Wednesday, October 15, 2025

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson



Long-lost cousins with vastly different upbringings
When Europeans first discovered the Americas, it was the meeting of two vastly different cultures, two populations that were entirely alien to one another. In his 2012 book, The Great Divide, British intellectual historian Peter Watson investigates how and why the peoples of the Old and New Worlds developed so differently. Watson makes the case that differing environmental conditions in the two hemispheres—climate, topography, flora and fauna—forged two diverging trajectories of civilization and culture. In The Great Divide, he has compiled compelling evidence to that effect into a sweeping overview of human history. Some factors that he considers are the role that natural disasters played in the creation of gods and religions, how different flora and fauna affected the rates at which agriculture and cities developed, how the use of psychotropic plants influenced cultural ideologies, and why was human sacrifice such a widespread practice in the Americas?

As I’ve come to learn from previously reading his books Ideas and The Modern Mind, Watson is a master generalist who can pull together concepts and data from a wide variety of fields in the sciences, humanities, and the arts and unify them into a remarkably cohesive whole. The Great Divide, however, is pretty much all about archeology, anthropology, and paleontology. I thought this book would have something to say about the cultures of the Old World and the New after the first transatlantic contact, but with the exception of some brief coverage of the Spanish Conquest, it is entirely concerned with events prior to 1492. Watson’s investigation begins with the dawn of humans and spends a lot of time in the Ice Age. Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius don’t show up until chapter 18, and the Spaniards don’t reach America until the 23rd and final chapter. The Great Divide is basically a comprehensive summary of world archaeology, as much as we knew in 2012. I enjoy reading about archaeology, but because I read quite a bit on that subject, a lot of this was review for me. Nevertheless, as is always the case with Watson’s books, he enriches the general narrative with plenty of interesting facts and connections that will be new and intriguing to most general readers.

If the purpose of this book is to compare and contrast the pre-1492 trajectories of the Old and New Worlds, it is not entirely successful. Watson presents a few chapters on the history of the Old World, followed by a couple chapters on the history of the New World, and back and forth, and back and forth. Only in the conclusion of the book, when recapping all the evidence presented, does Watson really take the time to make side-by-side comparisons between the two domains and draw generalizations and theories from their differences. The two hemispheres, not surprisingly, do not get equal time and consideration. It seems like the book is about two-thirds Old World and one-third New World, simply because there’s so much more pre-16th-century information available on Eurasia than there is on the Americas.

The Great Divide is an excellent synthesis of human history that draws interesting parallels and deviations between the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This book will not, however, captivate the general reader to the same extent as Charles Mann’s excellent 1491 or perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I haven’t read, but it was a popular bestseller). Although Watson does generate similar wow-factor by delivering insightful revelations to curious readers, The Great Divide has more of a textbook execution to it, rather than the more investigative science journalism feel of Mann’s work. Notwithstanding, if you are at all interested in the ancient history of world cultures, this book’s breadth and depth make it a must-read.

The ebook claims that an Appendix 2 is available online at the Harper Collins website, but it’s not there, and that’s really annoying.  

Monday, October 13, 2025

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian



An aimless wanderer (or two) in Southwest China
Chinese-French writer Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in China in 1940, emigrated to France in 1997, and writes in the Chinese language. His novel Soul Mountain was published in 1990.

An unnamed writer of literature has gotten into trouble with the authorities in Beijing for the controversial content of his writings. He leaves the capital and takes an extended journey out west to Sichuan, sometimes venturing over the border into Tibet and other surrounding areas. He lived in this region when he was younger, so he knows much of the local history and folklore. This writer tells the people he meets that he’s looking for material for an upcoming literary work, but that really just seems like an excuse for him to do some soul searching. He gravitates towards remnants of pre-modern China—old-growth forests, isolated Daoist temples, and lonely mountaintops—and he searches for a legendary location called Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Along the way he meets a woman, also a solo traveler, and they become romantically, or at least sexually, involved. Actually, there is more than one woman over the course of the book, but there seems to be one who predominates over the others. It’s unclear what this woman is doing while he’s off visiting historical and archaeological sites. Is she just waiting in the hotel for him to return? Or, perhaps, are the chapters arranged in nonchronological order?

One of the annoying aspects of Soul Mountain is that none of the characters have names. At times, stories are related in which historical and mythical personages are named, but no one in the primary present-tense narrative has a name, just “the woman,” “the lawyer,” “my friend,” etc. Even more frustrating is the way that Gao switches the narration from first-person to second-person seemingly indiscriminately. The protagonist is known only as “I” or “you.” Later in the book there’s a “he,” and I don’t know who the hell was supposed to be the antecedent for that pronoun.

