Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting views of political ideologies: for example, he expressed sympathies for socialism (“anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty,” he wrote, can understand why fighting “against the inequality of wealth” was necessary) only to reject it elsewhere as antithetical to human nature. He similarly supported Zionism (even serving on the founding board of the Hebrew University) while simultaneously criticizing it as “baseless fanaticism.” Few works embodied this ambivalence better than Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud’s most all-encompassing reflection on social matters. Discussing everything from religion to technology to bodily odors, he provocatively concluded that life in society is destined to be tragic: Whatever people gain from their social web, from safety to a sense of belonging, always comes at the price of unhappiness. Even his hair-raising escape from the Nazis, who in 1938 occupied Freud’s home country of Austria, invoked mixed feelings. “The triumphant feeling of liberation,” he wrote in a letter from exile, “is mingled too strongly with mourning for one had loved the prison from which one has been released.”
“I never thought I would write a novel,” she told me. “Yet I’ve been able to articulate something about this culture that I hadn’t been able to. I’ve learned a few things about what fiction can do that nonfiction can’t. It was incredibly freeing. This is a real turning point for me as a writer. My books were getting shorter and shorter. I initially began the book as a memoir, but there wasn’t enough story there. I ran out of material!”
In 1563 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted two versions of the Tower of Babel, one in Antwerp and the other in Brussels, after he had married and moved there to distance himself from his mistress. The move, Michael Pye suggests in Europe’s Babylon, his exuberant history of sixteenth-century Antwerp, changed the artist’s viewpoint. The first painting is a scene of construction, with sheds and cranes, ladders and chutes. Nimrod, the mighty hunter and God-defying tyrant, stands before a recognizable panorama of Antwerp’s wharves, spires, walls, and windmills: “Furious, muddled energy is building a heap which will have the look of a city.” In the second version, Nimrod has vanished. The ziggurat tower-city is finished but ominously quiet. The life has gone out of it—a prophecy in paint.
It is midnight. We are walking up a road that winds itself round a mountain outside of Bergen, Norway. The walk has been lasting for what seems like an eternity already. Icy wind lunges at us now and again, scratching at our faces. My nose is red and sore from me constantly wiping it with tissues. My eyes are watering and I lower my head so that it’s parallel to the ground. Occasional lampposts bathe the asphalt in warm light, and it glimmers with hoar frost as if powdered with fairy dust. It’s too bright here, though; there’s too much light pollution. We swerve off the road and onto a footpath, looking for a sweet open spot. Our feet move tentatively along a stony trail, tree branches lashing at our faces. It is so quiet. Someone in our group turns on a flashlight and the rest of us snarl back, as we’ve just got our natural night vision going. The flashlight goes out. When it’s finally pitch dark and there’s not a tree to cover our view, we know we have arrived. There is a distant silhouette of a hill rising on the other side of the fjord, with just a scattering of houses around it. The sky is dark and rich with tiny stars. The place is perfect. The sky is perfect — perfect for watching the Northern Lights.
The stories, memories and images Au puts on the table escape easy conclusions – like the lines of a screen painting the narrator admires: “Some were strong and definite, while others bled and faded, giving the impression of vapour. And yet, when you looked, you saw something: mountains, dissolution, form and colour running forever downwards.” Aesthetic, opaque, endlessly uncoiling.
We’re living through rough times. Pandemics, climate change, volcanic eruptions—each sweeping horror seems worse than the last. In Kim Fu’s new collection of stories, Lesser Known Monsters Of The 21st Century, the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity.
Jonas’s narrator is a work of art in herself, with at least one foot on the wrong side of #MeToo. You wouldn’t want to let that stop you.
Structurally the book is like countless other introductions to ethics. Chapters focus on major theories, such as utilitarianism, Kant’s ethics of duty, Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Sartre’s existentialism. But that’s where the resemblance to a conventional textbook ends. The narrative voice is not that of a gentle professor but of a slightly manic bar-room joker who is actually funny and genuinely excited to share his passion with anyone who will listen—and anyone who won’t.
You might expect a book on this morbid theme to be forbidding or sombre. This one is neither. Instead Mr Doig, a biochemist at the University of Manchester, tells an empowering story of human ingenuity.
Pixelated, on a clear day, a shovel may resemble
a rifle. A woman is always a civilian, by definition,