History With a Wide Lens(Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World – Justin Marozzi)

Popular history is a tough field. The broad target audience usually precludes meticulous, detail-oriented research and analysis. Historical fidelity forbids (or should forbid) the imagination of speculative and interesting details. Unless the author can find an untold story (the recently reviewed Salt by Mark Kurlansky) or can make a novel historical argument without alienating readers (the fascinating Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze), a work of popular history will struggle to be either enlightening or entertaining.

Justin Marozzi’s recent history of Tamerlane takes an unusual approach to the problem. His book is not so much a history of Tamerlane the man as of the idea of Tamerlane through history. Though most of the text is devoted to straight history, perhaps a third takes a broader focus. Marozzi provides a wide assortment of collateral information to contextualize his story. Accounts of the author’s expeditions to various relevant historical sites are most common, but the political exploitation of the Tamerlane story by the Uzbek government and Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great are also explored.

At its best, Tamerlane’s roving style gives the reader a fuller account of Tamerlane’s impact than a conventional biography would be able to. The inclusion of so much present-day material is also a valuable source of historical perspective. When Tamerlane is at its best, it’s a great reading experience.

But all too often, one part or another falls short. The historical research can be disappointing. For example, Marozzi often cites contemporary reports for the population of a city or the casualties in a battle. As Marozzi repeatedly concedes, such accounts are notoriously unreliable, but he goes on citing them without even attempting to provide more accurate figures. Worse, the writing often seems hastily put together and poorly edited. The arrival of a Spanish ambassador at Tamerlane’s court is described at length twice in the book, for no discernible reason. Occasionally jarring informalisms and the meandering organization of the book contribute to this impression.

Tamerlane is an intriguing departure from the norm of historical writing. Its blend of biography, travel writing, and modern politics is something I’d like to see more of. The book itself is less exciting, simply because it fails to do justice to its concept. If you’re a bored reader who wants to learn about Tamerlane, you could do worse than Marozzi’s book. And if you’re a popular history author looking for an idea, please read this book and write a better version!

A World of Possibilities (Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson)

Near-future science fiction writers have a difficult task. They have to make their worlds different enough to be interesting but similar enough to be believable. It’s fine for Star Trek to talk about dilithium crystals and tricorders in the 23^rd century, but something a little more credible is needed for 2020. At the same time, a world where cell phones are slightly smaller and TVs are slightly bigger would scarcely make for compelling reading.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash succeeds at this difficult task better than any comparable book I can remember reading. The plot is hard to describe without ruining it, and I won’t even try. Suffice it to say it’s intelligent, engrossing, and preoccupied with the role information plays in civilization. The real joy is the way Stephenson creates bizarre things that still have an unmistakable feel of “rightness” to them.

The Mafia are still in their original business, but they’ve also developed an especially ruthless pizza delivery arm. The idea is preposterous at first, but on further reflection it starts to seem like a conceivable extension of the early-nineties obsession with the thirty-minute delivery. Likewise, the federal government has evolved into a bureaucratic, paranoid software development company that controls its employees with mountains of regulation and monitors them with regular polygraph tests. The freshness and feel of Snow Crash are even more remarkable considering the book was first published in 1992. The book’s Internet-based “Metaverse,” for example, is a perfect anticipation of a modern multiplayer online role-playing game.

Science fiction revolves around possibilities. Stories must be logically coherent and technically plausible. Snow Crash takes it a step further and makes its world culturally possible, even (especially?) when it’s at its most far-fetched. The result is both thought-provoking and delightful.

A Fable About Writing Overambitious Fables (The Alchemist – Paolo Coehlo)

[Sorry about the long break since my last post. With finals, graduation, moving, and getting set up in Cleveland, I've been a bit too busy to write. But now I've got almost nothing to do except read books and screw around on the Internet, so I'll try to make up for it.]

There’s a reason the fable is no longer an important form of literature. It is a simplistic genre that is best suited for conveying basic moral ideas or maybe some sharp satire. Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream tries to use the form to convey inspirational philosophy, and it fails miserably.

