Image via Wikipedia

Memory is a fascinating subject, we all would like to improve ours, I certainly would.  Sometimes we remember things quite differently from what others who were there at the same time, remember.  Siblings may remember things you have no recollection of whatsoever.  There’s false memory syndrome, Capgras syndrome and the continuous study in trying to understand better how memory works.

Just now, as I started writing my review, the New Scientist publishes an article on remembering things that never happened.  Fascinating all this.  And false memories, loss of memory etc provide great plots for stories in which a protagonist has lost her memory because of an accident or a trauma.

Before I go to Sleep by S.J. Watson is about a woman, Christine, who wakes up every morning in a bed and environment she does not recognise, next to a man she does not recognise.  Every morning this man tells her he is her husband, Ben, and that she has lost her memory due to a near fatal car accident.   She goes through days only to lose her experience of that day whilst sleeping – her mind is wiped clean.

‘I stand up.  I move through the time from room to room.  Slowly. Drifting, like a wraith….’

Every morning a Dr Nash rings her and tells her she has a diary, a notebook, hidden in her wardrobe, in which she has started writing down her every day experience and so by rereading every morning what she experienced the day before, she is able to build up a slightly larger picture of herself, every day.  She does not trust the man she wakes up with, is not sure that he is Ben, but he says he is.  She finds out she has a son, only Ben tells her that her son is dead, killed in Afghanistan.

What are we without memory?  The other question is in how far can we trust our memories?  Dr Nash reminds Christine that everyone constantly changes facts, rewrites histories to make things easier, more bearable for ourselves.  We often invent memories.   This is of course completely confirmed by science as born out in the New Scientist article.  We rarely challenge our own memories.

Before I Go to Sleep is a thriller, it does not delve too deeply into the various symptoms and syndromes, unlike the Echo Maker by Richard Powers.  In the Echo Maker, a near fatal accident results in complete loss of memory and Powers really has done his homework, describing Capgras syndrome.  This, however, is also a psychological thriller about what happened that night when Mark Schluter, the main character, had the accident.

In both books, memory loss puts the characters in vulnerable positions, they can be manipulated and their loss of memory results in a dependency that is not wanted.   Other people who claim to love the person, misuse this dependency.

I enjoyed reading Before I Go to Sleep and it made me think about my own memories and the ones I have lost.  Can I really trust them?  Can I trust what I think I know about other people?  Who would ever dare write autobiographical stories after reading books like this!

Related articles

• Richard Powers and Generosity (51stories.wordpress.com)

More importantly, Moran presents a feminism here that is true and in a hilarious way tells you what it is about: it’s about you as a girl, woman, taking your own life in your own hand, deciding what you want and don’t want, how a girl should not feel pressurised (in having that Brazilian, or wearing those killer high heels that no sane person can walk on for longer than five minutes,  on chosing the clothes that best fit and suit your body, rather than buying clothes and then feeling depressed because your body is somehow or other  wrong  for the clothes which were never intended for real bodies anyway, etc.) .  Presented on the page by Moran, it all seems to straightforward, so matter of fact because we’ve all had these thoughts and we’ve all gone through the agonies or are still going through them. This is a book that should be given to every teenager, niece, cousin, daughter, granddaughter because I’m sure it is the only one that brings up all those things that every girl needs to be armoured against in order to cope with the pressures and expectations.   This is an account of Moran’s  own experience of life between the age of 13 and about 30 and takes in a range of female / feminist issues and how she came to grips with them.  As far as I’m concerned she presents the convincing argument as to why every female should be a feminist and every man as  well.    I enjoyed this book.

The Rhapsody of Restraint by Roy Baldwin is one of the books I am currently reading  on my Kindle.  It is a book that also takes in  a lot of sex but in a different way: it’s a genre fiction book about a female nuclear scientist and in the words of a  reviewer on the Amazon website is a ‘mash up of chick lit and nuclear physics’.  And so it is, the woman Lauren Hind is certainly in charge most of the time, and has all the physical and wealth attributes  and mental capabilities that most of us could only dream of.  However,  as long as she is in charge, has fun and is enjoying all the sex, clothes and male attention,  there is no reason why she is not,  in terms of Moran’s definition, a feminist.

I am reading this book because of my curiosity into the new phenomenon of small Indie publishers, who increasingly bring out first authors  (their own books and others’) in e-reading format, bypassing all established publishers and often foregoing printed format altogether.  Not this one though: it is available on the Kindle and in paperback format.

