On the Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle

        A few months back, I read On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, which is the first in a series of books about Tara Selter, a woman trapped reliving November 18th over and over again. As she navigates this inexplicable phenomenon, there are a few patterns that emerge. When Tara wakes up in the next November 18th, everyone else resets to where they were. The same person drops their knife at breakfast, the train passes at the exact moment, and so on. Tara, though, is able to move around and wake up and operate differently.  On some occasions, she lets people in on her secret and they enjoy a largely unquestioned day together. Tara’s consumption habits have a lingering effect. For instance, if she orders the same meal at a restaurant every day, they eventually run out and it stops appearing on the menu. Also, her possessions generally follow her, though a little less consistently, if she keeps them with her when she goes to bed.

This volume was somewhat less engaging to me, since it was retreading similar ground. The mysteries and rules around this forced time non-travel are the elements of the book that are most compelling to me. For most of the book, there is not much advancement in the central conceit of the book. Instead, it revolves around three core elements:

1) Tara returns to her parents’ home for “Christmas.” Of course, it’s November 18th. But, she explains to her parents that she is reliving the same day and they accept it with relatively little fuss. She also has her sister visit with her and she gives them all gifts and they celebrate a Christmas meal together.

2) Tara chases seasons through Europe. She finds parts of Europe that are close to winter, spring, and summer in their weather, hops on the train, and travels around getting a taste for the change she has lost.

3) Tara’s bag gets stolen while she’s on a train and          some of her possessions.

The issue with the book is that it seems to present new questions but does not fully explore them. For example, the question emerges of whether Tara can bring someone with her. In the first volume, her husband refuses to spontaneously travel with her and he ‘resets.’ In this volume, her sister is inquisitive about how time non-travel works and seems willing to ‘go with her’ if it’s feasible. She considers the ethics of bringing someone ‘out of time’ with her. I would love to see that idea, for example, develop further.

The moment comes up where her bag is stolen. It seems to be a moment of harrowing drama: her entire life is in that bag and it’s already a challenging hanging onto it under her pillow every night. The question of what might happen to the bag—and to Tara with its disappearance is a compelling one to explore, but Balle glosses over it a little quickly. At the time Tara is writing about the stolen bag, she has already recovered it, which sucks away some of the intensity.

I won’t spoil the ending of the book, but that’s when things really pick up. In the last five or so pages, we’re provided a cliffhanger that presents a new critical question: is anyone else experiencing the same phenomenon?

One of the throughlines from the start of the first book is an ancient Roman coin that Tara has obtained and carries around. Towards the end of the second volume, Balle provides a beautiful outline of the significance of the coin. Tara researches it, of course, but there’s one moment in particular that solidifies the symbolism of the coin. She reflects as follows:

Maybe it was simple: I was caught in time and there was the sestertius. Once it had been just metal, it had been molten, fluid, formless and then it had stopped at the moment that it was stamped with the images of Antoninus Pius and Annona, a modius, ears of corn and all. Stop. Fixed. Chink. Out onto the pile of newly minted coins. A frozen moment. (160)

I really appreciate the parallel of time being fluid like a molten liquid and then it becoming fixed into a static image. It’s as though Tara, as though Tara’s day, is fully shaped. I like that it creates this unfortunate situation where in order for something to be shaped it needs to lose its capacity for change. I think the future volumes of the book are going to explore this duality more fully.

While I felt this book was a little slower than the first and more repetitive, let’s be real: I’ll probably read the next five volumes, too, just to see if there are answers and to see if Tara returns to normal or bleeds into something even more strange. I’m not convinced there will be any clear answers, but I’ll keep you posted.

        Happy reading!

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

        Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, if you ask me, doesn’t have enough Proust or enough squid, but remains a reasonably insightful book about language and reading. With the surging interest in the science of reading, it’s a worthwhile text; Wolf discusses the brain science for language reception and how that translates into our capacity for reading.

The structure of the book is pretty interesting in that it starts with a largely historical perspective. Wolf discusses the first records of written language, the objections Socrates and Plato had to the written word, the ongoing development of the written word in different places in the world, and so on. One of the most interesting part of the book to me was the discussion of cultural and linguistic differences and how those impact what we are able to communicate. For instance, Wolf explores how writing systems impact development for different areas of the brain and offers some theories for how people might think differently using different language conventions.

Following the historical background, the book then delves into the brain science of language. Wolf discusses the different areas of the brain that go into reading, what happens when they are impaired, and the connection between brain development and reading disabilities. I have to admit, the scientific language was a little lost on me—especially listening with the audiobook rather than seeing the words visually. The balance skews scientific, which pushed my boundaries a bit more than a more classic arts-based defence of reading.

