Category: Books

Is it possible that near-universal affluence and the social safety net inevitably make for less moving fiction? This thought is suggested by  A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s heart-wrenching novel of India that invites comparison to the English novels of the 19th century–complete with a kind of workhouse in which our heroes are briefly incarcerated. Such is life in the developing world; fans of Sister Carrie should read "At 18, Min Finds a Path to Success in Migration Wave" at wsj.com (requires subscription), about the odyssey of one young woman from rural China.

Mistry’s book is set around 1975, with periodic excursions into the deeper past, and gives us a portrait of a place (India during the suspension of civil liberties under Indira Gandhi) where affluence is rare and the social safety net almost non-existent. It’s a society where the dead hand of bad government blights almost everything: there is rent control, food rationing, and a bureaucracy so extensive that "facilitators" negotiate it for you for a fee. Corruption abounds, abetted by all the regulation.

In literary terms, it’s too bad modern Western novels aren’t much concerned with money nowadays (you can read more about this), but to the extent the phenomenon reflects reader prosperity it’s probably just as well. Read A Fine Balance and you’ll come away feeling that the characters in most Western novels-like the people in most Western societies-have no idea how good they have it.

A conversation between [Samuel] Johnson and Goethe is all but inconceivable. Perhaps a gathering of Shakespeare, Plato, and Oscar Wilde, put together in Eternity, could create it. Shakespeare would convey the inability of the English critic and the German poet to listen to each other, while Plato would mold the irony of the encounter, and Wilde suggest the wasted wit.

That’s from Harold Bloom’s new Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?. It doesn’t matter how flawed Bloom’s recent books may be, he is still a smarter reader than just about anyone else. I buy his stuff on sight and gobble it up within twenty-four hours.

Another good Christmas gift is Richard Dawkin’s The Ancestor’s Tale, his most systematic treatment of evolution to date.

Addendum: Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty just won the Mann Booker Prize; here is more info.

As many textbooks now break the $100 barrier, complaints are rising

Some college and public-interest groups charge that the publishing industry is forcing textbook prices higher by introducing unnecessary new editions and packaging books with expensive study materials that not all students want or need. The National Association of College Bookstores says wholesale prices of college textbooks have risen nearly 40 percent in the past five years.

And students are finding that many of the same books are sold overseas at much lower prices.

Note, by the way, that textbook prices have not risen as rapidly as tuition and fees (admittedly the latter is difficult to calculate in real terms, given different way of valuing financial aid). This makes it harder for universities to make a stink.

The economic problem is simple: professors assign a book without worrying much about the cost that students will pay. In fact a pricey book might be a nice way to drive down your enrollment and lower your workload.

But do we really need Congressional hearings on the matter?

How about this for a simple solution? If a professor can lower the price of classroom materials, the university adds one-tenth of the class’s gain to that professor’s salary or research account. Yes in the short run there might be inefficient skimping but in the longer run prices should come down. Some professors, of course, might resort to teaching their classes through blogs. As the subtitle of this blog notes, “Small Ideas for a Much Better World.”

Arnold Kling, a master expositor of economics, has another excellent solution.

Most of all used bookstores; read more here.

And here are the most requested out-of-print books.

Jorge Luis Borges was one of the greatest writers never to win a Nobel Prize (try the early short fiction if you don’t already know his work). Now I know why:

The visit to [Pinochet’s] Chile finished off Borges’s chances of ever winning the Nobel Prize. That year, and for the remaining years of his life, his candidacy was opposed by a veteran member of the Nobel Prize committee, the socialist writer Arthur Lundkvist, a long-standing friend of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, who had received the Nobel Prize in 1971. Lundkvist would subsequently explain to Volodia Teitelboim, one of Borges’s biographers and a onetime chairman of the Chilean Communist Party, that he would never forgive Borges his public endorsement of General Pinochet’s regime.

Borges, it should be noted, did believe in democracy but thought Pinochet the best of the available options at the time. For purposes of contrast, consider the following (slightly overstated) description of Laureate Pablo Neruda:

On the eve of his [Neruda’s] death, in 1973, he could still describe Stalin as “that wise, tranquil Georgian”. His feelings were similarly soft for Mao’s China, where he loved to see everyone in those vast landscapes and streetscapes dressed in regulation blue.

The former quotation is from p.426 of Edwin Williamson’s excellent Borges: A Life.

I’ve now entered the vacation part of my trip, which of course means that I am slightly bored. On the bright side, I’ve just discovered Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I admire his ability to think in epic terms and grab the reader at the same time; I’ve long thought that his best material will still be read one hundred years from now. My previous favorites have been Stand and The Dead Zone, among others. And the food in Acapulco is of course amazing. I’m back at the beginning of the week to come, and my apologies for being slow in email responses.