Saturday’s Guardian has an article on the new e-publishing phenomenon.  With so many new Kindles having been sold over Christmas, this is the time that authors go for the self-publishing route and some are able to make it a lucrative enterprise.

The Rhapsody of Restraint comes as part of  this new phenomenon and I was intrigued by the book also because it tries to do something quite different: a female protagonist who seems to have it all, and a mixture of clever and understandable nuclear physics which is very well researched and believable, various locations around the world, with or without nuclear facilities, taking in London, Sicily and lots of good food and wine (as well as retail therapy) all of which puts it right in the middle  of today’s world , and with enough romantic suspense to want you to read to the end of the book to find out who or what.  It could be classified as a ‘lablit‘ book, but my preference goes for the ‘nuclear physics meets high performing female brain cell’ or something like that…..

The Kindle version is well-edited and pleasant to read, something which is definitely not the case with a lot of the self-publishing books I have come across.   I think it’s a good first book by a new author on the block, one that would not have seen the daylight (as so many others) without this new publishing opportunity.

I gave myself a subscription to the London Review of Books, as an additional Christmas present, partly because I could not resist the offer of the very nice calendar that came with it.   That was, however,  just an added incentive.  As a literary  review magazine it tops everything else here in England I think, and to do it justice you have to give some dedicated time to the various excellent (and extensive) reviews.  The first issue I received (5th January) has an in-depth review by Stephen Holmes of the Luke Harding book on The Mafia State, convincing me that I must somehow or other find the time to read it in order to understand more about Putin‘s present day Russia; there is also  an enjoyable and persuasive analysis of P.D. James‘s take on Jane Austin’s Pemberley characters in ‘Death comes to Pemberley’; these two essays are for starters only.  All in all  the magazine has plenty to offer for a couple of hours on this Saturday afternoon,  and has given me the perfect excuse not to write the reviews I had promised myself I would do this afternoon.

I shall get on with that soon, I promise.  It’s just that I feel rather jaded after a long Friday ‘out’ with over 250 work colleagues, which  included a very early start and a long drive, a morning of company presentations, followed by an afternoon of group activities such as charades, ice-skating, sleighing, quizzes and other such wonderful pastimes, and then came a run for showers and changes of clothing in order to get ready for a dinner, concluded by a restless night’s sleep  in a hotel room and a two and a half hour’s drive back home early this morning.   Perhaps it’s not surprising that I looked for an excuse for not doing any demanding mental exercise and chose the path of least resistance;  and I will admit that whilst reading the London Review I fell asleep for an hour  or so.

No, that’s not me!

Cover of Generosity: An Enhancement

In his previous book, The Echo Makers (which I reviewed in 2010), Richard Powers writes a story that revolves around memory and brain disorder: Mark, the protagonist loses his memory in an accident and subsequently imagines that his sister is an impostor.   Powers nows his stuff: a lot of research has clearly gone into theories of memory loss and brain disorders, the relationship between Capgras Syndrome and  cognition, and the story evolves into a gripping psychological thriller about what really happened during the accident.

Generosity is similarly intricate and demanding. The beginning of the book is somewhat pretentious, as if an elaborate film set is being prepared, however, it becomes clear that we’re still on earth, in fact in an American town that turns out to be Chicago and we are being introduced to Russell Stone, a failed writer now lecturing in ‘creative non-fiction’ writing and to the group of students he is tutoring.  The group includes an immigrant girl in her early twenties, from Algeria, Thassa Amzwar.  The students give each other nicknames and Thassa’s  is ‘Generosity’ because of her unbelievably positive attitude to life and people in general.  This despite having lost her parents in a dreadful way and having been through a lot of misfortune in war-torn Algeria.  She is exuberantly happy nevertheless, and all the time.

As with his previous books, Powers has clearly undertaken a lot of research, which involves biochemical theories / genomes and processes.  He is extremely knowledgeable about gene therapy, the genome project etc.   In Generosity Kurton is a genomics biochemist, business entrepreneur, who is preoccupied with the ‘happiness gene’ , Schiff is the tv programme producer, who asks Kurton at one point ‘You’re going to make us all happy is that the plan?’.  Kurton, however, feels mocked by this, and retorts: ‘A little more capable of being well in this world.  But not if you don’t want it, of course.’

The science of the gene is woven through the evolving relationships between Russell and  the University Psychologist Candace he falls in love with, between Russell and Thassa whom he wants to protect from the publicity jamboree that develops after the story about a woman with a happiness gene has been published, between Thassa and Candace and Candace’s need to protect her own professionalism, between Kurton and Schiff and later between Thassa and Schiff.  We never learn very much about Thassa as such, apart from her extremely happiness and at the same time that she is quite down to earth in her acceptance of this remarkable trait.  All she wants to become is a film producer, the one who holds the cameras and follows others around to record their movements and expressions.