The plot is simple enough. A shepherd boy has a dream. A gypsy and a mysterious man claiming to be a king convince him that this dream means that his destiny is to find a buried treasure near the Pyramids. With no further prompting, he’s off to face the predictable sequence of adversity, perseverance, self-discovery, and success. Oh yes, and of course true love.

The Alchemist would be nothing more than a trite, boring children’s story if not for Coelho’s unnerving sincerity. The inescapable impression is that Coelho believes he is conveying deep philosophical insights. That makes for an awkward reading experience when all the reader can see is the stale leftovers of a mediocre inspirational speaker.

Fantasy elements have a rich history in literature, particularly in Latin America. But where other authors have used the supernatural to make the world seem richer, Coelho makes it shallower. His mythology centers around the idea that everyone has a “Personal Legend,” a particular destiny of his very own, which the universe conspires to help people achieve. Coelho seems to think the concept is an empowering one, but I can’t imagine why. The author’s vision of life as a sort of cosmic scavenger hunt might offer some hope to the alienated and disaffected, but I find the idea of a benevolent fate planning out everyone’s destiny to be simply depressing.

At least Coelho deploys some solid technique in his misguided philosophical quest. I was particularly struck by the way he manipulated the time setting of the book. At some points, I would have sworn the story took place in the fourteenth century. At other times, it seemed to be no more than a hundred years ago. Even now I’m not really sure when it was. Coelho aims to produce a timeless, vague setting, and he succeeds.

Neat authorial tricks aside, The Alchemist remains a deeply disappointing book. The plot is unexciting and the philosophy vapid. I sincerely hope that your Personal Legend does not include reading this book.

The Perils of Political Fiction (Shalimar the Clown – Salman Rushdie)

Conveying a political message through quality fiction is a difficult task. Salman Rushdie’s latest offering, Shalimar the Clown, highlights some of the challenges. At times, the book shows us the writer whose passionate, urgent voice earned him death threats and exile. But at others, the political focus takes away from the story. As a result, Shalimar is good, but not as good as it could have been.

Unsurprisingly, some of the best parts of Shalimar take place in Kashmir, in the past. Fables and tales of children growing up in an idyllic past provide the backdrop and the meaning for the contemporary part of the story. Here, Rushdie is in his element. The travails of a village of traveling chefs feel comfortably familiar and homey without draining them of their authenticity. The experience is exciting, enlightening, and enjoyable all at once.

The other great parts of the story also take place in Kashmir in the modern day. The idyllic past is charming, but it quickly becomes consumed by the struggles that have since torn Kashmir apart. Rushdie’s righteous anger is ably communicated, and the menace of the Islamic terrorists and the Indian military occupiers is vividly drawn with fascinating, frightening magical realism.

The modern American frame story that tries to draw everything together is distinctly less interesting. Part of the problem is that Rushdie’s musings about the culture of Los Angeles lack the exotic foreignness of Kashmir. A larger issue, though, is that the frame story is heavy-handed and inhuman. The pointed symbolism of the life of a girl named Kashmira lacks any semblance of subtlety or the authenticity that makes some of Shalimar so good.

That’s a shame, because the failure of the outer story really weakens the overall impact of the book. We’re left with a mostly enjoyable, at times disconnected story combined with some political anger. The reading experience is not bad, but when you put Shalimar down, don’t expect to take away a lasting message.

Ancient Chinese Wisdom (Chuang Tzu)

A sad fact is that the best known Chinese philosophers are often the least original and challenging. Confucius’ moralism is nice, but I find little in it that speaks to the modern reader. Lao Tzu is so mystical as to be either useless or profoundly banal. The great sage of ancient China was a man few today have ever even heard of, much less read, but he offers both philosophical insight and literary beauty.

Chuang Tzu, whose writings are known by their author’s name, was a philosopher later grouped into the Taoist school. (Lao Tzu is usually recognized as the first and most influential Taoist.) Broadly speaking, Taoists responded to the political chaos and violence of their times by declaring human striving futile and advocating “inaction” or wuwei.

Chuang Tzu’s concept of inaction is profoundly liberating. Rather than condemning action as such, he urges his followers to abandon calculation and dithering and follow their inner nature. In this way, he is essentially the antithesis of Hamlet in his “To be or not to be…” speech. A favored metaphor is the example of a skilled butcher. When faced with a difficult joint, an experienced butcher doesn’t calculate the position of the bones and the optimal cutting path, he simply cuts by instinct and succeeds.

