AFRICA'S WORLD WAR by Gerard Prunier

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Africa's World War, Gerard Prunier's fantastic exercise in a sort of double contextualization -- of both the Rwandan genocide and the ensuing trans-continental Congo conflict, involving at least half a dozen countries and yet more non-state militias and organizations -- is essential reading. Prunier analyzes the causes and course of the conflict in significant detail, without losing sight of his non-specialist audience, and all the while going beyond the glib explanations (of the "ancient ethnic hatreds" variety) much loved by the international community when it comes to many conflict situations, especially African ones. Prunier is rightly skeptical of the "New World Order" that emerged in the wake of the Berlin Wall's fall, not to mention the neo-colonial "old" order championed in Africa by the likes of France; at the same time, he eschews the facile (and condescending) anti-imperialism of many on the left, tending to deprive African political actors of agency. But perhaps most notably, Prunier seeks to correct the record when it comes to Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, and the movement he leads (the Rwandan Patriotic Front ("RPF")), presenting a far more complicated and disturbing picture of the RPF's activities in the Great Lakes region than readers of Philip Gourevitch's one man pro-RPF lobby would be familiar with. This isn't simply an academic question for Prunier, as he strives to demonstrate how Rwanda's post-genocide government shrewdly (and cynically) exploited the Clinton Administration's guilt over its inaction in the face of the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Rwanda's (then Hutu-led) regime -- with disastrous consequences for the rest of the region, as Rwanda used the excuse of pursuing the genocidaires in the neighboring Congo (then called Zaire) to invade its gargantuan neighbor, fueling a conflict that has been estimated to have claimed four million lives over the last decade -- the deadliest conflict since World War II (indeed Prunier implicitly suggests the Bush Administration, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, were more clear-sighted with respect to the RPF, Powell reportedly telling Kagame at their first meeting that the carte blanche hitherto given the RPF to remake the region in the name of security for the Tutsi-dominated regime, was history).



Africa's World War is a lot more nuanced than the above has probably made it seem. For instance, Prunier's debunking of the myth of the virtuous RPF does not lead him to ignore the very real security threat that the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda in the wake of the RPF's 1994 victory over the genocidaire regime, continued to pose to the new government; but he rightly questions the offensive conflation of the Hutu refugees in general with the genocidaires. Nor does he pull any punches when discussing the RPF's own gross violence and its own blatantly discriminatory attitude towards the Hutus. Finally, the international community's combination of moralistic posturing, cretinous imbecility, and hypocrisy comes in for its share of the flak too. This isn't a book with "good guys" (although this reader found himself wishing Prunier had spent more time fleshing out the character of Joseph Kabila, the seemingly callow successor (and son) of Laurent Kabila, whose prior career had been devoid of anything suggesting that he would turn out to be the shrewd and capable customer he has turned out to be in running a country that was in dire straits when his father took it over from the West's erstwhile Cold War ally (and kleptocrat supreme) Mobutu Sese Seko, and no less so when Mobutu's successor died), but one that highlights the shifting complexities of the region's politics. For instance, taking the "international" dimension of the Congolese wars as an example (one among many), the reader quickly learns that it is impossible to engage with the Congolese wars that brought down the Mobutu regime in 1996-97, and then continued to rage for years due to a variety of reasons, local, economic, and international, without engaging with the history of the Congo's neighbors, including (apart from Rwanda), Uganda (where Kagame and the RPF cut their teeth in the 1980s in that country's civil wars), Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and Angola. The complexity of the situation chronicled in the book can sometimes feel overwhelming, despite the helpful key at the front of the book, and running footnotes might have been more helpful than the appendix; one hopes that future editions spare a thought to this effect for the lay reader.