The summary above is how I read the novel, but I found out afterwards from Wikipedia that “I” and “you” are supposed to be two different characters, and Soul Mountain is actually two novels intertwined. If I have to find that out from Wikipedia, then the author hasn’t done his job very well. In chapter 72, Gao breaks the fourth wall and briefly touches upon his use of pronouns, but it’s the very definition of too little, too late. I think most people reading Soul Mountain (in its English translation, at least) would interpret the book exactly as I did.


The novel is set in the 1980s. The Cultural Revolution in China was over by then, but it is mentioned frequently by the characters as a recent memory. Soul Mountain is critical of many aspects of life under Chinese Communism—restrictions of civil liberties, unwieldy bureaucracy, degradation of the environment, censorship of literature and journalism, cruel and unusual punishment, and more. I liked Soul Mountain for what it taught me about China. It functions as an insider’s travelogue to this region of China during a certain period in history, but I could have probably gotten the same experience from a Lonely Planet guidebook or some travel memoir. I enjoyed the travel chapters much more than the chapters that chronicle the relations between the writer and his female partner(s). The sex scenes are off-putting, not because of any graphic sexual content but because of the odd and disturbing conversations they have. As a fictional narrative, there isn’t much of a novel here at all, just a collection of scenes. At first, it seems as if an actual story will be told, but as the book progresses it gets more abstract until Gao is just writing down seemingly random thoughts. I didn’t care about the characters, who never seemed to develop or progress or learn anything over time.

Friday, October 10, 2025

Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines



African-American novel of Southern racial realism
Ernest J. Gaines is an African-American writer known for his novels The Autobiography of Jane Pittman and the Oprah’s Book Club selection A Lesson Before Dying, both of which were made into Emmy-winning TV movies. Gaines, the recipient of many literary awards and honorary doctorates, was born to a sharecropping family on a Louisiana plantation. His 1967 novel Of Love and Dust, is set on a plantation outside Baton Rouge in the 1940s.


Though slavery in the American South officially ended roughly four score years prior to the time of this story, the Hebert Plantation employs many Black laborers through debt bondage, a system of indentured servitude very similar to slavery. Marshall Hebert, the current owner, also acquires workers from the local prisons. A young Black man named Marcus Payne is sent to jail for murdering another young Black man in a barfight. Marshall buys Marcus’s bond, releasing him from incarceration. In exchange, Marshall gets five years of plantation labor out of Marcus. Marcus is a proud man with a chip on his shoulder who refuses to bow down to White men in power. He insists it’s only a matter of time before he escapes the plantation and runs to freedom. As a result of his cockiness and insubordination, Marcus draws the ire of the Cajun overseer, Sydney Bonbon, who works Marcus harder than the other workers in an attempt to break his spirit. The novel is narrated by James Kelly, a Black man and veteran worker on the Hebert Plantation who “onboards” Marcus into the plantation workforce, acts as his supervisor during the farm work, and looks after him in off hours. Kelly and Marcus develop a relationship that’s part friendly and part adversarial.

There ends up being more love than dust in this novel. That is to say, it starts out as a muckraking exposé about the exploitation of agricultural laborers, but it soon turns into a story more about the racial politics of love and sex. In 1940s Louisiana, White man and Black woman is OK, as long as nobody talks about it. Black man and White woman, however, is not only frowned upon but also possibly a capital offense for the Black man involved.

Gaines has written Of Love and Dust in a very down-to-earth realist style, with little modernist experimentation. Much like the writing of John Steinbeck, it is modern in the sense that it deals with the modern world, modern themes, and modern psychology, but the prose is straightforward and not in any way linguistically opaque like William Faulkner’s depictions of the South. This is not a simple black-and-white tale of violence and oppression between overseers and enslaved. There are complex motivations here and some sly scheming going on as characters, both Black and White, jockey for an advantage in this power struggle. At times the plot twists, as well as the cleverly written but period-realistic dialogue, reminded me of an Elmore Leonard novel.

Of Love and Dust has a problem with its pacing. The middle portion of the novel is rather drawn-out and repetitive, to the point where the reader is ready to say, “OK, I get it. Let’s move on.” The ending, however, feels rushed and crammed into the last ten pages. Suspense builds to the point where the reader has a right to expect an epic confrontation, but what’s delivered doesn’t quite live up to expectations. But that’s realism. A more thrilling conclusion might have put this novel into the realm of a potboiler or adventure story when it really belongs more in the domain of tragedy. The slice of history depicted here deserves more than a formulaic story of villains and victims, and Gaines commendably delivers something much more nuanced, complex, and authentic.

Thursday, October 9, 2025

Old Books by (Mostly) Dead Nobel Laureates 2025

Congratulations to László Krasznahorkai!