An area I was hoping to see more of is how science plays a role in our reception and interpretation for texts. For instance, I felt it could have been more thorough in explaining why certain texts resonate or how different writing conventions create particular effects in us—that is, coming back to Proust a little more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, my notes on the text are pretty limited and it’s been a few weeks since I’ve read it, so I have very little to say. It was a good primer on some science of reading content, but I think its lasting impact on me is limited—perhaps it spoke too much to my brain and not enough to my heart.

Nonetheless, any book that valorizes reading is OK in my books. Happy reading!

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

  Braiding Sweetgrass has made quite an impact in a number of fields, most notably environmentalism, Indigenous studies, and literature. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi botanist who recounts some personal stories that parallel ecological phenomena and Indigenous teachings. Each chapter deals with a foundational concept to her study of plants and connects to either a personal story, an environmental project, or an Indigenous teaching.

There’s an anecdote early on that I find endearing, relatable, and quietly subversive. Kimmerer recounts applying to a botany program and when she is questioned about it, she tells the instructor that she wants to know, essentially, how the plants know which colours work together. It’s an aesthetic or poetic concern, rather than a scientific one—at least insofar as the instructor is concerned. Kimmerer’s gentle challenge to the discourse, though, is that these are not separate conversations, but rather different angles to the same one. She then draws on Potawatomi (and other Indigenous) stories to explain the logic that binds the natural world together.

The book’s style is appreciatory, warm—celebratory. Admittedly, I listened to the audiobook for this one and the reading of the text has such a gentle cadence, appropriate to the style of the book. It’s inviting, of course, but I found that the text lacks bite. Edge. I suppose that says more about me as a consumer that I need conflict; I need tension in order for something to be worth my while—which is very much against what Kimmerer advocates for here. Something in me is broken where I can’t appreciate the simple beauty of the world for what it is.

As such, the highlight of Braiding Sweetgrass, in my mind, is when Kimmerer talks about w*ndig*s (my understanding is that their name should not be spoken, so I’ll refrain here). Kimmerer identifies the cannibalistic creatures as symbols of unrestrained capitalism. They are relentless, unable to be satiated. Kimmerer’s storytelling on the issue is finely wrought and it becomes even more complex when considering the context of past and present Indigenous people. She suggests that the spirit of the w*ndig*s corrupts Indigenous people and makes them ravenous for flesh; capitalism does the same. Kimmerer then problematizes the fact that rather than dismantling capitalism, people strive to integrate themselves within it—it’s actually a similar line of reasoning to a section of Living in the End Times by Slavoj Zizek where the left no longer seeks to dismantle capitalism, but rather become more active participants within it, essentially selling out rather than reshaping the world. The alignment of the w*ndig* with capital is persuasive and offers an engaging story for how we’ve let things get so far.

Another section of the book deals with salamanders and the war effort in Afghanistan. I have to say, this one feels less intuitively connected, making the book come across as a little more disordered. The idea of studying salamander crossing and car-induced fatalities is interesting on its own (for instance, they have a morbid formula for deciding how many salamanders have been crushed by measuring the squish radius). The chapter jumps back and forth to a discussion of young men in Afghanistan in tanks. The connection, though, is tenuous and feels more like an insertion of politics into an otherwise innocuous project.

It was interesting to hear about the specific projects of which Kimmerer has been a part. In addition to the salamander study, she recounts excursions with students to learn in the field (she had to argue the relevance, of course, given that her work falls outside the traditional purviews of science). She recounts the cleaning of Onondaga Lake and the disastrous impacts of mercury waste. The individual projects hold weight and are worth learning about, but the broader lessons are where the book shines.

For instance, it becomes clear from the book that maintaining the environment is not enough. More is required of us. Kimmerer expounds on the idea of gift giving. She explains cultural norms for giving and receiving gifts and the idea of reciprocity. The land is a gift, it gives us gifts, and we are responsible for showing gratitude for those gifts and giving back in return. There are some engaging philosophical meditations on what it would mean for nature to show gratitude, as well. She often refers to Indigenous stories to help support the science—for instance, she discusses the Three Sisters (beans, squash, and corn) and how they are mutually beneficial to one another. Kimmerer returns to the notions of respect and reciprocity frequently, making the key lessons of the text completely clear, but also bloating the book somewhat with repetition.

Many people have recommended this book to me and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. Unfortunately, the book as a whole does not really resonate with me to leave a lasting impression. It’s a matter of taste, I suppose—I was hoping for something more explicitly revolutionary, something visceral and bombasti. Instead, Braiding Sweetgrass is a calm, inviting work of philosophy. Its warmth may warm the spirit and inspire, but I don’t think it’s going to make people take to the streets and demand change.

