What Shall We Do? by Leo Tolstoy

Thought-provoking utopianism mixed with drunk-uncle curmudgeonliness

Leo Tolstoy is renowned as one of the world’s greatest novelists, but he also wrote short stories, plays, and nonfiction works. In the latter category, Tolstoy was quite prolific as an essayist and philosopher. His book What Shall We Do? was first published in 1886. In this nonfiction work, Tolstoy addresses the topic of poverty and the inequality of the class system. What Shall We Do? has also been published in English as What Must Be Done?, What Then Must We Do?, or What is to Be Done?

Tolstoy was born to a wealthy aristocratic family. He owned a few thousand acres of land worked by over 300 serfs. Around 1870, Tolstoy had a “born-again” experience. Although not a proponent of organized religion, he developed a philosophical conviction that one should live one’s life in accordance with the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus Christ. From What Shall We Do?, the specifics of Tolstoy’s theological beliefs are not entirely clear (I believe he covers that ground more thoroughly in his 1884 book What I Believe), but he definitely advocates the emulation of Christ’s life by giving up one’s riches for the benefit of others. His ethical views bring to mind those of the Christian socialists or Christian anarchists.

The first dozen chapters or so of What Shall We Do? feel like a waste of time, quite frankly. Tolstoy relates how he discovered poverty while residing in Moscow. He visits the housing projects of the poor and converses with beggars on the street. He tries to come up with charitable endeavors to alleviate the sufferings of the urban poor, but none of his attempts are satisfyingly successful. He asks his rich friends to donate money to the cause, and they all agree to do so, but then never deliver the funds they pledged. There is an annoying disingenuous to the way that Tolstoy discusses poverty in these chapters, acting as if he were a naive country boy who never realized that rich people or poor people existed before he hit the age of 50.

After this lackluster intro, however, Tolstoy starts to get into the nuts and bolts of his views on political economy. He discusses at great length the “division of labor,” which he sees as an excuse for the wealthy and privileged to avoid doing their share of the work in society. Whenever it is pointed out that some people labor like mules while others perform no labor at all, the reason given for this inequality is always “the division of labor.” Tolstoy sees no valid reason why the wealthy, the clergy, scientists and artists should be excused from manual labor, or why they are financially rewarded for doing so. In Tolstoy’s view, everyone should grow their own food, for starters, and contribute a fair share of manual labor required to legitimately justify their existence. Science and art are things should be done in one’s spare time and should not be funded by tax dollars. Tolstoy argues with an old-fashioned curmudgeonliness. In What Shall We Do?, he comes across as anti-government, anti-religion, anti-science, anti-art, and anti-birth control, among many other antis. He calls to mind American thinker Wendell Berry in that they both seem to think we would all be better off if we reverted to some quasi-Amish lifestyle. 

Nevertheless, Tolstoy has some very interesting things to say about money, the exploitation of labor, and income inequality. One of his more interesting ideas is that everyone should spend a few hours of each day performing manual labor, intellectual labor, and artisan handicraft labor. That may be an unrealistically utopian idea for today’s world, but it’s a utopia I might enjoy living in. Overall, I found What Shall We Do? to be a confusing mash-up of liberal and conservative ideas, but not without glimpses of enlightening wisdom. You’re bound to find something to agree with here, but it’s unlikely you’ll agree with all of it.
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Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History by Joel Selvin

From genius to nightmare in a few albums

Sly and the Family Stone still get some radio airplay on classic rock stations, but most people under the age of 60 are unlikely to remember or comprehend the level of fame and critical acclaim this band achieved in their heyday. Formed and led by the incomparable musician and songwriter Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart), the Family Stone was one of the first prominent bands to feature black and white artists, and men and women, making rock and roll music together. And no one was a token member. While the band was in its prime, Sly made sure everyone got their juicy riffs and solos. When people my age praise what a musical genius Prince was, I can’t help thinking Prince learned 90% of what he knew from Sly and the Family Stone.

First published in 1998, Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, is a biography of the band compiled by rock journalist Joel Selvin. The text of this oral history is assembled from interviews with about forty different persons who lived and/or worked with Sly and the band. Notably absent from the interviewees is Sly himself. It would have been nice if he were present here to defend himself, but given that he’s been a recluse since the 1980s, that would be an unrealistic expectation. All of the other members of the Family Stone participated in Selvin’s project, with the exception of “Little Sister” Rose Stone. KC and Alpha Stewart, parents to Sly, Freddie, Rose, and Vaetta Stewart/Stone, tell their side of the story, as does Sly’s ex-wife. Most of the other participants are managers, bodyguards, record company execs, and other members of the entourage. There aren’t many big-name stars among the speakers, but Bobby Womack, Grace Slick, and the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart are among the few notable rock and rollers who testify.