Not that Chuang Tzu is just an exceptionally precocious hippie, urging us to follow our feelings. He expresses wuwei as a stirring triumph of the individual over society and the state: “All the titles and stipends of the age are not enough to stir him [the sage] to exertion; all its penalties and censures are not enough to make him feel shame.” In a culture where disfigurement and death were common penalties for dissidents, this statement reflects considerable courage.

Chuang Tzu’s courage arose in part from his skepticism. He refused to believe that wealth was better than poverty, virtue better than vice, or life better than death. The last point is illustrated in this beautiful story:

Lady Li was the daughter of the border guard of Ai. When she was first taken captive and brought to the state of Chin, she wept until her tears drenched the collar of her robe. But later, when she went to live in the palace of the ruler, shared his couch with him, and ate the delicious meats of his table, she wondered why she had ever wept. How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life?

Chuang Tzu’s philosophy is refreshing, but the true joy of his work is the writing itself. Blurring the line between prose and poetry, Chuang Tzu uses a formidable array of literary powers to convey his ideas. Too often, mystical philosophy founders on its inability to communicate ideas that are fundamentally ineffable. Chuang Tzu avoids this trap. Even when his concepts are impossible to put directly into words, he uses a mixture of humor, mythology, imagined dialogues, and metaphors to lead the reader along. The combination of fun and intellectual discovery is rewarding and completely unique.

In a time when the demands of society are increasingly complex and burdensome, Chuang Tzu offers an unusual and valuable perspective on how important the things that seem so urgent really are. The fact that he writes brilliantly and beautifully only makes it more tragic that he’s not more widely read.

The Virus (The Geographer’s Library – Jon Fasman)

Phase 1: Infection
It happened to me last summer. I walked into the living room of my apartment to see my roommate “Clarence” lounging on the couch reading a book.

“What’s up, Clarence?”

“Not much, just reading a book.”

“Cool. What’ve you got there?”

“The Geographer’s Library. It’s a cool mystery. It’s about a murder that’s mixed up with all sorts of alchemical mysticism.”

“Awesome! Can I check it out when you finish with it?”

A week later I was cracking open Jon Fasman’s debut novel, expecting high-brow version of The DaVinci Code, mixing drama, history, and shadowy conspiracies.

Phase 2: Contagion
For a hundred pages, I was delighted. Mysterious murder, check! Likeable young protagonist slowly being drawn into an investigation that’s way beyond his depth, check! Interesting intercalated chapters detailing the strange histories of alchemical artifacts in the victim’s possession when he died, check!

So, when my mom saw me reading the book and asked me about it, it was only natural that I gave her a glowing recommendation and offered to lend it to her when I was done.

Phase 3: Sickness
At about page 150, a sickening realization set in. Nothing more was going to happen. The young protagonist (becoming less likeable with every page) was going to keep running in circles and learning nothing at all. The artifact chapters became almost indistinguishable tales of people somewhere in the Soviet Union being tricked out of artifacts and then murdered by a sinister organization. The only consolation was that the book had to end eventually, at which point the author would be obligated by the conventions of fiction to conclude the story. Right?

Phase 4: Aftermath
Not really. When the book could no longer physically contain any more aimless ramblings, all I found was a slapdash ending that explained none of the book’s earlier events. The chapters about the alchemical artifacts ended up having no relevance to the book’s plot at all. It took me a while to get over my rage at the author, but eventually the healing began. That’s when my mom called to yell at me for recommending the book.

Condimentary History (Salt: A World History – Mark Kurlansky)

Few materials have undergone a transformation as dramatic as salt’s. For thousands of years, it was a precious commodity and a vital nutrient. At times it was even used as currency. Today it is usually the cheapest item by weight in a grocery store. It is demonized for its possible unhealthiness. The long, rich evolution of salt is chronicled in Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History. Though not flawless, Salt is an enjoyable and enlightening exploration of the way this common rock has shaped human life through history.