But no caviling can detract from the fact that Prunier's is the indispensable English-language book for understanding the Great Lakes wars of the last decade, combining empathy and engagement with cynicism regarding the motives of the players that borders on the ruthless. In the final analysis, and despite the book's title, Prunier sees his subject as more analogous to Europe's seventeenth century Thirty Years' War rather than to World War I, both in terms of the conflict's structure (with much of the momentum provided by private/princely interests and greed rather than reasons of state per se, and in terms of its wide-ranging impact. Prunier's thesis is that the conflict has gone a long way toward consigning the "old" African "system" -- a relic of the Cold War and half-hearted de-colonization -- to the dustbin of history, much as the Thirty Years' War paved the way for the Westphalian system that would dominate Europe in subsequent centuries. Especially in the Great Lakes region, the old world, born of imperialism, ethnic conflict, economic pressures, Cold War ripple effects, and the weakness of the nation-state (a weakness, nowhere greater than in the Congo, transforming just about every civil war into a conflict with trans-national ramifications, as everybody's enemy set up shop in the Congo, where the central government was too weak to keep anybody out). As to whether the new beast slouching towards Bethlehem is "better" or "worse" than the dying animal, there are no easy answers -- if the Thirty Years' War is any guide, the jury might remain out for a few centuries yet.


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Not everyone is impressed with Prunier's book, including the U.S. army's Thomas Odom.

Reading Orwell Lite

It’s George Orwell season again, an observance that may outlast the swallows of San Juan Capistrano. War is always a good occasion to trot him out, as are obfuscating politicians. So, really, he goes well with anything.
- Willing Davidson

In his 47 years on the planet George Orwell certainly packed a lot in his life before he finally packed his bags and moved further upstairs. He served in the Burmese Imperial Police, made time to join other writers in fighting in the Spanish Civil war, and later was known mingle with sweepers and others by dressing and working like one in order to research his material better. Orwell, of course, had a strong political agenda and is best known for his essays on poverty, politics and his grand works. As Willing Davidson writes, he goes with anything including social comedy.

A few months ago, I read Coming up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying and realised that Orwell's writing is not always like listening to Beethoven's openings - heavy, dark and laced with deep sarcasm. There is a light version of Orwell, much like the playful melodies of Mozart or Schubert.

The hero of Coming up for Air is George Bowling, an middle-aged insurance agent with a crabby, penny-pinching wife and two kids who are more of a burden than a joy to bring up. Bowling is aware that he is the regular Joe - living in a suburban home outside London and one who fears his boss and his wife. He has not much to complain or much to live for. Frustrated with his boring job, nit-picking wife he has the feeling of being drowned by it all and wants to 'come up for some air'.

It's not really other women that he wants to chase, but something more innocent - his childhood. For sometime he wants to go back to his old hometown and go fishing and relive those sunnier and happier days. So, Bowling goes AWOL and embarks on this nostalgic adventure trip using the cliched excuse of a business trip. It is an entirely innocent desire, but not something that you would expect a grown man to indulge in or his wife to allow him to do so.

"If Hilda finds out, there will be a dreadful row", Bowling is convinced. Sure! I dare any husband to be able to actually convince his wife that the 'lost weekend' was really spent trying to find any old fishing spot from childhood and not spent seeking the arms of another woman. So, despite being a childish, but chaste adventure, Bowling feels guilty all the time. Yet, the promise of the forbidden pleasure makes Bowling feel he was coming up for air. As is to be expected, much as we would like, time does not stand still in our boyhood homes. People die, things happen. Bowling did not conceive of his old home,, as a Utopia, but he is ill-prepared to face the reality decades after days of youth.

In this particular novel, Orwell's gift for comedy shines on every page. So why is Orwell's gift for comedy not often mentioned. Perhaps because comedy in Orwell is a consequence of his acute observation. The human species when observed closely nothing but comic and absurd (A fact on which Kurt Vonnegut based his entire ouevre). That in summary is just the storyline. Orwell's critical eye misses nothing on marriage, bosses, urban development. Uncannily prescient, he sees through the hollowness of people trying to flaunt their fake green/organic culture credentials.

The first chapter is an absolute delight:

"... Do you know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic bouncing type
that's nicknamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of the party? I'm that type. 'Fatty' they mostly call me. Fatty Bowling. George Bowling is my real name.