I’ve always found oral history to be an excellent format for rock and roll biography, especially when the artist in question has lived a scary and terrible life (see many episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music). A prime example would be the formidable I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, but in terms of self-destruction, paranoia, and violent behavior, Sly may have Warren beat. The story the participants tell here is really a shocking and tragic tale.

Sly was a musical genius who wrote songs and produced records even as a teenager. He was a successful radio DJ in San Francisco before he decided to form his own band. Sly and the Family Stone blew the crowd away at Woodstock and put out classic albums like Stand! and There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Sly’s songs told of a better way of life in which love and brotherhood triumphed over oppression and hate.

The story behind the scenes, however, was much darker. Sly turned into a control freak, not just in the studio but outside as well. With escalating fame came escalating drug use, including a proclivity for PCP. Members of the band often lived together in Sly’s homes amidst his large collections of guns and dogs. (There is a dog story in this book that is one of the most incredibly harrowing scenes I’ve ever read.) Sly’s bodyguards behaved like mob goons, allegedly beating up band members. Sly’s derangement got to the point where he considered showing up for concerts to be optional. Over time he isolated himself more and more, until the Family Stone became a one-man band. This book is more than just a hatchet session by the people interviewed. Despite the broken hearts, physical injuries, and shattered careers, one can sense that they truly cared about Sly. His decline was a tremendous squandering of artistic potential. This oral history is definitely not a feel-good story, but it does make for a riveting and eye-opening read.
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Werner Drewes: Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking by Martina Roudabush Norelli

Biographical interview with a pioneering abstractionist

I dabble a bit in printmaking—linocuts and woodcuts—so I always keep an eye open for good books on the subject, and “new” (to me) artists to discover. I recently became aware of Werner Drewes (1899-1985), a prolific German-American artist who produced several hundred prints, most of them etchings and woodcuts (as well as over a thousand paintings). After stumbling upon a collection of Drewes’s work online, I was really blown away by his range of styles and subject matter, his skillfully aggressive style of carving, and his bold yet sensitive taste in color and design. Drewes studied at the Bauhaus in Germany before emigrating to America in 1930. His work ranges in style from German expressionism to abstract expressionism, with occasional touches of cubism and surrealism.

As far as I know, only a few books have ever been published about Drewes, and all of them are out of print. The best of these books is the massive tome Werner Drewes: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints, compiled by Ingrid Rose. Like most catalogue raisonnés, however, a used copy will set you back at least 80 bucks. The runner-up, and a distant second in terms of size and coverage (only 56 pages), is Werner Drewes: Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking, an exhibition catalog published by the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art in 1984.

If you are looking for a beautiful portfolio of Drewes’s art, this book isn’t it. Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking contains only three color plates, 26 black and white images of Drewes’s prints, and a few photos of the artist at different stages in his life. The exhibition for which this catalog was published was about evenly split between etchings and woodcuts, so the illustrations in the book are about evenly split as well. Fortunately, if you want to look at Drewes’s art, you can view hundreds of his works in full color online, either at drewesfineart.com or at the website of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).

The main attraction of this book is the text. Drewes was still alive when this exhibition was held, and the bulk of the catalog is devoted to an interview with the artist. In this interview, Drewes discusses his childhood, his artistic education, his world travels, and his career as an artist and teacher. This first-hand account by Drewes is likely the most authoritative source on his life and the influences behind his art. In the Bauhaus, Drewes studied with Johannes Itten, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Decades before abstract expressionism became big, Drewes was part of a small group of American artists who pioneered purely abstract art. Though he never became a household name like some of his Bauhaus contemporaries, Drewes nevertheless built a solid career as an artist and educator. He led a very adventurous and inspiring life.

Interviewer Martina Roudabush Norelli doesn’t ask all of the questions I would have asked. Sometimes the interview reads more like a curriculum vitae than a discussion of an artist’s methods and philosophy. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of interesting content to this conversation that makes this a worthwhile read for any fan of Drewes’s prints. This may not be the visual feast that this talented and innovative artist deserves, but considering the scarcity of information on Drewes, this book at least serves up a satisfying snack.
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They Walked Like Men by Clifford D. Simak

Newspaperman uncovers far-fetched invasion plot

When I was younger, I read a couple of short stories by Clifford D. Simak, but he didn’t really register on my radar until Open Road Media started re-releasing his works in ebook format in 2015. Since then, having really enjoyed Open Road’s series The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, I decided to read and review Simak’s complete works. I was forced to hunt down some obscure paperbacks, but Open Road has finally caught up with me and published just about all of Simak’s work in ebook format. Their most recent release is his 1962 novel They Walked Like Men, which also happens to be my final read in Simak’s extensive catalog of fiction. I probably could’ve ended on a better book, as this is not one of his best novels, but Simak’s science fiction is at the very least considerably above average, and They Walked Like Men is worth the time spent for Simak fans.

