Both as a reader and writer, Tokarczuk brings a set of lofty expectations to a novel, which she regards as the highest literary form. “I expect novels, including crime fiction, to be multifaceted and to work on many planes,” she says. “A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive. I still believe in the social function of literature, that literature can change things, it can have an influence on reality, or even generate it. I fully realized that many years ago, the first time a publisher sent me a sales report, and I read with pride and disbelief that tens of thousands of people had bought one of my books. It made me aware that what I say matters.”
Basically, what all these critiques come down to is that with so many books and movies and TV shows in the world, why keep talking about just one?
But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe instead the question is: Is it really that bad to read a single book or watch a single show over and over and over again?
F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “sleep-conscious”: a state of heightened anxiety about sleep that keeps us from getting enough sleep. In “The Crack-Up,” that self-pitying collection of essays published after his death, Fitzgerald wrote, “The problem of whether or not sleep was specified began to haunt me long before bedtime.”
We are a people constantly doing the math, computing how many hours of shut-eye we got, how many hours we missed, how many hours the weekend might offer. In her slim, thoughtful book “Insomnia,” Marina Benjamin suggests that “the collective noun that fits us best is a calculation of insomniacs.”
What is the scientific attitude? In 1941, at the lowest point of the war, the developmental biologist Hal Waddington published a small book with that title. The scientific attitude, he asserted, was rational, disinterested, evidence-dependent and above all modern. In alliance with progressive artists and architects, it confronted the irrationality of nazism, and shared many of the values of Soviet communism. Today, nearly 80 years later, when irrationality is once again growing, science denial and pseudoscience proliferate on social media, and to assert the “values of communism” warrants at best a scornful laugh, philosopher Lee McIntyre repeats Waddington’s question, but uses it to address some very specific modern problems.
While Into the Planet is a book about cave diving full of adventure and danger, it is a biography at the core. Heinerth takes readers along on an amazing journey that starts in an unlikely place: with her working in an office and taking a few diving classes as a hobby. From there, the narrative follows her as she becomes one of the most recognized names in her field. The journey isn't easy, but the author does a fantastic job of relating everything with ease and using a clear, straightforward prose that makes the book feel more like a conversation with a friend than a biography.
It would try to lisp a dumbness sometimes—
the language of welts rising slowly on the panes,
a cracked blur of riot-torn air,
confused which year it was.