A word of caution to my fellow history nerds: Salt is not a nitty-gritty work of economic history. If you yearn, as I half-did, for a complex analysis of the technical means used to produce, distribute, and consume salt throughout the ages, prepare for disappointment. When it suits him, Kurlansky can produce clear, detailed passages of political or economic history. His explanations of the fundamentals of the 18^th century Atlantic salt trade or how the French Revolution was influenced by the gabelle, the hated salt tax, were satisfying, but Kurlansky is happiest citing medieval cookbooks to show how Eastern European housewives used salt to pickle cabbages.

That quibble aside, Salt does a great job of using the title substance to illuminate the past. Salt’s versatility gives Kurlansky license to explore an assortment of diverse areas. He deals with basics, like the use of salt as a condiment and in food preservation, but he also discusses the Basque salted cod industry (and the intriguing question of whether wandering Basque fishermen reached the New World before the Vikings), a Roman sauce of fermented fish guts known as garum, and the relationship between salt mining and the petroleum industry.

Salt also delights by giving the reader concrete insight into the past. I poked fun at picked cabbage recipes earlier, but those sort of sources show how people actually lived (even if they are a bit fluffy for “serious” history.) The author uses numerous primary sources to illustrate the reality of many of the abstract facts he relates. No prose discourse can convey the importance of salt in everyday life as well as Confederate newspaper articles trying to provide ways for desperate Southern homes to function without salt.

When it reaches the modern day, the book loses some of its luster. Part of the problem is that salt is mostly used as a straight condiment, no longer to preserve foods or in curious sauces. Also, salt, now cheap and readily available, has lost much of its former mystique. Even so, I would have liked to see Kurlansky give a greater explanation of how the salt industry works in the present day and how exactly it got that way. More discussion of the health issues surrounding the substance would also have been welcome.

Salt has its weak points, but it also has a strong heart in its exploration of salt’s heyday, the time when sodium chloride was vital to human health, food preservation, and cuisine. To a modern reader, such a time is completely foreign, but Kurlansky brings it to life. This feat more than makes up for the book’s failings and leaves the reader with a fun, illuminating historical experience.

Protagonist Ex Machina (Ascent – Jed Mercurio)

What if there was a man with exceptional gifts driven by a fierce desire to be a legend? Any reader of the Iliad will recognize that this question is as old as Western literature. Any reader of Jed Mercurio’s Ascent will find that a novel needs more than a heroic protagonist to succeed.

The main problem with the book is that its main character’s traits are often assumed rather than developed. Yeremin, the protagonist rising through the Soviet Air Force and later the space program, is a great pilot because Mercurio says he is. He wants to be a hero so badly because of a cursory childhood scene and because the author says so. Rather than being a real person for us to commiserate with or puzzle over, Yeremin is a golem animated by the properties Mercurio has written into him. However unusual or eccentric he may be, he lacks the spark of life.

Hampered by its inscrutable characters, Ascent becomes a boring litany of events: “Yeremin is a good pilot. Watch him fly really well. Yeremin really wants to be a hero. Look at all the sacrifices he makes.” It doesn’t help that the key space scenes read like a Russian rewrite of Apollo 13. Ex-doctor, ex-pilot Mercurio tries to pull us deeper into Yeremin’s world with technical jargon and biological detail but only succeeds in making the book confusing and gross by turns. (Though if there were an award for Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Rectum, Ascent would be a shoo-in.)

At a few shining moments, the book does convey some of the hero’s deep inner passion: “He has not risen so far to emulate the achievements of other men, to choose a glory amortized by repetition; his destiny must be the perfect mission, the unique mission….” These few moments salvage some meaning for the otherwise bland novel. In the end, however, Ascent cannot make up for its lack of a meaningfully human protagonist.

A Long March (The Road – Cormac McCarthy)

The genre of the postapocalyptic has spawned a wide assortment of works: classics like A Canticle for Leibowitz, garbage like Battlefield Earth, and most of Phillip K. Dick’s catalog. Mainstream literature, though, has tended to avoid the device, probably because of its science-fictiony associations. That’s unfortunate, because the clean canvas of world without civilization and the strong emotions of desperate survivors can nourish great stories and characters. Cormac McCarthy demonstrates this in his latest novel The Road, which follows a father and son in their travels across the nuclear wasteland that the US has become.