While his career as a science fiction author lasted more than half a century, Simak also had a day job as a journalist and editor for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. His stories often take place in the Midwest, and newspapermen frequently figure as protagonists. In this case, the city is unnamed, but it might very well be modeled after Minneapolis. Parker Graves is a reporter for the city’s daily newspaper. Graves and his fellow journalists cover issues of local importance, such as the closing of the hometown department store or the scarcity of available residential real estate in the metro area. Graves’s girlfriend Joy, also a reporter, gets stuck with more mundane fare like a man who breeds tame skunks for pets. Little did anyone suspect that all these various threads would be tangled in a sinister plot that threatens not only the city but the entire world.

In the novel’s first chapter, Graves has an encounter with an alien creature. In my opinion, Simak jumped the gun a little too early with such a startling reveal, but the title of the novel kind of gives away the general gist of the story anyway. This is a mystery/thriller in which the villains are nonhuman invaders. They Walked Like Men is a very entertaining and engaging novel while you’re reading it, but it’s one of those books that when you get to the end you think to yourself, there were some aspects of that story that were rather dumb. This is not a comedy, though it does have some comedic moments. In fact, this is perhaps one of Simak’s more deadly serious novels. Even though this is science fiction, however, some degree of logical believability is reasonably expected, and this story definitely lacks in the credibility department. The physical aspect of the creatures is conceived and handled very well and leads to some thrilling and suspenseful scenes. Their grand strategy for taking over the world, however, defies logic, not only the logic of our real world but even the rules that the aliens have established for themselves. The plot brings up some thought-provoking issues of economics and politics, but the ideas feel a bit half-baked, as if Simak didn’t thoroughly think them through.

enjoyable read than probably 90 percent of the sci-fi authors out there. Every Simak book is worth reading, though some more than others. If They Walked Like Men comes up as a Kindle Daily Deal, by all means buy it, but make sure you also read some of his better novels like City, Way Station, Mastodonia, The Werewolf Principle, and The Visitors.

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Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght

Moderately interesting field-work memoir

In 2005, Jonathan Slaght was working on a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. To achieve his degree, he formulated a research project to study the Blakiston’s fish owl. This majestic bird, the largest owl species in the world, lives in the forests of Eastern Asia. Slaght decided to conduct his research in the Russian province of Primorye, along the Pacific coast northeast of Vladivostok. Though an American by birth, through his father’s occupation and some time in the Peace Corps Slaght had previously lived in Primorye, spoke the language, and was familiar with the region’s customs. Over the course of the next few years, Slaght made repeated trips to Primorye to find Blakiston’s fish owls, capture them, and fit them with radio telemetry devices to track their movements, with the end goal of crafting a conservation plan for the fish owl and completing his dissertation. Slaght’s 2020 book Owls of the Eastern Ice is a memoir of his time spent in Primorye conducting this research project.

Owls of the Eastern Ice is basically a 24-page National Geographic article that has been drawn out into a 300-page book. There isn’t enough of interest here to merit such a lengthy treatment. At least half of the book consists of Slaght and his team looking for owls and not finding any. The reader gleans a little bit of a feel for what life is like in this remote portion of Russia, but Slaght doesn’t delve much deeper into the culture than many episodes of drinking in hunting cabins. The most memorable passages of the book involve Slaght and his Russian colleagues escaping some natural threat or obstacle, such as a flood or blizzard.

Other than the fish owls that Slaght is searching for, he doesn’t offer much discussion of the rest of the ecosystem beyond a few mentions of other species spotted here and there. The reader never really gets the feeling of what it’s like to be among these forests. Although this is a book about nature, it’s not really nature writing. A naturalist like Bernd Heinrich might combine concrete bird science with broader Thoreau-like musings, but Slaght’s book is strictly focused on his research. For other zoologists engaged in projects involving the tagging and radio-tracking of animals, this might be a helpful case study in methods and techniques. As an average bird-lover, however, I was disappointed to find that I learned more about capturing fish owls than I did about the birds themselves. This is a perfectly sound volume on an ornithological research project, but I’m not sure why the publisher decided to give this book the full-on trade book treatment and market it to general readers.