That being said, I hope you receive the gift of nature and grant it your own respect and reciprocity. Happy reading!

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

        Is there any point in summarizing Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon? I feel like it has so much pop-culture cache that everyone knows the story. If not, here’s the idea: Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. Disowned by his family for almost twenty years, his teacher at his special school pushes for him to be part of an experimental surgery that improves his IQ. He works at a bakery and after the surgery he comes to realize that his coworkers are pretty awful towards him, he has memories of an abusive childhood, and then he becomes a genius that outpaces the doctors that conducted the experiment. He gets frustrated being under their care and frees himself and the mouse that was the precursor to his experience. He sets up an apartment in New York and continues his studies, has a dating life, and visits members of his estranged family before losing his intelligence and returning to his former life.

The novel has a central flaw that I’ll explain with reference to theory. In History and the Novel, Irving Howe presents the thesis that the foundation on which novels stand—history—erodes as we increase our distance from it. As such, our ability to access and interpret older novels similarly fades. I would make the case that Flowers for Algernon shows its flaws in the light of the modern day. The most glaring issue is that the core of the novel relies on the idea of IQ, a much-discredited measure of intelligence. The history of science imprints itself on the book, but takes it further away from us at a foundational level, beyond the teeth-grinding repetition of the R word. The premise is compelling, but the historically problematic nature of the book breaks the immersion somewhat.

What Keyes does well, in his way, is to present the story with moral conscience and emotional core. Charlie is treated with a great deal of sympathy, with a common refrain being that he is a human being and was even before his surgery. Keyes does a lot to show the torments Charlie Gordon goes through—more on this momentarily—and to expose the evil lurking in the supposedly moral hearts of the “smart” and “normal” people in his life. Everyone treats Charlie as a child and exploits him; his mother shows him no compassion for being different and no one extends any care of him. Keyes does a wonderful job at what is arguably the novel’s climax of juxtaposing Charlie’s treatment with his own mother, who by the end of the book has clearly developed Alzheimer’s—yet people refuse to put her away into a care facility. Keyes shows the limits of peoples’ sympathy and the different treatment of people who have “proven” themselves to the rest of society.

Keyes inserts a diatribe in the middle of the novel, noting that people would never “take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence” (139). It’s a surprisingly progressive stance for the 1960s to target ableism in this way, and I can’t fault Keyes for extending sympathy, even if it is misguided by modern standards. Charlie notes that even when he had low intelligence how he knew he was inferior: “Other people had something I lacked—something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too” (139). He notes that “even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men” (139). At his best, he shows the moral core that treats people well. At his worst, he succumbs to some of the same infantilization that the people in the book subject Charlie to; he draws the parallel to children directly: “A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger” (139). He then speculates on what could happen if all people could receive the same treatment: “If I could be made into a genius, what about the more than five million mentally ******* in the United States? What about the countless millions all over the world, and those yet unborn destined to be *******? What fantastic levels might be achieved by using this technique on normal people. On geniuses?” (139). We see Charlie replicating the same standardization and borderline-eugenicist philosophy that led to his treatment in the first place, not extending sympathy to people for how they are, but instead creating a plan to make others “normal” too.

Now, I can somewhat forgive this seeming flub in Keyes’ philosophy because the novel specifically makes a distinction between intelligence and compassion. After Charlie’s intelligence takes off, he becomes patronizing, unkind, unsympathetic, and so on. People regret that Charlie’s free and easy kindness and warmth disappears as his intelligence emerges. Eventually Charlie learns that lesson, too, and says that there is no direct connection between being smart and being a good person. Consequently, some of Charlie’s views might be discounted as part of his evolution towards having a heart again.

Weirdly, though, Keyes’ narrative seems to place a lot of blame on women. A number of them are vilified or have inappropriate relationships with Charlie. His mother is the worst, alternating between insistence that he is normal and abusing him for being what she perceives as a pervert. His sister is equally malicious. The traumatic and abusive things they do to him could have been plucked from A Child Called It. Meanwhile, his teacher Miss Kinnian is largely compassionate, but I can never accept relationships between teachers and students. There’s also some strange character development in her towards the end of the book that feels inconsistent—the love story doesn’t quite earn its payoff. The other woman Charlie gets involved with, Fay, is seen as a messy free spirit artist who is regularly nude and feels like she’s paraded around as an unintellectual piece of eye-candy for the male gaze. Sidenote: it’s weird that Charlie’s low intelligence is paired with a kind of hypersexualization that he then has to recover once he becomes smart. Even women at the science conference are presented mostly as incompetent and scared of a mouse. Given how much sympathy Keyes extends to people with intellectual disabilities, it’s odd that he does not seem to offer much sympathy to the inner lives of women.

