I realize now that my summer reads may be out of step with many others’, but we all are, I hope, transported by our picks, because that’s what good literature can do.
However, unlike our unicellular ancestors, we are ethically conflicted about our looming fate. How much more should we grow as a species? Do we have an obligation to leave future generations with a biosphere that is as rich and diverse as the one we inherited? How should we distribute the associated costs between poor and rich nations, between producers and consumers, and between institutions and individuals? These are important, pressing issues. Beneath many of these questions lies a more fundamental ethical quandary: what should we do about our ability to so easily dominate other species and the environment? It is a problem that has become urgent. Should we disavow our dominance and attempt to minimise it? Or should we embrace our powers to alter Earth and its inhabitants?
Perhaps we shouldn’t do either.
"Wake up! The sea is taking it all away, it's taking it all away!" were the first cries Claudia Ramón heard that night, when a fierce wave lashed her town. "It was my cousin who warned me, and I ran to take out my personal things. If she hadn't grabbed my arm tightly, the wave would have rolled me over too," says the young woman standing on the rubble in the sand.
Where the family bodega used to stand there's now only a huge sinkhole. In the background there's the squawking of seagulls and a calm, silent horizon, oblivious to the roaring wind that mercilessly lashed the landscape of Las Barrancas, Mexico, in the early morning of October 2, 2022.
From the very first sentence of Richard Flanagan’s 12th book, Question 7, the model for this extraordinary, hybrid work is clear. WG Sebald is there in the subject matter: the second world war and the ethics of mass bombing campaigns; the interweaving of personal and political history; the blending of truth, memory and a kind of hyper-real imagined past. Sebald is there in the deeper currents: a somewhat solitary, occasionally ridiculous middle-aged man seeking to come to terms with his place in the world, wrestling in particular with his complex love for a father whose own life was defined by his experiences in the war. It’s there even in the rhythms of the prose. The book begins like a Sebald tribute act, with its stateliness, its subclauses, its melancholy: “In the winter of 2012, against my better judgment and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing – much as I said they were – and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned.”
For all of the transformations of the past two decades, however, Kuper is always alert to the city’s particularity. This is the immutable essence – to be found in the daily pleasure of the menu du jour or just the snarky, nasal banter at your local zinc (bar) – that makes Parisians love their city, and foreigners such as Kuper (and me) love it even more.