Man a Machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Materialist manifesto

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) was a philosopher of the French Enlightenment. As a young man, he studied theology, then medicine, then worked as a practicing physician. His physiological researches led La Mettrie to formulate a philosophy of materialism. In this sense, materialism is exactly what the name implies: the belief that everything in the universe is made of matter. This opposes the philosophy of dualism, which argues for two universal substances: matter and spirit. La Mettrie’s book Man a Machine (L’homme machine in French) was published in 1747.

The concept of dualism goes back to ancient times, but in early modern France, René Descartes (1596–1650) was its primary proponent. La Mettrie, writing almost a century after Descartes’s death, directs his arguments to refute many of Descartes’s dualistic assertions. The direct opposite of dualism is monism, a school of thought led by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza, however, believed that matter was imbued with God—a belief that amounts to Pantheism. La Mettrie, on the other hand, was an avowed Atheist, who believed in no god or divine power.

As the title of his work indicates, La Mettrie believed that human beings are machines, though constructed of living tissue rather than metal. That is to say, all the phenomena of the human body and mind can be explained by material processes. Mankind has no spirit or soul. La Mettrie sometimes uses the word “soul” in Man a Machine (or rather, the English translator does), but what he means by that is human consciousness. La Mettrie believed that each particle of matter was invested with an infinitesimal degree of intelligence or sensation. When organized into complex forms, these bits of mentality could be combined and amplified into higher orders of intelligence, with the human mind being the pinnacle of this process. This concept, sometimes referred to as atomistic consciousness, was later championed by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), among others. While the knee-jerk reaction of many to such an idea might be to disregard it as ridiculous, the development of computers and artificial intelligence seems to argue in its favor. Mankind has created artificial minds entirely of matter. Though they are not quite up to the level of human consciousness as of yet, who knows where the future will lead?

La Mettrie begins his materialist manifesto by pointing out the various ways in which the human mind is altered or affected by physical causes, such as illness, alcohol, drugs, or injury. He then goes on to assert that humans are no different from animals in their form and function, except that in many ways—especially mentally—humans are more advanced. This is not a precocious argument for evolution but rather a rebuke to the common Judeo-Christian belief that man has a soul but animals do not. La Mettrie scoffs at the anthropocentric idea that man is so special there exists a portion of his being to which the laws of physics do not apply. La Mettrie then goes on to concur with empirical philosophers like John Locke (1632–1704) who argued that all knowledge comes form sensory perception. Humans are born with a mind that is a blank slate, or tabula rasa—essentially an empty hard drive waiting for input. La Mettrie also advocates atheism over theism and rejects the theistical argument for intelligent design.

To be honest, La Mettrie probably doesn’t have a whole lot new to say in Man a Machine that Spinoza, Locke, and other pre–Enlightenment philosophers hadn’t already said. The merit is in how he says it. La Mettrie is materialism’s most enthusiastic booster. Rather than a hefty treatise that only a sage could decipher, he has written a brief, intelligent work accessible to any literate man of his age. His argument is logically structured, clearly stated, and pleasantly irreverent. In his day, even deists like Voltaire found La Mettrie’s thought too radical and dangerous, but readers of today who are atheistically inclined will enjoy this unsung Enlightenment freethinker’s no-bull iconoclastic straight talk.   

Government by B. Traven

The Porfiriato’s culture of corruption

B. Traven was a German-born author who wrote mostly fiction set in Mexico and Central America. His novel Government, published in 1931, is one of a series of six books known as the Jungle Novels. Depending on which list you’re looking at, this is either the first or second book in that series (both Government and The Carreta were published in 1931). The Jungle Novels take place in the state of Chiapas in Southern Mexico in the years just prior to the Mexican Revolution. This period is known as the Porfiriato because Mexico was governed by the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911. During his reign, Díaz invited foreign corporations to exploit Mexico’s resources for his own financial gain. He and an oligarchy of favored landowners and industrialists enjoyed immense wealth, while the majority of the country’s population struggled for survival as illiterate peasants and laborers. Traven’s Jungle Novels deal directly with this social and economic environment.

Under Díaz’s regime, as depicted in the novel Government, a system of trickle-down patronage determined the granting of government positions. Government offices at all levels were reserved for Spaniards, Mestizos, or Ladinos—essentially the “whiter” population of Mexico as opposed to the Native Mexicans or Indians (the term Traven uses), who were treated little better than beasts of burden. In this novel, Don Gabriel is granted a minor role as secretario of an Indian village, basically the federal government’s appointed mayor. His job is to keep the Natives in line and keep rebellions in check to ensure that farms in the region remain profitable. Because such government jobs pay very little, it is understood that the functionaries appointed to such positions will generate wealth for themselves through various schemes of corruption or graft, including arbitrary taxes, fines, and fees, the taking of bribes, and the monopolization of certain goods, in particular alcohol. The drawback to such a seemingly lucrative position, however, is that if the secretario pushes his Indians too far, he may find himself beheaded by a machete. At first, Don Gabriel is somewhat reluctant and very ignorant of such unethical techniques of income generation, but by the end of the book he is wheeling and dealing in Indian lives as if they were cattle.

