that’s a whole different story. This is not to say that it’s a bad book the way Da Vinci Code is thoroughly and irredeemably bad, I just didn’t like it – quite the way I don’t like Coelho. I must say that this confession (i.e. not liking Unbearable Lightness of Being) has caused many raised eyebrows over the years – to the point that I have tended to start avoiding the topic altogether. For some reason, disliking this particular book seems to be something that has to be defended as one is almost expected to feel guilty for this, or at least have a pretty darn good explanation.
Anyway, I remembered all this because I just finished a book by Bruce Chatwin – Utz – that I enjoyed immensely. Chatwin wrote Utz in 1988, six years after Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness and just a year before his own untimely death, and just like Unbearable Lightness the novel takes place (mostly) in Prague. It is a story about Kaspar Joachim Utz, a man who keeps a fabulous collection of Meissen porcelain in his tiny two-room flat in central Prague. Although free to leave Czechoslovakia, Utz is unable to do so – being a prisoner of his own priceless collection that he can’t take with him.
A central theme in Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness – indeed, the point that the very title of the book refers to – is that as we only live once, our existence is “light”, leaving no trace in its uniqueness. Or, as Tomáš muses at the end of third chapter: “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”. But where the characters of Kundera’s novel collapse under the unbearable lightness of their own unique and ultimately meaningless existence, Kaspar Utz refuses to be weighed down by his inescapable predicament:
…the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn’t raise a murmur against the Party or State – yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads. With their silence they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist.
Porcelain, a pure aesthetic substance which is at the same time fragile and eternal, is for Utz an “antidote of decay”. And so Utz would rather be stuck in Prague with his collection than loose in the free world without it. In the words of Tyler Durden from Fight Club “it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”. And ultimately it is giving up our unlimited freedom to “do anything” that enables us to become the persons we want to be – as for a human being this is never possible to accomplish alone on our own.
Chatwin’s Utz is a short and deceptively simple book – similar in that sense to Baricco’s Silk. Reading it carefully, however, rewards with many layers of meaning and reference. Ultimately, like Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness, Utz is a book about our freedom and what we choose to do with it – but Chatwin manages this with a touch a lot lighter than Kundera.