Potentially this could be classified as a lab-lit book, with biochemical/genome theories underpinning the direction of the story, what is and what is not scientific and how friendship, love and happiness cannot be dissociated from cold theories about genetics, although ‘journalists can barely disguise their excitement at the discovery of the ‘happiness gene’.  Science has found a chief genetic contribution to bliss.’

There are some lovely insights and thoughts and the story is absorbing.  However, at times the book seems over-pretentious, as it is also trying to provide a commentary on its own fiction, through the author’s interference by providing self-conscious analysis of the story lines, on what will happen next.  Halfway through the book, for example, Stone reflects back onto chapter one, when he predicted her [Thassa's] ultimate capture by science before the book’s end.   Sometimes we get the fiction writing theories through the textbook used by Stone for his non-fiction writing class: ‘Place, Harmon says, is as much a protagonist as any character.  But place is in danger, Harmon claims.  Our sense of here is rapidly disappearing in the globalizing, virtual onslaught.’  And then, reflecting on his own inability to finish his fiction book ‘He does not tell her the real problem: fiction is obsolete.  Engineering has lapped it.’

So, as well as constantly reminding us that this is fiction, and that the characters could all just end up in quite different (fictional) places, there is also a kind of inevitability because of the scientific processes underlying character and individuality: in the way we are to an unknown extent genetically determined to be one way or another.

This is definitely a book worth reading, and in my view needs to be reread to be able to argue with all the theories and observations that Powers plays around with.  He definitely does not shrink away from very ambitious large-scale stories that involve complicated science and psychological theories.

End of 2011

Sandra’s made some great pictures of our pre and post New Year ramblings: above is a view of the Priory in Castle Acre, full of midwinter gloom -  it’s always a treat to walk around the crumbling buildings, whether summer or winter.

Back home there’s plenty to read and watch and listen to in 2012.  Before that there is the need for some  brisk walks and plenty of fresh air with plenty of opportunity to enjoy granddaughter’s company:

New Year’s Day is always good for a stroll along the beach.  This time we went to Cromer looking for shells and those very special stones that centuries of water and wind have transformed into creatures with gnomelike features, ready to pounce or perhaps they will simply be washed away again by the next tide to come and haunt us once more next year:

Tomorrow we will wave goodbye to granddaughter and her parents still marvelling at the ease with which she switches from German to English and back again, her enthusiasm for the English idiosyncrasies and love of books and all forms of storytelling, reading and watching, storing the information and then reminding us faultlessly of things we had forgotten or not paid attention to.  We will miss her.

Back to the routine – here we come 2012.  According to today’s newspaper in a commentary  on some piece of scientific research,

Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

optimism is ingrained in the human psyche.  So let’s just stick to that and not fret too much.  Cheers.

Image by henry… via Flickr

So this is the end of 2011. TV programmes , newspapers and magazines  show us all the highlights: of arts, of politics, of books, of science and of ups and downs in general of countries across the world.   With a house full of people and lots of good cheer it’s difficult to find the space and time to give a quick round up of my own reading year, so I’ll give it a miss.  I’m sure you don’t mind!

Nevertheless, here’s a very quick round up of my most recent reading if only so that I can wipe my hands clean off some of the books that seem to linger on, either on my Kindle or on bookshelves, waiting to be reviewed.  It is as if I am not able start afresh until I have dealt with them:  I’ve had a number of books on the go recently, and I’ve now got to own up to the fact that I will simply not finish some of these.

There’s Umberto Eco’s ‘The Prague Cemetry’.  What is it with these highly praised literary writers who write the kind of books that I used to enjoy so much.  At least I think I did!  And now, this one, just seems to go on and on: the writing is beautiful, some of the words used are simply out of this world and you wish you had them at your fingertips for the rest of your life; the story starts of in an intriguing way (‘hey, this is different, this has promise’) and then half way through you get this uneasy feeling that this is not going anywhere, the characters are beginning to feel forced, others get completely lost, you become confused between the narrator, the ‘voice’ of the main character and then there is an alter ego, who may not actually be an alter ego but a figment of the imagination, or someone who was in fact murdered by the main character.  For a bit, you think it’s you, you’re just not up to it anymore, not up to reading truly philosophical and literary books full of ideas.  Then you begin to suspect that perhaps it’s not you, rather, this writer should have had an editor who should have been much, much stricter and who should have told him /her to just cut it out and to stop indulging.    This sums up my thoughts about Eco’s latest novel.  The book starts very promising, as I said, with a man sitting at a table in front of a window: he’s elderly, wrapped in a dressing gown but pretty soon the narrator intervenes, claiming that he his not sure himself who this mysterious figure is and promises that together with the Reader (capital R) ‘we will find out’.  How?  Well, by reading the diary that this mysterious person is writing in.   Intriguing, yes, and so you think this could be good.  Only half way through the book we have become aware that the diary writer, a Captain Simonini is not one but two people, or perhaps he is not and it is all in his imagination, but there is also this alter ego the Abbe Dalla Picoola who enlightens some of the darker episodes that Simonini claims to have forgotten.