In this novel, Traven uses the word “montería” a lot, and he doesn’t define it for the reader. This is a logging camp in the tropical jungle where hardwoods like mahogany were extracted for export. In other regions of Mexico, mines were the primary scene of slave labor, but in Southern Mexico and the Yucatan it was the monterías. The labor was grueling and the living conditions extremely harsh. Technically, of course, it wasn’t slave labor, because slavery was nominally illegal under the Porfiriato. However, a system of indentured servitude was common and basically amounted to slavery for many Indians, who had no power, no rights, and little or no chance of ever earning their way out of debt peonage.

Traven lived in Mexico for much of his adult life and spent considerable time in Chiapas from 1924 to 1931. Despite being born in Germany and writing in the German language, Traven is one of the best writers of fiction about Mexico for English-language readers. If Mexican writers wrote critical novels of this sort, they haven’t made it into translation. Juan Rulfo’s The Burning Plain, although set after the Revolution, is the closest I can think of to Traven’s work as far as considering the plight of the Mexican Indians. Mariano Azuela’s Los de Abajo is in a similar ballpark, but more about the Revolution itself and not the conditions that inspired it.

One surprising thing about Traven’s Government is how well it has stood up to the passage of time. The book is still very relevant to our political climate today. In recent years, the United States has drifted farther from democracy, and government officials at the highest level commit blatantly corrupt acts of self-enriching graft. Occasionally you’ll hear critics saying, “This certain politician [who shall remain unnamed] wants to be the next Hitler or Mussolini.” No, that’s not quite accurate. What he really wants to be is the next Porfirio Díaz, and Traven’s Government gives us a pretty good idea of what that might be like.

Fourth World: When the Old Gods Die by Jack Kirby, et al.

Trippy, dippy stuff from the King of comics

Jack Kirby, one of the most highly regarded creators in the history of comic books, began his career way back in the 1940s. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, he co-created most of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters, including the Hulk, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the X-Men, and Doctor Doom. In 1970, Kirby left Marvel and moved to DC Comics, where he was given some free reign to develop his own projects. He created three new titles for DC: The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle. He was also assigned to an existing DC title: Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. Kirby connected the four magazines into one intertwined narrative arc utilizing a new fictional universe of his own creation, dubbed the Fourth World. (I’m guessing the name arose from the fact that, long before the Marvel multiverse, DC had three parallel Earths inhabited by different versions of their superheroes.) DC Comics recently released a volume of Kirby’s Fourth World stories in their new DC Finest paperback line of full-color reprints, with a second volume planned for the near future. The first volume, subtitled When the Old Gods Die, reproduces roughly 21 issues of comics from 1970 and 1971. This includes a few issues of Lois Lane, not by Kirby, that are very loosely related to this story and really shouldn’t be in here.

The gist of Kirby’s Fourth World is that long ago, in some other dimension, two antithetical worlds were created: New Genesis, home of the New Gods, and Apokolips, home of all things evil. The forces of Apokolips are led by the supervillain Darkseid, who searches for the anti-life equation that will allow him to control the universe. This formula is locked inside the mind of some unknown human on Earth, so Darkseid sends gangsters and monsters to hunt for it, and New Genesis sends heroes to stop them and to protect humans. Characters travel between worlds via boom tubes, which are similar in function to Asgard’s rainbow bridge. The Forever People are hippy teenagers from New Genesis. Mister Miracle is a Fourth Worlder who comes to Earth and assumes the identity of a performing escape artist.

The art in these comics is the typically spectacular and bombastic drawings one expects from Kirby. Surprisingly, however, when Superman appears, Kirby does not draw DC’s staple superbeing in his own trademark style but rather in a more mundane style resembling that of Curt Swan. I can imagine an order coming down from on high: Don’t get creative with Superman! With that one major exception, the art in this book is classic Kirby, and it is beautifully reproduced in this DC Finest volume.

The stories, however, as is typical of post–Marvel Kirby, are hit and miss. After bringing life to Norse mythology with his pantheon of Thor characters, Kirby started creating his own original mythologies of gods and cosmic forces. He began with Marvel’s The Eternals in 1976, and the Fourth World is a continuation of similar themes and elements, but more unrestrained in its weirdness. The most enduring element to come out of all this is Darkseid, but in these stories he doesn’t really do much except show up for brief appearances to look mean and give orders. The three Kirby-created titles are the better material here, but you only get three or four issues of each. There’s an awful lot of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and Lois Lane in this book, however, and most of those stories are rather stupid. Kirby dredges up characters from the 1940s: the Newsboy Legion, whom no one was asking for, and the Guardian, a generic superhero. Comedian Don Rickles makes a guest appearance in Jimmy Olsen, and as if that wasn’t dumb enough, Kirby creates a second Rickles, a silly fictional doppelganger of the first.

