Culture

Prospect reads

February 08, 2008
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Thomas Cameron
Throughout his fiction, José Saramago cultivates an entertaining and witty blend of logic and absurdity, and his work is characterised by an obsessive search for the right words and names even as he is amused by their arbitrariness. Death at Intervals, his latest novel to be published in English, begins with the news that death is on sabbatical. A simple opening statement ("The following day, no one died") gives rise to a dazzling satirical display, as Saramago considers the consequences of death’s disappearance for undertakers, carpenters, journalists, retirement homes, insurance companies, various branches of philosophy and the church, government and opposition, “maphia,” militia and monarchy.

In his depiction of the machinery of bureaucracy, Saramago is heir to the great Czech novelists Kafka and Hašek. Despite spending the first half of his life under Portuguese dictatorship, he has stated in interviews his belief that ours is a particularly “dark age… when totalitarianism no longer even needs an ideology.” His fondness for lists apparent in this book is highly appropriate in a fictional world peopled predominantly with rules, regulations, acronyms (cacor—the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome—is a favourite), files and waiting lists, where the precision of job titles (“in her role as secretary, and a confidential secretary to boot”) is of the utmost importance. This is a compelling work by a fine writer. The unique Saramagan style—full stops, new paragraphs and capitals rarities, quotation marks eschewed—gives the impression of a thought experiment to which the writer is merely a catalyst. That impression is a carefully crafted one: true art conceals its art, wrote Ovid.
Tom Chatfield
I've just finished JG Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life, and think it's one of the finest things I've read in the last year. More than almost any other living British author, Ballard seems to me to have an unflinching honesty at the heart of his writing—an acknowledgment, which is as much intuitive and emotional as it is intellectual, that almost everything we take for granted and treat as permanent is in fact a kind of illusion: a stage-set of conventions and customs that can be swept away at any moment, just as suddenly and brutally as a human life can be ended. I value his short stories as a literary touchstone more than those of almost any author, and I'm certain I will be turning to this autobiography again to savour its lucid praise of those things that really matter—family, honesty of expression and ambition, joy in life—as well as its dispraise of the dross that can clog our hopes—status anxiety, conformity, parochialism, arrogance. The personal freedom Ballard found for himself within British suburbia is a model of writerly possibility, while the intellectual and moral iconoclasm of his oeuvre is a decisive riposte to the literalism that so many who have experienced "tragedy" and "trauma"—as he did both in Shanghai and through the sudden death of his wife—confuse with imaginative force. I look forward to reading John Gray's review in our forthcoming issue.
John Kelly
I've been reading The Trader, the Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery, by James Walvin, a surprisingly light read for such a deeply depressing subject. The Atlantic slave trade, which England fostered, dominated and ultimately abolished, was an enduring iniquity which displaced more than 15m Africans, killing more than a third in the process of transportation alone. The trader of the title is John Newton, an 18th-century sailor who fell from grace with the sea, became a slaver, sunk to the depths of depravity and despair, but amazingly found God and became a nonconformist preacher. So amazing, in fact, that he wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace." The world's most ubiquitous uplifting dirge, so beloved of gospel choirs and unofficial US national anthem, was penned in Olney, Buckinghamshire by a bona fide saved wretch.

The owner is Thomas Thistlewood, sugar plantation overseer whose diary of unrelenting everyday brutality and immorality was a powerful weapon in the abolitionist armoury. The slave is Olaudah Equiano, whose book The Interesting Narrative, published in 1749, is exactly that. Like the Irish potato famine or the genocide of the Australian Aborigines, we don't exactly rush to teach England's starring role in the history of slavery to our children, apart from edited highlights of the good bits, such as William Wilberforce, recently subject of a truly teeth-grinding film, inevitably entitled "Amazing Grace" - who has recently suffered a revisionist backlash, having been outed as a smackhead. Albert Finney plays John Newton. While I don't advocate hand-wringing apologies for the sins of our ancestors, this book gives a window onto a history which we cannot afford to elide. I'm not sure that films like Amazing Grace with the vaseline-on-the lens POV don't inadvertently do the reverse. Subsequent events, up to and including our present times, show that the cant, greed and hypocrisy which sanctioned slavery are not exclusive to the 18th century. A recommended improving read on the holiday flight to Montego Bay or the big shop for all those must-have Chinese throwaway bargains.
Susha Lee-Shothaman
This year, I've decided to read all the short stories in the New Yorker, by subscribing (free) to their "Fiction & Poetry" RSS feed. The standout story so far, out of the six they've published in 2008, is EL Doctorow's "Wakefield," about a man who accidentally leaves his wife. TC Boyle's "Ash Monday" was a close runner-up. Boyle skilfully switches between different characters—a semi-delinquent Californian teenager and his Japanese neighbours—while progressing his story to its inevitable but unexpectedly achieved end. Longtime New Yorker favourites John Updike and Alice Munro have both featured; their contributions are typical of them. Of the other two, I enjoyed Louise Erdrich's story about as much as I could, considering it's on my least-favourite fictional topic (a young woman's mental breakdown), and I continue to miss what other people like about Tessa Hadley.
Tom Nuttall
Economics is sexy again, and how: just this morning we received at Prospect HQ a manuscript of the forthcoming The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything (a title one of my colleagues assumed to be satirical) by Robert Frank. It's this kind of thing that led Noam Scheiber, writing last year in the New Republic, to deride the rise of what he called "cute-o-nomics" (PDF here; for some reason the piece doesn't seem to be in the TNR archive)—popular economics books that attempt to use basic concepts like incentives and supply & demand to explain phenomena usually considered outside the purview of the dismal science.

I've been reading Tim Harford's new book The Logic of Life. Harford is certainly one of the leading lights in the cute-o-nomics movement—for instance, he adopts the persona of an agony uncle to answer readers' letters in the the Financial Times's weekly "Dear Economist" column. But what I find interesting about the new book is how old-fashioned the economics is. Harford wants to convince us that the old economic idea that our behaviour shows us to be more or less rational utility-maximisers is more or less true; that instances of what may look like irrational behaviour—like Mexican prostitutes not insisting that their clients use condoms—on deeper inspection turn out to make a lot of sense, whether or not we are aware of it. It's curious that at a time when some of the axioms of classical economics are coming under attack from new discoveries, particularly in behavioural economics, that much of the new work aimed at popularising economics sticks resolutely to the old ideas.
William Skidelsky
I very much enjoyed David Runciman's piece about home advantage in the latest issue of the Observer Sport Monthly. Why is it that in virtually every sport, teams playing at home do consistently better than teams playing away? The traditional explanation—which Runciman claims is a myth—is that the passionate support of fans buoys up home teams. There is, Runciman says, "no evidence that home advantage is much affected, if at all, by the size, intensity or commitment of the fans."

The essay is very wide-ranging, and takes in lots of other theories and arguments which I haven't got space to go into here, but one thing it draws out well is that home advantage differs markedly across sports. The sport in which it is strongest is basketball, followed by soccer, with the impact less discernible in American football, ice hockey and baseball. Runciman has some interesting explanations for this, including the suggestion that the impact of home advantage is significantly negated in sports with lax drug testing regimes.