I envy Slaght’s adventures: exploring remote wilderness in a foreign land, observing beautiful birds, uncovering previously unknown facts about them, and working to conserve wildlife. His writing, however, while exhibiting the perfectly competent and articulate voice of a scientist, didn’t really generate much excitement in the relating of his travels. This memoir isn’t colorful enough to succeed as a travelogue. The audience most likely to enjoy this book are Slaght’s fellow ornithologists, not for its scientific findings—which would be presented in his dissertation or other academic publication—but for its relatable anecdotes of field work.
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We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts by Guðmundur Kamban

Scandinavian drama of an American marriage

Playwright Guðmundur Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play We Murderers was first staged in Denmark in 1920. The play is set in New York, where Kamban and his wife had recently lived for a year or two. In 1970, We Murderers was published in English as one of about a dozen books in the Nordic Translation Series from the University of Wisconsin Press. One notable thing about this series is that the University of Wisconsin has made these translations freely available to the public. The books can be downloaded from the UW Libraries website, allowing curious readers to sample the works of 20th-century Scandinavian writers, many of whom are revered in their home countries but little known in America.

We Murderers presents the tumultuous marriage of Ernest and Norma Macintyre. They had previously enjoyed a happy and stable marriage, but since Norma took a solo vacation to Florida, their relationship has not been the same. Norma has recently taken up flying lessons with an instructor named Mr. Rattigan, whom she met in Florida. She swears that there is nothing romantic happening between them, but Ernest is a very jealous husband who resents the amount of time his wife is spending with another man. Norma thus feels she has to lie to Ernest when she spends time with Rattigan, and her mother and sister aid her in her deceptions. Ernest has had enough and demands a divorce. Norma refuses to agree to a divorce, and swears that she will change her behavior to please her husband. For Ernest, however, their love has been tainted by dishonesty, and he will not settle for anything less than true love and complete devotion.

There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as Welded, Diff’rent, and The First Man. This ain’t no Long Days Journey Into Night. Kamban clearly sympathizes with Ernest in this conflict, but to readers a century later the husband’s stance seems like unreasonable overreacting. Kamban’s views of love, as voiced by Ernest, seem pretty high-falutin a century later. Even the title, We Murderers, is rather pretentious for what today feels like a rather pedestrian marital drama.

Why would a Scandinavian playwright set his play in New York? Perhaps the Danish audience would have liked that. The bigger question is, why would anyone translate it for this series? If you’re doing a series on Nordic literature, why not translate books that give some insight into Scandinavian life? For the American reader, this little play about a New York marriage is not very special. The introduction by D. E. Askey informs us that Kamban was satirizing American society but if so, this isn’t a very biting satire.

The story of Kamban’s death is one of the saddest that I’ve ever heard. On the day that World War II ended in Denmark, Kamban was wrongly suspected of being a Nazi collaborator and was shot in the head in front of his family. During his life, Kamban was also reputed to have psychic abilities. He sounds like an interesting man, but this play unfortunately is not very interesting. Of the several volumes I’ve read in the Nordic Translations Series, this is the weakest entry. Thankfully, it might also be the shortest book in the series, so it doesn’t require a major investment in reading time.
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Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars by Avi Loeb

We can’t get to know alien visitors if we’re not looking for them

Israeli-American astrophysicist Avi Loeb is a professor at Harvard University. In addition to his academic publications, Loeb has published two science books for the general public. The first was Extraterrestrial, published in 2021; the second is Interstellar, published in 2023. In these books, Loeb advocates that we employ more active measures in searching for evidence of alien life. In Interstellar, he also expresses hopes that connecting with an extraterrestrial intelligence will aid humanity in colonizing other worlds.

Thus far, mankind has sent five objects out of our solar system. Millions of years from now, one of those objects may drift into another star system, informing an exoplanet’s inhabitants of our existence. If the roles were reversed, however, and some interstellar civilization’s space junk drifted into our solar system, would we even notice it? Loeb’s argument is not if we don’t try. For this reason, Loeb has established the Galileo Project to actively search for interstellar visitors. He has designed a small observatory to monitor the skies with instruments and AI designed to filter out natural phenomena and alert us of UAPs (what used to be called UFOs). Loeb wants to place these observatories in multiple locations around the globe. There have been four confirmed objects from outside our solar system that have entered our neighborhood. Three were meteors that landed on Earth. Loeb’s team is working to recover and analyze fragments of those meteorites. The fourth was ‘Oumuamua, a mysterious object that passed within 33 million km of Earth. It’s not examined in detail here because Loeb discussed it in his previous book Extraterrestrial. Could ‘Oumuamua have been an alien probe? We’ll never know, because we didn’t get a good look at it. Loeb argues that we should be better prepared for the next interstellar object that comes our way.

I really like most of what Loeb has to say in this book, but I didn’t always like the way he says it. The text is accessible to general readers with a reasonable level of science education. There are a few instances where Loeb’s explanations of theoretical physics were over my head, but I got the general gist. On the other hand, Loeb must think his audience is dense, judging by how he continually hammers the same points home over and over again. His writing is sooooo repetitive. The whole second half of the book consists of multiple reiterations of the same points made in Part I, just restated in a more philosophical tone with different metaphors.