Conspiracy theories abound, in particular about real events in history, and early on there is quite a breathtaking rant about jews ‘the most godless people’ who are adulterous; there are the germans who live in perpetual state of intestinal embarrassment due to an excess of beer and those pork sausages on which they gorge themselves’; there are the French who are mean, ‘a national vice which they take to be a virtue and call thrift’.  Italians are untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitors.  Simonini got to know priests at this grandfather’s house and he has a vague memory of their ‘shifty looks, decaying teeth, bad breath and sweaty hands trying to caress the back of my neck….’. etc.

The first part is actually very amusing and well written, and then….  Then the book seems to get lost somehow in its own fantasies and as I mentioned before, indulgence.   Simonini is one of the most unsympathetic, awful characters ever invented, and it is a shame that some of the other characters that come and go seem to do just that, come and go and it becomes quite difficult to keep track of who is who.

I don’t think I will actually finish this book, as I have now lost it and I don’t think I can bear trying to work out  what this great conspiracy of the jews in the Prague cemetery was all about and who invented what and why and who killed who and why and who in the end was the winner and who the loser.  Great first quarter of the book, and then it’s downhill.

I do wonder whether this is simply because editors no longer are being given the time or the opportunity to interfere or whether there simply are no longer enough good editors around: this books should have been cut by at least a quarter, if not half.  The story is good, I’m sure, but far too long-winded.

So, that one is out of the way.

Another book I have read, and felt slightly disappointed with was Camilla Lackberg’s The Stonecutter.  But that may be due to the fact that I am now realising that a number of these nordic thrillers are written to a formula and I am now slightly bored with the formula.   It was ok, but not anything to write about.  People are so very ordinary, nevertheless, these amazing killings take place and cause such mayhem in tiny isolated communities and villages.

Then there are some that I will definitely take with me into 2012:

Christopher Hitchens  ‘Arguably’ is one of these.  I am very much enjoying his essays and will come back to them.  I’m also reading Richard Powers’ Generosity which is another quite ambitious novel that somehow does not quite cut it, nevertheless I will persevere and read it to the end, if only because it is trying to do something that is interesting, even if too self conscious to actually succeed.  At least that’s what I think.  I enjoyed his previous book The Echo Maker.

So then, this was 2011 – many happy reading hours to each and every one of you in 2012!

Related articles

• The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco – review (guardian.co.uk)

All that will change from tomorrow – no more time for laziness and sleeping in the day time.  After dinner tonight I will get in the car drive to the airport to pick up family, including granddaughter.  Her bed is made, presents are still waiting under the Christmas tree and we will have a lovely belated christmas breakfast with all the things little girls fancy and that were on the list provided during a very lengthy telephone call in which she said she missed ‘the magic of an English Christmas’ :  so there will be croissants, pain au chocolat, berries, apple juice and lots of fun when we open our presents in our pyjamas.

Of course, there are lots of books in that pile under the tree so even if I cannot settle down to adult reading there will be plenty of stories to read to a little girl.

Wishing you all a happy in-between-Christmas-and-TheNewYear!

Image by swarna rajan - 50K views - thank you all!!! via Flickr

I have a well-thumbed version of his ‘God is Not Great’ on my bookshelf.

Numerous obituaries and reviews have of course already been published; today there is Henry Porter in the Observer,  the NYT published one yesterday, but had to add a correction as the original had inadvertently claimed that he might have considered a dead bed conversion!  Unlikely of course and very much against the grain of the man.    I very much liked Ian McEwan’s piece for the Guardian on Friday  night though; that same night  McEwan gave an extended interview on the Channel 4 News.

And today’s announcement of the death of Vaclav Havel is marks another sad passing.

These were men I have always greatly admired.