But at that moment I didn't feel like the life and soul of the party. And it struck me that nowadays I nearly always do have a morose kind of feeling in the early mornings, although I sleep well and my digestion's good. I knew what it was, of course--it was those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water
in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a skull. It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you've bitten into a sour apple. Besides, say what you will, false teeth are a
landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik, is definitely at an end. And I was fat as well as forty-five. As I stood up to soap my crutch I had a look at my figure. It's all rot about fat men being unable to see their feet, but it's a fact that when I stand
upright I can only see the front halves of mine. No woman, I thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice at me again, unless she's paid to. Not that at that moment I particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me.

But it struck me that this morning there were reasons why I ought to have been in a better mood. To begin with I wasn't working today. The old car, in which I 'cover' my district (I ought to tell you that I'm in the insurance business. The Flying
Salamander. Life, fire, burglary, twins, shipwreck--everything), was temporarily in dock, and though I'd got to look in at the London office to drop some papers, I was really taking the day off to go and fetch my new false teeth. And besides, there was another business that had been in and out of my mind for some time past. This was that I had seventeen quid which nobody else had heard about--nobody in the family, that is. It had happened this way. A chap in our firm, Mellors by name, had got hold of a book called Astrology applied to Horse-racing which proved that it's all a
question of influence of the planets on the colours the jockey is wearing. Well, in some race or other there was a mare called Corsair's Bride, a complete outsider, but her jockey's colour was green, which it seemed was just the colour for the planets that happened to be in the ascendant. Mellors, who was deeply bitten with this astrology business, was putting several quid on the horse and went down on his knees to me to do the same. In the end, chiefly to shut him up, I risked ten bob, though I don't bet as a general rule. Sure enough Corsair's Bride came home in a walk. I
forget the exact odds, but my share worked out at seventeen quid. By a kind of instinct--rather queer, and probably indicating another landmark in my life--I just quietly put the money in the bank and said nothing to anybody. I'd never done anything of this kind before. A good husband and father would have spent it on a
dress for Hilda (that's my wife) and boots for the kids. But I'd been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.

After I'd soaped myself all over I felt better and lay down in the bath to think about my seventeen quid and what to spend it on. The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskies. I'd just turned on some more hot water and was
thinking about women and cigars when there was a noise like a herd of buffaloes coming down the two steps that lead to the bathroom. It was the kids, of course. Two kids in a house the size of ours is like a quart of beer in a pint mug. There was a frantic stamping outside and then a yell of agony.

'Dadda! I wanna come in!'

'Well, you can't. Clear out!'

'But dadda! I wanna go somewhere!'

'Go somewhere else, then. Hop it. I'm having my bath.'

'Dad-DA! I wanna GO SOME--WHERE!'

No use! I knew the danger signal. The W.C. is in the bathroom--it would be, of course, in a house like ours. I hooked the plug out of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I could. As I opened the door, little Billy--my youngest, aged seven--shot past me, dodging the smack which I aimed at his head. It was only when
I was nearly dressed and looking for a tie that I discovered that my neck was still soapy.

It's a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you've once discovered that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.
....

Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does still, but she's got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and when she's more upset than usual she's got a trick of humping her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire. She's one of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and revolutions, she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up,
and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids' boots are wearing out, and there's another instalment due on the radio--that's Hilda's litany. She gets what I've finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast, and glooming at me, 'But, George, it's very SERIOUS! I don't know what we're going to DO! I don't know where the money's coming from! You don't seem to realize how serious it IS!' and so on and so forth. It's fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won't mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact she'll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.

e-book: Coming Up for Air

THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The fictional autobiography of a SS officer devoted to his duty -- whatever that may be and however unpleasant the work, such as, um, mass murder -- The Kindly Ones is not a great novel, principally because it isn't clear whether Littell subscribes to the notion of the "banality of evil" Hannah Arendt put forward in Eichmann in Jerusalem, as opposed to the notion that the Nazi perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities were evil in some larger than life or monstrous way. This incoherence mars Littell's characterization of the novel's chief protagonist, and hence the book itself: Maximilien Aue is at one level a conscientious and capable Nazi functionary, and if he has a "flaw", it is that he is too honest and sincere, and is thus insensible to the various political currents around him, mastery of which is essential to advancing one's career in any bureaucracy. Aue is also wracked by a traumatic childhood love, namely his sister's; the two were separated by their mother and step-father after their illicit relationship was discovered. Moreover, Aue cannot, even as an adult, seem to forgive his mother for re-marrying after her husband (a World War I veteran drawn to German's burgeoning right wing political scene in the 1920s) goes missing. This Aue -- the vehicle of some rather obvious psychoanalytical cliches -- ends up drawn to Hitler as a sort of replacement father-figure, and winds up a true believer. When exploring the former, Littell's novel is a superb and compelling recreation of the Nazi SS structure, deepening one's appreciation of what Arendt might have meant by her now famous phrase; when exploring the latter, i.e. the erotic/psychological life of Aue, however, The Kindly Ones is just, well, banal, and simply does not justify its thousand-page length.