As to “Our Future in the Stars,” I agree with Loeb that ultimately mankind will have to migrate to other star systems or face extinction here on earth. If we don’t destroy ourselves sooner, the Sun will eventually die. His vision of our extrasolar exodus, however, isn’t entirely appealing. Loeb proposes sending thousands of small craft with 3D printers that can molecularly constitute human DNA to seed alien worlds. That’s not exactly what I had in mind when envisioning my descendants colonizing other planets. Loeb himself admits that such a plan “may promise human civilization endures but not as anything recognizably human.” Loeb is also very excited about a recent article in which some researchers assert it is possible to create a “pocket universe” in a laboratory. Why is this even a goal?

I admire Loeb for daring to think about the big picture of mankind’s future and the rational way he has gone about working through these issues. Though I’m not wholeheartedly sold on everything he says, I’m glad someone is doing this work, and I look forward to hearing more about his findings.
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The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven

An American drifter in post-Revolutionary Mexico

B. Traven was a German writer who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The name is a pseudonym. The exact identity of the writer has never been verified, but there are a few educated guesses. Traven’s debut novel, The Cotton-Pickers, was originally published in 1925 in the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It first appeared in book form the following year under the title of The Wobbly, but subsequent editions have used the original title of The Cotton-Pickers.

Gerald Gales is an American drifter wandering through Mexico. He gets a tip that a farmer named Mr. Shine is looking for cotton pickers. Seeking work, Gales sets out to find the farm in the vicinity of an obscure place called Ixtlixochicuauhtepec. At a train station, he meets up with five other drifters looking for the same Mr. Shine. The six wandering laborers decide to team up and travel together to find Shine’s farm, where they then sign on to pick his cotton.

The novel takes place shortly following the Mexican Revolution and the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Since that momentous regime change, the Mexican workers supposedly have more rights, but the employers still exploit them and treat them very much like peons. Here, all the employers seem to be White Europeans or Americans, while the laborers are mostly people of color: Latinos, Indigenous Mexicans, Blacks, Asians (though Gales is White). The Cotton-Pickers is first and foremost a novel about labor. Traven depicts the squalid conditions under which the cotton pickers live and work. Mr. Shine tries to pay them as little as possible, but the workers find ways of fighting for their rights and attaining small victories. This story, however, is not told in the depressing style of a muckraking exposé. Rather, it’s more of a comedy infused with a persistent gallows humor. The cotton pickers work like mules, but they also have fun and enjoy their lives as vagabonds. Traven doesn’t really push any socialist agenda, but he does point out the absurdities and abuses of capitalism and colonialism. Beyond Shine’s farm, the narrative also follows Gales as he moves on to other jobs, sometimes accompanied by a cotton-picking friend or two.

I had heard the name B. Traven before, but this is my first time reading his work. He is best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the basis for the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart film. I really enjoyed this book. Rarely does it occur that I “discover” an author and immediately think I want to read everything this person wrote, but such is the case with Traven. (I also love Mexico, so that probably has something to do with it.) Traven’s closest equivalent might be John Steinbeck, as seen in labor novels like The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. Traven, however, comes across with fewer pretensions of literary dignity and more of a down-to-earth matter-of-fact bluntness. His prose often has the feel of pulp fiction, with occasional touches of Ernest Hemingway or Jack London. For a book from the 1920s, The Cotton-Pickers is remarkably forthright and uninhibited. In one memorable passage, Traven describes a whorehouse in Tampico and captures its raunchy reality without ever saying anything obscene.

The term “Wobbly” was a nickname for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. Neither Gales nor anyone else in the book is a member of the IWW, but Gale reminds someone of a Wobbly in that wherever he goes, labor trouble follows. That’s not explained until the final page of the book. The Cotton-Pickers is a much better title. Gales is a recurring character in several of Traven’s books. I look forward to following his Mexican wanderings in subsequent novels.
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Victoria by Knut Hamsun

Love stinks in semi-feudal Norway

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was a pioneering modernist whose style has been extremely influential in world literature. Norway basically disowned him when he became a Nazi sympathizer during World War II, but after a few decades it again became acceptable to appreciate his work. Hamsun’s novel Victoria was published in 1898. Though not one of his better-known works, Victoria has been adapted into film a half dozen times, more than any other of his novels.

Johannes is the son of a miller in a rural town on the coast of Norway. Nearby stands the Castle, where dwell the Master and his family. The Miller and his family are essentially servants to the Master. They not only mill the grain produced on the Master’s lands but also perform odd jobs when asked, such as rowing boating parties on an afternoon outing. As a youth, Johannes becomes playmates with the Master’s daughter Victoria, who is a few years his junior. Playing outdoors amid the idyllic landscape, Johannes and Victoria develop an innocent love for one another. When they grow into young adulthood, the two admit their love for one another. Victoria makes it clear, however, that she and Johannes are not of the same social class, and her father would never approve of a union between them.