Related articles

• Ian McEwan on Hitchens’s last days (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• Christopher Hitchens Leaves the Party (mraybould.wordpress.com)
• Former Czech President and Anti-Communist Icon Vaclav Havel Dies at 75 (foxnews.com)

Cover via Amazon

Being in the middle of this Euro crisis and the negotiations, and as a Dutch woman living in England with close family in other European countries, I cannot help but feel  very involved in what is happening with Cameron (England’s PM) giving  his ‘veto’ against the treaty last Friday and so in fact disengaging Britain from Europe.  I am a European, always will be, and was appalled at the stance taken by C and in particular, in the first instance, also by Nick Clegg  (his coalition partner) although the latter now seems to have realised that his party (the Lib Dem) is not actually backing Cameron in his poor judgement.

Like so many others though I did not really understand how we have arrived in this economic mess, whether in Europe, Britain or the rest of the world.  I had not understood  what exactly happened that precipitated the economic meltdown, yes, something about housing and high levels of debt, but I was not sure about the mechanisms or the real cause.  Having read Whoops by John Lanchester I must say I feel a lot better informed and actually followed the explanations and yes, I think I understand what the hell the bankers did do with the money, even though they themselves apparently did not quite understand the formulae they were using in order to arrive at the decision that it was ‘safe’ to lend and to lend and to lend more.  As long as you kept passing it onto other banks and non-financial institutions in complicated packages so that at the end of the trail no one actually knew any longer who owed the money or had the asset in the first place.  Something like that.  I loved this book as it gave me the sense that at long last I began to understand what had happened and so could actually form a view on the politics around banks, the City and bankers.

But what now?   As  Lanchester writes (in 2010), you look back and you wonder about the journey that has been made over the previous ten years and you wonder what to make of it.   You realise that:

‘Looking back, it turns out that we’ve just lived through an economic golden age, one based on debt and on an unsustainable credit bubble and underpinned by a financial system which was, it turned out, taking crazily miscalculated risks – but we didn’t know that at the time.  In fact, most of us had no idea it was a golden age, we didn’t know that we were living through what for many of us will turn out to be the best economic times of our lives.  I wish someone had told us….’

That’s exactly how I feel – suddenly it all seems to have come to a halt, what is there in the future for children and grandchildren to look forward to?  Could we have prevented this from happening?  Lanchester writes that to blame some thirty or forty people in the banking system or the City or in Government for being responsible for the financial ‘shenanigans’ may be true, but misses out something very important which is that so many of us were caught up in the good times ‘when they were rolling’.   And then there is the question we need to ask ourselves which is about how we allowed governments to do it – Lanchester points out that Britain has half of the total European credit card debt…..

His warning relates to the way we have accepted an economic metaphor that came to be applied to all aspects of modern life, especially where it didn’t below: for example in education, health etc the first conversation should be about values and principles and only then about costs and what you can afford as a society.  What has happened in Britain is that the idea of value has gradually faded to be replaced by that of price.

I think that there is the real indictment: the loss of value and the commodification of all aspects of our lives.  How do you turn that around?  Especially at a time when you have to pay the bill for everything that has been mismanaged?

On my Kindle I have another book that is about the economic crisis and that promises to be another readable account in terms of ‘a crash course in the Future of Finance’.  This is Crisis Economics by Nouriel Roubini.  The book’s aim is to bring crises back to the front and the centre of economic inquiry.   It also shows that crises are the norm, not the exception, in emerging as well as in advanced industrial economies.  Crises in the form of unsustainable booms followed by calamitous busts have always been around and that the most recent one is just one of many through the ages.  Usually they go hand in hand with creation of ‘newfangled instruments and institutions for whatever is the focus of a speculative fever’.   So in that respect there is a certain optimism that even if the near future does not look very rosy, perhaps in the longer term things will pick up again.

There is the example of the ‘tulip mania’ in The Netherlands in the 17^th century, when speculators apparently bid up the price of rare tulips to stratospheric levels.  Later there was the South Sea Company speculation in Britain.  And a number of examples are provided, including of course the crash in the 1930s.

The book quotes Aldous Huxley  who once commented that ‘the charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consists in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.’  The difference between these various crises then was not in the magnitude of the greed but rather in the new structures and incentives and compensations that channelled that greed into ever higher and dangerous directions.

Sometimes non-fiction seems better than fiction, or maybe just more amazing!

Below is a link to a Guardian article that suggests as much.

Related articles

• No time for novels – should we ditch fiction in times of crisis? (guardian.co.uk)