It’s that time of year again when Old Books by Dead Guys congratulates the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and celebrates Nobel laureates of the past. It was announced this morning that Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 prize. Every year at this time, we present the ever-growing cumulative list of works by Nobel laureates that have been reviewed at this blog. New authors added to the list this year are Germany’s Thomas Mann, Hungary’s Imre Kertesz, and Elias Canetti representing both Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. In addition, I've added new entries from Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, and José Saramago, and I continue to chip away at the complete works of Eugene O’Neill, Hermann Hesse, and John Steinbeck. Check out the authors below and click on the titles to read the complete reviews.

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1903 Nobel) Norway 🇳🇴

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905 Nobel) Poland 🇵🇱


Rudyard Kipling (1907 Nobel) United Kingdom (born in India) 🇬🇧

Selma Lagerlöf (1909 Nobel) Sweden 🇸🇪


Paul von Heyse (1910 Nobel) Germany 🇩🇪


Maurice Maeterlinck (1911 Nobel) Belgium 🇧🇪


Gerhart Hauptmann (1912 Nobel) Germany 🇩🇪


Rabindranath Tagore (1913 Nobel) India 🇮🇳

Romain Rolland (1915 Nobel) France 🇫🇷

Verner von Heidenstam (1916 Nobel) Sweden 🇸🇪

Henrik Pontoppidan (1917 Nobel) Denmark 🇩🇰

Carl Spitteler (1919 Nobel) Switzerland 🇨🇭

Knut Hamsun (1920 Nobel) Norway 🇳🇴

Anatole France (1921 Nobel) France 🇫🇷


Wladyslaw Reymont (1924 Nobel) Poland 🇵🇱


George Benard Shaw (1925 Nobel) Ireland 🇮🇪


Henri Bergson (1927 Nobel) France 🇫🇷

Sigrid Undset (1928 Nobel) Norway 🇳🇴
  • Jenny (1911) - 2.5 stars

Thomas Mann (1929 Nobel) Germany 🇩🇪

Sinclair Lewis (1930 Nobel) United States of America
 🇺🇸

John Galsworthy (1932 Nobel) United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Ivan Bunin (1933 Nobel) France (born in Russia) 🇫🇷 🇷🇺

Luigi Pirandello (1934 Nobel) Italy 🇮🇹

Eugene O’Neill (1936 Nobel) United States of America 🇺🇸


Pearl S. Buck (1938 Nobel) United States of America (raised in China) 🇺🇸


Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939 Nobel) Finland 🇫🇮

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944 Nobel) Denmark 🇩🇰

Hermann Hesse (1946 Nobel) Switzerland (born in Germany) 🇨🇭 🇩🇪

Bertrand Russell (1950 Nobel) United Kingdom 🇬🇧


Pär Lagerkvist (1951 Nobel) Sweden 🇸🇪


François Mauriac (1952 Nobel) 
France 🇫🇷

Ernest Hemingway (1954 Nobel) United States of America 🇺🇸

Halldór Laxness (1955 Nobel) Iceland 🇮🇸

Albert Camus (1957 Nobel) France (born in Algeria) 🇫🇷

Borris Pasternak
 (1958 Nobel) Russia (Soviet Union) 🇷🇺

John Steinbeck 
(1962 Nobel) United States of America 🇺🇸

Mikhail Sholokhov (1965 Nobel) Soviet Union 🇷🇺

Samuel Beckett (1969 Nobel) Ireland 🇮🇪

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1970 Nobel) Soviet Union 🇷🇺

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1974 Nobel) Guatemala 🇬🇹

Elias Canetti (1981 Nobel) Bulgaria/United Kingdom 🇧🇬 🇬🇧

Gabriel García Marquez (1982 Nobel) Colombia 🇨🇴

William Golding (1983 Nobel) United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Wole Soyinka (1986 Nobel) Nigeria 🇳🇬

Camilo José Cela (1989 Nobel) Spain 🇪🇸

Octavio Paz (1990 Nobel) Mexico 🇲🇽

José Saramago (1998 Nobel) 
Portugal 🇵🇹

Günter Grass (1999 Nobel) Germany 🇩🇪

Imre Kertész (2002 Nobel) Hungary 🇭🇺

Orhan Pamuk (2006 Nobel) 
Turkey 🇹🇷
  • Snow (2002) - 3.5 stars

Mario Vargas Llosa (2010 Nobel) Peru 🇵🇪

Mo Yan 
(2012 Nobel) China 🇨🇳


Patrick Modiano (2014 Nobel) France 🇫🇷

Bob Dylan (2016 Nobel) United States of America 🇺🇸

Olga Tokarczuk (2018 Nobel) Poland 🇵🇱