As the years go by, the two go on with their lives while their love steadfastly simmers below the surface. This is not, however, simply a melodramatic tale of two saintly lovers pining away for one another. Victoria entertains other suitors and encourages Johannes to woo another woman. The unsatisfied longing between the two sometimes poisons their interactions, resulting in outbursts of resentment and hurtful exchanges. Victoria repeatedly makes it clear to Johannes that he is beneath her station, yet she unfairly resists letting him go completely and sometimes plays a cruel coquette. Though the novel begins as a very idyllic romance, it soon turns into an unconventional love story with a rather pessimistic view of love and fate.

Hamsun was a neo-Romanticist who rebelled against the trends of realism and naturalism that prevailed in world literature in the late-nineteenth century. He felt that modernism should aspire to more than just the relation of reality. Literature should delve into the psyche and soul as Romanticists had done before, but through the lens of modern philosophy and psychology. Here Hamsun accomplishes that through the use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, literary techniques of which he was one of the world’s pioneers.

With its Castle and the Miller and so on, this novel has a very fairy-tale atmosphere to it, but I suspect it depicts the reality of Norway at a time when some vestiges of feudalism still existed in land ownership and social strata, particularly in rural areas. The psychological drama between the characters is anything but a fairy tale. Their behavior bears the authenticity of real relationships, which is what makes this story timelessly compelling more than a century later. Hamsun may have shunned realism, but I think there is still a naturalistic aspect to this novel in the way that the characters are shaped and restricted by their social environment and the class system of their time. All lit-crit terminology aside, I liked Hamsun’s delicate balance between romance and realism here, and more importantly he made me truly care about these characters and feel what they felt.  

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Maigret in Holland by Georges Simenon

A bit formulaic by Maigret standards

Maigret in Holland, also known as A Crime in Holland, is the 8th novel in Georges Simenon’s series of mysteries starring Parisian police inspector Jules Maigret, a series that would eventually grow to 75 novels and 28 short stories. Simenon, one of the most prolific authors of the twentieth century, could really crank out novels at a startlingly rapid pace. The first ten Maigret novels, including this one, were all published in 1931.

As the title indicates, Maigret ventures to the Netherlands for this case. A French professor on a lecture tour is detained in Holland as a murder suspect. The professor’s university contacts Maigret to request his assistance in investigating the crime, in hopes of exonerating their faculty member. Maigret travels to Delfzijl, a small coastal town in the far northeast of the Netherlands (a real town near Groningen). Following his lecture, the professor attended a party at a private home in Delfzijl, along with nine or ten other people, servants included. That night the host was shot and killed, and the professor was found with the gun in his hand. Though Maigret has no jurisdiction in the Netherlands, the small-town cops of Delfzijl allow Maigret some leeway to investigate, given his reputation and experience. Maigret interviews the party attendees and uncovers a web of secrets, animosities, and infidelities.

I’ve read about twenty of these Maigret novels and know I can count on them for a good read. Some of the books in the series are excellent, and they’re all consistently at least pretty good. This is one of the pretty-good ones. What sets the Maigret novels apart from most detective fiction is that Simenon usually delivers an unconventional mystery that has more to do with Freudian psychology and existential philosophy than with clue-and-deduction puzzles. Compared to most Maigret mysteries, Maigret in Holland is pretty formulaic. Within the first two pages, the crime has been committed, Maigret is on the case, and he has a list of suspects in hand (literally a list, written on a piece of paper). It ends with a re-enactment of the crime that feels more like it belongs in a Hercule Poirot novel instead of one of Maigret’s. Throughout the novel, there are really only two, maybe three people who would have been in the right place at the right time to commit the crime, so it’s not much of a surprise when the killer is revealed.

It seems almost as if in these early novels Simenon were still trying to figure out the direction he wanted to take this character. In the previous novel, The Night at the Crossroads (#7), Maigret is such a macho tough guy he’s almost an action hero. In Maigret in Holland, he’s more of a stereotypical sleuth looking for that one Encyclopedia Brown red herring that will convict the murderer. I don’t believe Maigret’s wife is even mentioned in this novel, which is quite unusual. The reader learns very little about his personal life in this book. I also felt like Maigret in Holland was too similar to other troubled-marriage murder mysteries in Maigret’s oeuvre (Maigret Has Scruples in particular). I’m not reading these books in order, however, so rather than this book repeating familiar plot elements, it’s the later novels that are derivative of this one. Like all Maigret books, this is a quick and entertaining read, but it’s not one of the French detective’s most compelling cases.
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The Promised Land by Wladyslaw Reymont

Ambition and corruption in Poland’s Industrial Revolution

The Promised Land is a novel by Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924. This novel was originally serialized in a Polish newspaper from 1897 to 1898 before being published in book form in 1899. Reymont is considered one of Poland’s greatest authors, and The Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana in Polish) is generally regarded as one of his best works, along with his four-volume novel The Peasants (Chlopi).

