July 2016: David Liss' Historical Novels

July's been a month with fewer pleasure reads (thanks to a more than busy month at work), but the novels of David Liss provided some enjoyable downtime. I'd had these on the shelf for some years (the spines looked so elegant in the living room) before finally digging in this summer. Due to their period flavor, the prose reads a bit slower than much contemporary fiction, but the books amply reward time spent reading. There's quite a bit of plot (with mystery/detective story elements), historical details of daily life and bigger economic/political systems, intellectual challenge, and interesting, likable but imperfect characters. 

Benjamin Weaver, the protagonist of A Conspiracy of Paper, A Spectacle of Corruption, and The Devil's Company is loosely based on an actual historical figure, Daniel Mendoza. Weaver is an ex-boxer; a former highwayman; a London Jew proud of his Portuguese vs. Eastern European heritage, not especially devout and estranged from his family when A Conspiracy of Paper opens; and a professional thieftaker, a kind of proto-detective-cum-bounty-hunter. It's this role that propels the plots of the books, as Weaver follows his own peculiar code of honor in the clients he takes and the jobs he pursues, not part of the justice system controlled by the aristocracy or 18th century London's world of organized crime. In each book, his case touches on matters of national historic significance and present-day resonance: in A Conspiracy of Paper, the ethics of the stock market and its establishment; in A Spectacle of Corruption, elections (the title speaks for itself); and in The Devil's Company, global trade with protectionism, monopolies, workers' representation, and technological innovation all in the mix.

Weaver may be Liss' most fascinating creation, but Ethan Saunders of The Whiskey Rebels was the more amusing narrator. (In The Whiskey Rebels, chapters in Saunders' POV alternate with chapter from Joan Maycott, whose prose is less compelling but who plays a key role in the action on the western Pennsylvania frontier.) Saunders is a disgraced Revolutionary War spy, a self-absorbed drunk and a rake, a romantic and a patriot. When he learns his former fiancee's family may be in danger, he's drawn into a conflict that reaches from the early capital of Philadelphia to the wilds of Pittsburgh and the financial markets of New York, one deeply entwined with Alexander Hamilton's new Bank of the United States and the question of what it means to value "liberty" and "pursuit of happiness."

Other July reads included Nalo Hopkinson's SFF short story collection Falling in Love with Hominids -- some good stories, but overall kind of "meh." I wasn't as drawn in, excited, or challenged as I generally am by her novels. I also re-read Lev Grossman's The Magicians, enjoying it just as much as the first time around (perhaps the highs seemed not quite as high but, better prepared, I found Quentin less annoying overall). In August, I'll finally find out how the trilogy ends. 

August 2015: Nonfiction Round-up

First, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I did actually finish in July, deserves a mention. I think George R. R. Martin's description of the book as "wonderfully elegaic" is spot-on. It's a postapocalyptic tale in which a plague devastates the globe; bands of survivors must make their way in a world largely deprived of technology and other infrastructure. There are a couple of threads that connect, or almost connect, including the pre-plague story of Canadian Shakespearian Arthur Leander actor and the post-plague story of Kirsten, a member of the Travelling Symphony who as a child had a walk-on role in Leander's production of Lear. Most of the novel muses on the value of art (including through a storyline pertaining to a mysterious comic book that almost seemed to me a homage to Moore's Watchmen). While there were some aspects of plot that didn't fully satisfy (the central villain seems pretty easily defeated after being built up quite a bit), Mandel is a prose stylist in the Hemingway tradition.

August turned out to be the start of a big nonfiction push, mostly focused around religion and anthropology. I started off with Religious Fundamentalism by Peter Herriot, a book that sets out to thoroughly define “fundamentalism” and show how it applies at personal, interpersonal, social group, and societal levels. What attracted me to Herriot’s exploration originally was that he thoroughly acknowledges and explores the similarities among fundamentalisms of many different traditions, including Jewish and Christian as well as Muslim traditions. I wasn’t sure about his 5-point definition of fundamentalism – some of the principles were so generic as to apply to just about any religion or group (he freely admits that it is not the descriptors themselves that are unique to fundamentalism, but their combination, with particular emphasis on the reactiveness of fundamentalism). I’m not sold on the essential reactiveness of fundamentalism; this seems a term even trickier to define that “fundamentalist” and likely to be applied selectively. I also found his emphasis on fundamentalism as a twentieth-century phenomenon to be problematic – it seems to me false and entirely arbitrary to deny the label of fundamentalist to the original followers of al-Wahabbi or to early Anabaptists. While it’s valuable, to have a fairly dispassionate and systematic study of the topic, I found much of the text dry and repetitive (Herriot shows his business background in many ways; the bullet points near the end of each chapter are indeed accurate summaries). Highlights of the book are the illustrative case studies, ranging from a close study of a George W. Bush speech to profiles of an Israeli conservative group and an al-Qaeda cell.