There are some wonderful elements to the book. The way it reads as a kind of Frankenstein story, even referencing Paradise Lost as a shared intertext, is a great way of exploring the premise. It deals with similar questions of responsibility towards one’s creation. Flowers for Algernon adds a spin, though, that the creation does not accept the creator’s role. To explain a little further, in Frankenstein, the creature accepts Frankenstein as his creator and wants to place demands on him. In this case, Charlie refuses to accept that the doctors ‘created’ him—he insists that he was a full person before they ever intervened, which is a great subversion of the trope.

It’s also a nice touch to see the evolving style Charlie uses to express his ideas. The book starts with a number of chapters with poor vocabulary, incorrect spelling, lack of punctuation, and so on. These emulate his inability to express himself properly and then as he learns and grows more intelligent, the style becomes sophisticated. It’s a little hackneyed but still an appropriate choice that helps to emulate the experience.

I do think, too, that the cruelty of the characters is emotional and heart wrenching. It’s most painful that Charlie doesn’t understand. His narration of his coworkers’ behaviours is clear to anyone that they are ridiculing him, but he feels like he is part of the team. It’s also hard to listen to his mother’s tirades against him and his sister’s abuses. When he goes to visit his father and his father doesn’t recognize him, it’s a sad scene and when he goes to visit his mother it’s even worse—she doesn’t recognize him at first, then does, and is so proud of his intelligence and finally accepts him—yet that hits hard. For one, we know that he is going to lose his intelligence and that these benefits are temporary. His need for acceptance is never quite fulfilled, since he has realized that he deserves acceptance and compassion regardless of contingencies. Then, because her own understanding is so fleeting, and her desperation for a normal son that she can show off so great, it’s a painful moment that brings not catharsis but shadowed saccharinity. Like his relationship with Miss Kinnian, his reconciliation with his sister feels a little unearned.

Flowers for Algernon began as a short story that was then expanded into a novel. I have to say, the book likely could have been about 50 pages shorter. There’s some extensive repetition in the middle of the book—flashbacks to a younger Charlie looking through windows (symbolism that is a little on the nose, if you ask me). I feel like a lot of the romance storylines could be cut down or omitted to focus on the central concerns of the book—not that emotional connection isn’t one of the central concerns, but it’s one that does not land as well.

As I mentioned at the start, Flowers for Algernon is a product of its time. Its didactic message is necessary, albeit marred by some historically-rooted flaws. It’s funny: I imagine that the book will have a similar parabolic structure as Charlie. Charlie begins from nothing, has a meteoric rise, and then faces an inevitable decline. Flowers for Algernon, I imagine, will follow a similar path—it began from nothing, became an icon in popular culture, but will face a swift decline as we become more knowledgeable about the science of intelligence and become more progressive in our treatment of people alienated from society.

For now, it’s a nice little book. Happy reading!

The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein

    The length of this review will be proportionate to my understanding: that is, minimal.

    The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein delineates his theories and provides the mathematical proofs for how things exist throughout space and time.

    When Einstein is explaining the broad strokes of the implications of relativity, I can somewhat follow, but within a few pages his maths becomes germane to me. Mathematics becomes a language with which I am unfamiliar; symbols I’ve never seen before populate the pages. Thank goodness for Einstein’s occasional Englishly-written comment to illuminate the premises of his theory. There are sometimes, for example, succinct phrases that highlight the premises and consequences of his work: “the theory of relativity does not make the assumption that the shape of bodies with respect to a space of reference is independent of their motion relatively to this space of reference” (35). Fair enough.

    The central premise that I take away from the book as a whole is that time is defined relatively to other measurable objects, and that the selection of time markers is arbitrarily defined. Our units of measure can shift. The line between mathematical and philosophical boundaries quickly diminishes.

  

    Actually, the parallel to philosophy is probably what I’m most qualified to talk about. Needless to say, I’ve never read a book like this before—where the author is proving an argument using mathematical formulas. I can’t help but notice a similarity, though, with the progression of arguments in logical philosophy. Premise A and Premise B lead to Conclusion A. That conclusion then allows for another premise to emerge, leading to another conclusion. Einstein’s argument progresses in much the same way as logical philosophers and so the book reads like an extended, multi-layered syllogism, offering over a hundred equations to help justify his theory. I find it encouraging that science and arts-based argumentation can find such common ground in the pursuit of truth.

    Unfortunately, I am not nearly well-versed enough in science or math to confirm the validity of The Meaning of Relativity. That said, I’ll stand on the shoulders of giants Isaac Newton-style and recognize that Einstein’s legacy seems pretty solidly established. 

    Despite not understanding much, I’m comfortable with accepting the conclusions of others on this one—I’ll take Einstein on trust.