The Promised Land is a story of ambition and greed set during the Industrial Revolution in Poland. It takes place in Lodz, presently Poland’s fourth largest city and apparently an industrial center. Reymont’s descriptions of the city call to mind the traditional American view of Pittsburgh as a factory town. Instead of steel, however, the main export of Lodz is textiles. Several successful factories operate in the city, and questionable business ethics are rampant. As the novel opens, three young career climbers have plans to try their hands in this competitive market by opening their own factory. Charles Borowiecki is a Polish nobleman currently working as the right-hand man to Lodz’s top cloth manufacturer. Moritz Welt is a Jewish trader in fabrics and raw materials. Max Baum, a German, wants to break away from his father’s business, an old-fashioned handloom factory in decline. As the three are raising capital for their venture, Borowiecki comes across an insider trading tip. To take advantage of this knowledge, the three partners agree to send Welt off an a business trip to secure a lucrative deal. Meanwhile, Borowiecki makes the rounds of the social scene among the rich industrialists of Lodz and, though he’s engaged to a woman from his rural hometown, he embarks on an affair with a married woman.

My favorite author is the French writer Emile Zola, who in my opinion took the art of the novel to its apex. Reymont is the one writer in the world who is excellent enough and stylistically similar enough to be mistaken for Zola. (If Reymont had published as many books as Zola, maybe he’d be my favorite author.) It’s hard to say whether Reymont was a “disciple” of Zola and his school of Naturalism, or if their two styles developed coincidentally. Either way, Reymont is a world-class writer of prose fiction who deserves to be better known and more widely translated.

The Promised Land is deliberately and brutally unromantic. Reymont describes Lodz as an urban mud puddle shrouded in smog. At least two of the book’s three heroes are decidedly unheroic and would sell their souls to be rich and successful. The relationships and prejudices between the three prevalent races in Lodz—Poles, Germans, and Jews—are explored throughout the story. Anti-Semitism is a factor in the plot, as some characters are anti-Semitic, but I wouldn’t call the book itself anti-Semitic because it exhibits both positive and negative portrayals of Jews, as well as Poles and Germans, for that matter. The vilest villain in the novel is capitalism itself, which drives the characters’ behavior. This is emblematic of the Naturalist school’s focus on how social forces shape human beings and control their lives.

The problem with The Promised Land is that it takes a long time to get going. The final quarter of the novel is riveting, but you have to trudge through a lot of description and exposition to get there. At first it seems the novel is going to be about these three friends and their factory, but Reymont departs from the trio for extended periods to introduce dozens of other characters. In his desire to capture the broad scope of real life in Lodz, there are too many plot threads, too many romances, and too many dinner parties. Some narrowing of focus would have been an improvement. The Promised Land doesn’t quite measure up to The Peasants, but this is a classic work of literature by a superb author and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Polish history and culture.  

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Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World by Philip Matyszak

Interesting mini-biographies of lesser-known cultures

British author Philip Matyszak is a former journalist turned scholar of ancient history who has published about three dozen books on the subject. Many of his books appear to be trade books aimed at a wide audience, rather than academic monographs written for archaeologists. While there are plenty of books published each year on the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, what about all those other ancient societies that we hear so little about, like the Elamites, the Aramaeans, the Philistines, the Chaldeans, the Galatians, or the Ostrogoths? With his book Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World, published in 2020, Matyszak has them covered.

The book is divided into 40 chapters, each of which is devoted to one ancient culture. For each, Matyszak discusses their origin and history, charting the rise and fall (or disappearance) of each group. The summaries are based on mentions of these peoples in ancient texts like the Bible or Herodotus’s Histories, as well as research from recent archaeological digs. In some cases, not much is known about these cultures, and there is a great deal of speculation about their histories. In other cases, today’s archaeologists don’t entirely agree on who these people were or what happened to them. Matyszak clarifies such ambiguities and arguments without passing judgment himself. The coverage here is strictly Old World. You won’t find the Olmecs of Mexico or the Chu culture of China here. The civilizations discussed in this book lived in the Middle East and Europe, a few in North Africa, and a couple venture as far east as India.