McCarthy’s characteristically ornate prose contrasts powerfully with the brutal simplicity of the dialogue between the man and the boy. Of all the endless words the two might be saying about the world around them, they chose only to use a bare handful. Language thus serves as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.

Some commentators report shock at the gruesome violence the characters encounter. I was more disturbed by the way the post-apocalyptic society had warped the father-son relationship. Organized cannibalism may be appalling, but I found the real horror in the man’s frequent musings about whether it was time to kill his son to spare him further agonies.

Also troubling, though less viscerally, was the tension between hope and hopelessness that pervades the novel. Despite their desperate physical situation, the characters have not given in to despair. The very act of traveling down the road implies a hope that what’s over the horizon will be better than what’s before it. The characters’ journey, which begins as a simple migration to find warmer land before winter, becomes a metaphor for their refusal to accept the nightmare the world has become. The father repeatedly reminds his son that they are two of “the good guys,” bearing a torch of decency and goodness that must not be allowed to die. As their horrors and disappointments multiply, this faith and the hope it represents are tested to their breaking points.

At 250 pages rich in white space, The Road is a quick read. I found McCarthy’s complex and often indirect narration easier to follow than in Blood Meridian. Nevertheless, The Road is scarcely light reading. The subject matter is so grim and the book goes so quickly that I had to pause frequently to digest what I had read.

Though its setting is unusual, The Road succeeds brilliantly. McCarthy’s distinctive voice is at home in the bleak wasteland. The result is a unique reading experience that masterfully blends beauty and ugliness, violence and goodness, sadness and fragile hope.

Lies My Narrator Told Me (Baudolino – Umberto Eco)

Any postmodernist worth his salt could dash off a quick essay on the importance of myths and legends as interpretive structures. It takes an author like Umberto Eco to make the same point in adventure-novel format. His novel Baudolino, an immersive, easy-to-read exploration of the world of the late twelfth century, accomplishes that feat with grace. Eco probes concepts of lies, truth, meaning, and human understanding in the fresh, playful style that is uniquely his. The result is delightful.

In the first and better part of the book, the roguish Baudolino traipses across Europe. In his travels, he starts many of the myths and legends that thrived in the Middle Ages. In the second half of the story, Baudolino passes through the looking glass into the world of medieval legend. Seeking the kingdom of the legendary Prester John, Baudolino enters through a world populated by the skiapods, people with only one leg; the blemmyae, headless people with faces in their chest; and other fantastical creatures.

One of the best things about this complex novel is that many of its levels are easily accessible. At times, Eco’s novels exhibit an unfortunate obscurity that can mar the reading experience. Baudolino escapes this pitfall, remaining at all times an entertaining adventure story. Many of its themes can be readily understood on a quick reading.

One of the most intriguing and accessible facets is the way Eco explores the way we understand the world. Baudolino experiences life on both sides of legends. In Europe, he constantly makes up tales and lies, at times planting seeds that will change the course of society and at other times simply lying or deceiving to get himself out of a jam. In his Eastern adventures, he encounters all sorts of made-up people and places. Though these people are not real, they have very real lessons to offer. The way the skiapods and the blemmyae don’t realize that they belong to two different physical races, and yet obsess over their minor theological quibbles was particularly intriguing.

Though we pride ourselves on being hard-nosed empiricists, how much of what we believe is a legend, an exaggeration, or even an outright lie? How often do we tell those same tales ourselves, for selfish or altruistic motives? And most importantly, do these falsehoods take us towards or away from the truth? One of the critical ideas in the book is summed up by one character: “I am not asking you to bear witness to what you believe false, which would be a sin, but to testify falsely to what you believe true – which is a virtuous act.”

Many commentators on Baudolino have worried too much about how we can know when the inveterate fibber (who narrates his adventures in a frame story) is telling the truth and when he is lying. To do this misses the point. In a strictly factual sense, the entire book is a lie, because none of its characters did what Eco tells us they did. And on a deep level, the entire book is true, because its lies aim to bring understanding.