The above notwithstanding, The Kindly Ones is nevertheless one of the most important novels in years, and ought to be read, principally because of a stunningly plausible recreation of the atmosphere of "total war", and the mentality that enables and implements it. For that achievement, one might forgive the novel its many flaws, not least of them its flimsy and unconvincing evocation of Greek myth (the "kindly ones" of the book's title are the Furies) in a world where industrialized mass slaughter has drained the life from those myths, making them seem quaint. Littell's ability to position his imagination within the Nazi regime is remarkable, leading to a tour de force that is comprehensive and necessarily claustrophobic. Not to mention historically sound: much of the novel makes for a worthy companion-piece to Mark Mazower's indispensable Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rules Europe; both books take the reader deep within the monumental cruelty and imbecility of the Nazi regime, but also within the "normalcy" of the regime. Mazower's work is the more clear-sighted, but Littell's novel is more wounding, imprisoning the reader in a world that is unacceptable, and seemingly inescapable. When we finally do escape from it into Aue's inner life, we are disappointed: his pining for his lost love/sister, his parental baggage, are rather uninteresting, and a weak denouement to a narrative that has taken us from Germany to Ukraine, the Caucasus, Stalingrad, and back to Berlin, all by means of a vantage point that is alien to us. Littell undoubtedly has a point with the Aue family romance, but this reader was past caring by the point The Kindly Ones concludes by delving into it, the novel's anti-climax all the more feeble given the hundreds of pages of "total war" narrative that have preceded it.


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What Murakami talks about when he writes about running

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you are running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can't take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand it anymore is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important part of marathon running.

Almost all books on or about running are written by running experts, or great runners (in some cases by sports journalists detailing some great rivalry or a race). Very few books have been written by your average runner. That's odd because most runners are more likely to be average than not (though everyone thinks he/she is above average). As a result few books talk about what the experience of running and what the activity means to the average runner. Books not about technique, or diets, or workouts, but what it means to lace a pair of shoes and set forth - mostly alone.

Haruki Murakami's novels are not the easiest to read, but What I talk about when I talk about running is not one of them. The book is his memoir on his 20+ years as a runner. How it changed him, and how it helped him become a better writer. Murakami wasn't always a runner. Before he started to run 36-50 miles a week and at least one marathon a year, he ran a jazz bar. Only in his early 30s did he begin to write. After he quit running the bar, he began to write seriously. At that point of time he also began to run. Bit by bit, he built the endurance to run longer and longer distances till one day on a whim he ran laps of the Tokyo Palace to complete 22 miles. According to him, writing is a lot like running. You may have a lot of talent, but you need to sit at your desk and actually write. He writes that many writers are extremely talented -- words and ideas simply flow. But, very rarely do such writers manage to sustain this creative energy. They dry out as they age (or commit suicide) as they have not developed the discipline to write when inspiration doesn't come easily anymore, or they have exhausted their wellspring of ideas. Murakami says that he is one of those writers who has to bore through rock and dig, everyday, to find inspiration. Writing a serious, full-length novel means having to sit at a desk for hours for six months to a year. Most people cannot sustain that. Most people cannot sustain or maintain the training for a marathon either.