I then moved to a classic that has been on my to-read list for years (at least 15) – Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism. I think my expectations were simply set too high, for while I found the book interesting, I didn’t find it packed with profundity. (Eliade corresponded with Jung and is frequently cited by Campbell, but Shamanism doesn’t reach the ranks of Man and His Symbols, The Hero’s Journey, or The Mythic Imagination for me. Part of that no doubt is that I was already familiar with the gist of Eliade’s argument.) I found some of his distinctions forced and resented his often condescending approach any time women are involved in shamanic practice (Eliade uses discounts such instances as mere mediumship or witchcraft). The introduction to my edition had a brief, interesting forward by Wendy Doniger that talked about the shortcomings and real contributions of Eliade and other scholars of comparative religion and “armchair anthropologists.”

I moved on to more contemporary studies of witchcraft and shamanship, some newly acquired and others the long-hoarded fruits of past visits to the Heartwood bookstore. In Darkness and Secrecty: The Anthropology of Asault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia, edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright and published by Duke University Press, is an interesting collection of academic (some highly academic) articles on shamanship in South America, with a focus on “dark shamanship” that in large part seeks to counterbalance overly-positive (and New Agey) depictions of shamans. The editors reject a distinction between “witchcraft” and “shamanship,” and most articles focus on how shamanic practice is customized to particular community needs or practices. There is a detailed depiction of shamanship in Warao cosmology; several articles looking at historical intersections or contemporary conflicts to find connections between shamanship and politics; and an exploration of child sorcery and its consequences (accused sorcerers were frequently executed).

The Modernity of Witchcraft by Peter Geschiere and Witchcraft, Power and Politics by Isak Niehaus with Eliazaar Mohlala and Kally Shokane document African witchcraft in Cameroon and South Africa. Geschiere, writing in 1997, cautions against discounting witchcraft beliefs as vestiges of a primitive past that will be swept away in a modern, global society (or as the exaggerations of patronizing and racist colonizers, despite admitted misreadings and over-emphasis of witchcraft beliefs by many Western scholars); he shows how strongly-held witchcraft beliefs continue to be a part of African society, and indeed how witchcraft beliefs and have changed and practitioners have interacted with other power brokers over time, so that witchcraft has at times been a modernizing (or at least uniting) force rather than a conservative one. The real problems or challenges of witchcraft beliefs are in no way overlooked, and Geschiere devotes considerable attention to accusations and punishments of witchcraft both within the judicial system and extrajudicially. Niehaus and his local collaborators have a similar focus, showing how witchcraft cases changed along with social tensions related to South African relocation of indigenous peoples, politics, and economics, including case studies of witch hunts in the 1990s. With his local collaborators, Niehaus presents numerous stories, analyzing the different types of witches and witchcraft beliefs reported and incorporating many colloquial and Sotho terms. Both studies of African witchcraft point out the power of occult practitioners (who have the power to cure as well as curse, but in doing so typically must identify the source of the curse as someone either within or outside the community) to both support local chiefs or serve as checks on their power, although in contemporary times, their power to challenge the elite may have lessened. Witches can be players in resource redistribution, often accusing those who have failed to give back to the community; they can bind communities together by accusing scapegoat figures such as strangers and the powerless; at the same time, they are always at least in part outsiders and at risk themselves.

Shamans of the Foye Tree by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo returns to South America, focusing on gender identity and expression among the machi, Chilean Mapuche shamans. Although the Mapuche indigenous peoples have been forcibly relocated and excluded from many economic opportunities (much like American Indians in the U.S.), the tone of this book is optimistic overall, and Bacigalupo focuses on the positive ways individual Mapuche machi express themselves. Currently, a majority of Mapuche shamans are women, but the opposite was likely true historically: machi were most often men who nevertheless sometimes presented themselves in feminized ways (including by wearing women’s clothes and headdresses). While there’s no simple parallel between gender roles in today’s America and Mapuche traditions, it’s likely that many were (and are) homosexual. Bacigalupo describes “co-gendered” male machi. The change over time is likely due to the influence of Western colonizing culture, including Spanish machismo, which set aside little space for non-binary or fluid gender roles. Bacigalupo interviews both male and female machi, asking their opinions on their practice, their colleagues, politics, gender roles, sex, and marriage. She follows their practices closely, describing healing (the machi mainstay) and community rituals. She investigates how modern-day machi interact with or ignore the systematized, medical model of the national healthcare system. The foye tree of the title refers to a tree carved with notches, climbed by shamans during rituals as part of an ecstatic, celestial journey, referenced by Eliade.