This is not a scholarly book written for PhDs. It is intended for general readers with an enthusiasm for archaeology. That’s not to say that it’s not intelligently written or the scholarship is not reliable. It’s just so concise that there isn’t a lot of room for minute detail. Matyszak summarizes the state of research on these peoples in a clear, accessible, and entertaining manner. The text does not have academic notes or citations, but there is a bibliography of “further reading,” separated by chapter, with three or four sources specific to each culture discussed, which is helpful. The writing is about on the level with what you find in Archaeology magazine, which is slightly more academic than National Geographic. In fact, this would have made a great monthly column in Archaeology magazine, if they’d thought of it, but they didn’t; Matyszak did.

One feature that I really enjoyed in this book is that each chapter ends with a brief section under the heading of “Future Echoes.” Here Matyszak points out words and customs from these ancient cultures that we still use today, or important firsts in the history of civilization. For example, the word “magic” comes to us from the language of the Medes. The name “Candace” comes from a warrior queen of the Kushites. The term “Aborigine” was originally the name of a tribe in Italy. The tradition of carrying a bride across the threshold comes from the Sabines. The Hittites negotiated the world’s first peace treaty with the Egyptians. The Amorites were the first culture to advocate the separation of church and state, in the Code of Hammurabi. The Sea Peoples conducted the first organized labor strike. Matyszak also highlights how these groups and their legends inspired future works of art, literature, or film.

If you’ve ever wondered about some of these lesser-known civilizations and how they fit into the grand scheme of ancient history, Matyszak will satisfy your curiosity. He has since published a follow-up to Forgotten Peoples, a 2023 book entitled Lost Cities of the Ancient World, which consists of brief histories of places rather than peoples. I enjoyed Forgotten Peoples enough that I will probably check out that book as well.  

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Engineer Menni by Alexander Bogdanov

Prequel to Red Star’s Martian utopia

Physician, philosopher, and Russian revolutionary Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov was one of the founders of the Bolshevik party before being expelled by his rival Vladimir Lenin. Bogdanov also authored two science fiction novels. Engineer Menni, published in 1913, is the prequel to his 1908 utopian novel Red Star. In Red Star, an earthling is invited to visit a perfect Communist utopia on Mars. Engineer Menni takes place a few generations earlier and shows how that Communist paradise came into being. Both novels have a character named Menni. Engineer Menni was briefly mentioned in Red Star as the illustrious ancestor of the Menni character in that book. In this second novel, Bogdanov delves deeper into the earlier Menni’s life.

The story begins in the year 1667 of our calendar. By that time Mars had already developed a technologically advanced civilization. Although Mars has a few large bodies of water, the famed canals that were viewed by Earth telescopes of the 19th century did not yet exist. To create more habitable land for Mars’s growing population, a genius engineer named Menni comes up with an ambitious plan to dig a system of canals to direct water into desert areas of the planet. Not only will this irrigate vast stretches of land for agriculture; it will fundamentally alter the climate of large areas of land, making them more livable. (This “terraforming” of Mars calls to mind the planned climate alteration of Frank Herbert’s Dune.) In assuming the leadership of his Great Project, as it comes to be called, Menni is granted a great deal of political and financial power, effectively making him one of the most powerful men on Mars. His uncompromising attitude leads to conflicts with various stakeholders, including government officials who resent his high level of authority and workers who dislike his negative attitude toward trade unions.

Just as with Red Star, it’s really quite amazing how well-written this is. For a science fiction novel that was published over a century ago, it shows none of the clunkiness or kitschiness suffered by so many of its contemporaries. Surely some of the credit for that is due to the translator, Charles Rougle, who prepared the English text of both Red Star and Engineer Menni for the combined edition published by Indiana University Press. Although the story deals with topics pertinent to the burgeoning Russian Revolution, the prose reads as if it were written last week. Bogdanov forgoes any far-fetched futuristic flights of fancy to present a narrative grounded in science (including political science). Even though we know now that there are no literal canals on Mars, Bogdanov manages to construct a very rational and realistic narrative around the idea.

Despite all its admirable qualities, Engineer Menni is not quite as interesting or compelling as Red Star. Menni is not a socialist but a capitalist, so whereas Red Star was an optimistic book about what’s right with communism, this is a pessimistic book about what’s wrong with capitalism. The critique that Bogdanov presents is not fiery enough to be exciting. The book often takes the form of policy debates between Menni and his young socialist protégé Netti. There is a commendable verisimilitude to the proceedings of politics on Mars—one can almost recognize some of today’s Congressional hearings—but Bogdanov ultimately veers away from realism into dream sequences and a touch of mysticism. Together, Red Star and Engineer Menni make for an impressive literary achievement, but the latter book is clearly the weaker of the two. Fans of vintage science fiction will enjoy these books, whether a Bolshevik or not, but they will appeal especially to those with an interest in the history of the Russian Revolution and the birth of the Soviet state.