Running long races is hard and even if you have done that distance a hundred times, you cannot simply wake up and run well. The body is rather unforgiving and cannot be easily fooled. Like cramming for an exam, I am piling the miles to get ready for the annual Dexter to Ann Arbor half, perhaps a little too quickly. I am banking on the fact that I am still young, and I can log a 20+ mile week at the start of training. I know just too well how painful the last few miles can be if you are not there yet in terms of distance. In the book, Murakami recalls the Chiba marathon (his worst ever) where he made three mistakes - not enough training, not enough training, and not enough training.

It's fairly obvious that any kind of serious runner has to be competitive to some extent. Running races are not like horse races. It doesn't matter who you pass or who passes you; in the end, all you are interested in is -- did you beat yourself? did you surpass your own expectations? did you fight in the last few miles, to get the time you wanted? There is competition, but it's is 'I' vs 'me'. The mind against the body. Writing is also like that. You don't really compete against somebody. Everyone pretty much runs their own race. As a writer, you have to find your own voice, hit your own stride.

The above is all true - the pain, the discipline, the competition. Yet, like any runner knows, that's not just why runners run. At some point, Murakami developed runner's blues - he did not feel like running as much as before. Then one day, in Boston, as he stood by the Charles River seeing the boats in the water and the sky. The desire for running came back again. He answers a fundamental question that usually bothers only non-runners - Why do people run? To live longer? To be healthier. One answer is to live life to the fullest. The other is that there is something beautiful to be out there in the open, hearing the sounds around you punctuated by your own breathing. At some point, you hit the 'zone' where the mind is perfectly calm and the legs roll like they were not a part of you.

How Fiction Works - James Wood

One of the most extraordinary experiences was reading John Ciardi's How Does A Poem Mean? Ciardi, a poet and translator, knew enough about words to not title the book as: "What Does a Poem Mean?", or "How Poetry Works", and that makes a world of a difference. The book completely transformed how I read and perceive poetry. Ciardi wanted readers to understand that a poem is 'a performance', and the key to enjoying or appreciating one is to see how the poet goes about that performance; focusing not on what it means, but on how it goes about getting to meaning and how it goes beyond. Meanings are like seeing ripples in a pond.

James Wood is acknowledged to be one of the best literary critics writing for the general audience today. He has been praised by his peers for writing better reviews of the books than the books themselves. His recent review of Naipaul's biography and of the man himself is characteristic of his writing (Wounder and Wounded): clear, crisp prose without sentiment obscuring the critical analysis of a writer and his work.

In “The Enigma of Arrival,” the long book that Naipaul wrote about the Wiltshire countryside in which he has lived, intermittently, since 1971, there is a searing parenthesis in which he tells us about two derelict cottages he has been converting into a new home. One day, an old lady was brought by her grandson to look at the cottage where she once spent a summer, and, confused by Naipaul’s renovations, thought she had come to the wrong place. Naipaul was “ashamed,” he writes, and so “I pretended I didn’t live there.” But what is the source of the shame? Is it his building project or his very presence in the English countryside? He lives there but is ashamed to live there; the house for Mr. Naipaul in England, as for Mr. Biswas in Trinidad, is a homeless house. The man is still unaccommodated.

After reading that review, I was persuaded to read James Wood's book - How Fiction Works that was published earlier last year. James Wood's little red book written in short sequentially numbered paragraphs attempts to unlock the mysteries of 'how fiction comes about' to the common reader. After we agree that the 'common reader' of this book is to a little more uncommon, James Wood has largely succeeded in his aims.

What I liked about the book is that James Wood writes as a reader, one who really enjoys reading, and not as a critic who simply relishes tearing books and their authors apart. There is a delicious footnote in the book where he ponders over the metaphysical question of "Why do humans read? Does it provide an evolutionary advantage". His opinion is that we simply do, and we enjoy it. You feel connected to his career as happy reader when you hear him share his personal anecdotes about reading to his daughter, attending a concert with his wife, or his experience as a teenager reading books.

We grow as readers, and twenty-year olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it

Wood said that all the passages in the book were taken from the books in his study, which some critics took as an oblique boast. Perhaps that may be true, but from a reader's perspective it is best that an author writes about the world he or she knows. There is no doubt on that account. The intimacy that Wood shares with the books he discusses makes me wonder if he sleeps with them. After reading his dissection of subtleties of language and detail in a short passage from Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas I felt that my own reading of the book a few years ago could be likened to: a hastily consumed the meal in the confines of a car when I should have been eating it at a table course-by-course over a few hours savoring every morsel. Wood is great reader at the level of the line. He says that he simply loves this line by Virginia Woolf:

The day waves yellow with all its crops.

. He beings with Narration and then breaks down the commonly-understood unreliable first-person narrative and the reliable third-person narrative by showing that they are respectively not as unreliable or reliable as made out to be. Using a lovely example from Henry James's What Masie Knew, Wood demonstrates the flexibility of free indirect speech, a device that allows the author to step into the voice and thoughts of the character without intrusion, and then step out again. In a sentence like, 'He sat through the concert as idiot tears filled his eyes', the author can step into the mind of the character without intruding with a sentence like,'He sat through the concert thinking "I must be an idiot to cry through this piece"'.

In the chapter on Consciousness he contrasts three characters - King David, Macbeth and Dostoevesky's Raskolnikov to show how the modern novel is interested in the the private thoughts of characters as never before. We only hear King David speak to others, we never hear him think to himself. Macbeth only thinks when he soliloquizes, and has to voice his motives. Compared to the modern Raskolnikov who is extensively shown to be thinking, though we are not often told his motives; we infer them. The 20th century character refuses to stay stable, always "in psychological torment....the chronic instability of the self".

In an oblique way, Wood admits that poets have masterful control of language and writes that "like all great novelists, he was a great reader of poetry". Earlier in the book, he calls every novelist is a poet-manque. The whole chapter on language can be substituted by any book on poetry appreciation. Of course, Ciardi's is the best. Personally, I find that reading a poem often takes longer than reading a book, because in a few words there is so much going on. There are so many shades of meaning and diction matters much more in poetry than in prose. At the same time, he dislikes the obsessive Nabokovian stylistic intrusion in novels.

In the last chapter (Realism) Wood the reader disappears, and the literary critic writing for other literary critics rears his ugly head. He spends a number of pages defending realism in fiction from critics who have savaged the whole idea as a set of outmoded conventions and that fiction can never say anything 'real' about reality. Maybe realism needs defendind, but his arguments would be better in literary seminar or journal. Thankfully, he writes at the end of the chapter that fiction is about 'lifeness', which he summarizes in a quote from George Eliot:

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow human-men beyond our common lot

I thought all the debate about realism is really superfluous and is correctly the domain of fusty academics. I tend to go with Ciardi's assertion that what matters is the performance and the writer achieves that masterful gymnastic display. What words are used, what is described, and what is left out.

Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov

Browsing through bookshelves turns up unnoticed gems, works that are less well-known, but not lesser in any way. My earlier experience with Orwell's Burmese Days was a case in point. I was intrigued by Mikhail Bulgakov after first hearing about him a few months ago. He remained in the Soviet Union not for reasons of patriotism, but because he felt that a Russian writer had to live in Russia to write about it. Much of his work was banned and not published in his lifetime for being too critical of the Soviet regime. If Stalin had not personally liked him, Bulgakov would have ended up in a gulag or been executed long before dying of natural causes in 1940 at the age of 48. Most of his work remained in his desk drawer only to be published twenty years or more after his death. The early editions were highly censored and it was only in the early 80s that Bulgakov was considered to 'safe' enough to openly published. Of course, his fame and popularity was well-known via the samizdat. See (Wiki entry and kirijasto).

I was looking for his masterpiece The Master and Margarita which happened to be checked out, and I settled for his earlier work - The Heart of A Dog. It was published in 1925, less than a decade after the revolution, and it is remarkable how prescient the book is. The chief character is Prof. Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky, a world renowned scientist and surgeon. In his latest experiment he takes the testicles and hypophysis of a common criminal and successfully grafts them onto a mongrel. The dog slowly sheds off his 'dogness' and slowly becomes a human. The professor and his assistant, Dr. Bormenthal are first delighted with their scientific success and then horrified by the results. He cannot seem to evolve any more from a slovenly, drunken individual, but does manage to get a job as a cat exterminator in the Soviet system.

In the end, the professor concludes that this procedure excites only physiologists and scientists, but produced nothing of any consequence in the grand scheme of things. He says that instead of using a criminal, if he had used a scientist or poet, that would not a be great contribution to society either. Even lowly peasants produce geniuses in the natural course of events.

The professor represents the intelligentsia and he has no patience for the tom-foolery of the proletariat with their daily singing and collections for starving children in parts of the world. He says that the best way to ruin your appetite is to speak of medicine or Bolshevism at the dinner table. He shares his observation that patients who read the Pravda lost weight. His scientific knowledge or expertise is not valued by the local youth Comrade Shvonder, who is the chairman of the apartment complex, and who wants to take over several the professor's rooms cause he believes that he doesn't need all of them. The professor's insistence that having a dining room is critical to his mode of life is not something that Shvonder sympathetic to. The professor is as much a part of the system that he despises and needs to call one of his well-connected friends to get rid of Shvonder's socialist plans.

The self-styled Poligraph Poligrafovich Sharikov, dog turned human, in the meanwhile gets drunk, fights with his 'father' the professor, steals money, finds support from Shvonder to obtain papers for his legal existence, harasses women and spouts Engels. The dog is a symbol for the proletariat who are artificially being raised out of their sub-human existence by grafting them onto a different life. Despite the best intentions, that cannot result in anything but chaos. In a telling episode, the professor complains about how all the galoshes got stolen right after the revolution. There was no breakdown in law and order in the pre-Soviet times.

Sharikov, as he grows more human, turns into a complete menace. The professor quite sadly remarks that the Sharikov no longer has the heart of a dog, but the heart of a human. Bulgakov presents the cynical view that moving up the evolutionary chain also increases the capacity for mischief and evil. The professor then undoes the procedure on the mongrel Sharik who returns to being playful dog and who only thinks of his next meal.

In this book, Bulgakov criticizes the anti-intellectual atmosphere that the Soviet regime was creating, and also mocking the attempts to re-make the proletariat. While the professor has scientific freedom, he has no freedom to say what his wishes about the system. Sharik was fine as a mongrel, but in trying to remake him, they created a Frankenstein that would soon be out of control. At the same time, Bulgakov also mocks the science, the pompousness and sheltered life of academics, and the self-congratulatory nature of scientific discoveries. The professor despite all his disdain for the regime has to fall back on his friends in high places to resolve issues with the pesky Comrade Shvonder.

Bulgakov's attempt to publish criticism of the Soviet regime under the guise of science fiction was not successful and like most of his work remain unpublished for decades after his death.

Where have all the vowels gone?

Christian Bok has written a book - Eunoia that contains five chapters and uses only one vowel in the entire chapter.

Mr Bok believes his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language.

Forms are important in fiction and more so in poetry. While one may not agree with Robert Frost's assertion that free verse is like "playing tennis without a net", there have to be some bounds. Even the greatest abstract painting needs to have the limitation of a canvas. Great art is about surpassing the given limitations and working with a limited set of tools you make something great out of seemingly nothing. All of English literature has used only 26 letters.

Of course, rules are artificial but it's not just about surpassing limitations. Christian Bok takes rules and limitations to an absurd extreme in his latest attempt. From the excerpts I really doubt that there is any genuine merit, other than it being a mere intellectual exercise.

Of two writers who excel in wordplay I can think of two - Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie. Seth's wordplay is less obvious, more subtle and cerebral, while Rushdie's is more clever and immediately enjoyable. Of course, this stuff is all fluff, a mere accompaniment to their main story. They do have something substantial to say. When the chief aim is to satisfy some arbitrary rules, then you are not telling a story but are simply just checking off little boxes. I greatly suspect that Bok has managed to check off the boxes and still succeeded in telling a coherent and compelling story. The chief problem is that too many embellishments are distracting and interfere with the story itself.

For Bok's book, the writing is on the wall:
Books like these generate headlines for a week, then get consigned to a box and are largely forgotten. The only people who would care to remember are trivia enthusiasts. Of course, the relevant details are the the title, author and the interesting factoid. The eunoia, or 'beautiful thinking', of the labored words and sentences will be forgotten and inconsequential.