So for the most part, this volume amounts to silly stories with exciting art. The rogues gallery of villains is interesting. The plot involves mentions of DNA and cloning that might have been advanced for their time, but Kirby doesn’t do much more with them than mad scientists creating monsters and evil twins, an idea that’s been around since the Golden Age of the 1940s. The Comics Journal named Kirby’s Fourth World one of the 100 best comics of the 20th century, but I don’t see anything here to merit such accolades. Maybe all the good stuff will be in the second volume, subtitled The Storm of the Battle, scheduled for publication in the Summer of 2027.

Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions: The First Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Games by Martin Gardner

Math games and puzzles mostly for the Mensa set

For much of an authorial career that spanned over three-quarters of a century, Martin Gardner (1914–2010) was America’s most popular writer on matters mathematical. He is best known for “Mathematical Games,” a column he wrote in Scientific American magazine for 25 years. The articles from that column were collected into a series of at least 15 books, the first volume being The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions, published in 1959. Many of the books in this series were later republished under different titles. This first book was rereleased in 1988 as Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions. The 1988 edition includes additional new content from Gardner in the form of addenda to each chapter and an afterward at the end of the book.

Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” was more than just a brain-teaser-of-the-month. In fact, very few of the chapters in this book are the sort of puzzles you would find in a typical brain teaser book. A couple chapters entitled “Nine Problems” feature such riddles. For the most part, however, a typical Gardner column was more of a recreational exploration into a topic of mathematical interest. The word “Games” in the title is no casually chosen word. Gardner does spend many pages talking about games, those in the abstract strategy category that includes chess, tic tac toe, and everything in between. In this volume he discusses chess, tic tac toe (2D and 3D), Hex, Nim, and Tac Tix. Beyond going over the rules for such games, Gardner might discuss the number of possible moves, play on different board sizes, the winning probabilities of certain opening moves, whether the first or second player has a mathematical advantage, and sure-fire strategies to ensure victory. Other favorite Gardner topics include magic tricks, geometry puzzles, and the branch of mathematics known as topology. Even when he’s discussing card tricks, magic squares, or hand-held sliding-square puzzles, the emphasis is on permutations and probabilities.

It’s amazing how many of the games and puzzles that Gardner features here were created by scientists and mathematicians in some of the most prestigious research institutions in the country. Apparently physicists, when they’re not splitting the atom at MIT or Fermilabs, spent their leisure time on such mathematical diversions. Hexaflexagons are strips of paper that are divided into equilateral triangles and folded into a hexagon-shaped object somewhat like a kid’s paper fortune teller. Yet Gardner tells us that one of the pioneers of hexaflexagons was Richard P. Feynman, the theoretical physicist who won the Nobel in 1965.

Nowadays, Scientific American magazine is aimed at a broad popular audience, but back in Gardner’s day, it was written for a high-IQ clientele. Those same mathematicians and scientists who were fooling around with flexagons, polyominoes, and board games would have been reading the magazine and tuning into Gardner’s column every month. For that reason, this ain’t always easy stuff for the average Joe to wrap his head around. In some cases, that’s because the math may be beyond your level. In others, it’s because Gardner’s explanations are confusing. For the most part, he’s great at explaining higher mathematical concepts to laymen, but sometimes the content is just too complex to be dumbed down for mere mortal mathematical minds like mine.

By its very nature, this book is a grab bag, and as such, some topics will fascinate particular readers more than others. I, for example found the geometry stuff more interesting than the magic tricks. Since a good portion of the book is about abstract strategy games, it helps to have an interest in those, which I do. I can’t say this book was fun and fascinating form start to finish, but it hooked me enough to know that I’ll likely delve into the second volume of Gardner’s Scientific American writings.

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus

Half-successful attempt at a psychological novel

Louis Couperus (1863–1923) was a Dutch novelist who achieved some international success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Various critics and scholars have classified him as a realist, a naturalist, and a Dutch sensitivist. His first novel Eline Vere was published in 1889 and released in English translation in 1892.

The novel depicts bourgeois society in The Hague. Eline Vere is a wealthy orphaned young woman who lives with her sister’s family. Their social set is comprised of about a half dozen well-acquainted families who all gather frequently for dinners, dances, and outings. Privacy is at a minimum, as no one can seem to do anything without inviting at least a dozen companions. The roster of these families is difficult to keep track of. They all have multiple children who grow up expecting to marry from this tight-knit circle of friends. Among this set, Eline is generally regarded as the most beautiful girl, but there’s something kind of flighty and stuck-up about her personality that’s off-putting to some. For the first half of the novel, you wonder why it’s named after Eline Vere because she barely appears. The second half, however, focuses entirely on her. Over the course of the book, Eline undergoes a few loves and a few minor trials that affect her outlook on life. Her behavior abruptly becomes irrational, and from the reader’s perspective, not entirely believable. She gradually declines into a paralyzing and depressing malaise.

Eline Vere seems to have been obviously influenced by Emile Zola’s l’Assomoir, and probably by way of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. In l’Assomoir, Zola charts the downfall of a woman who succumbs to alcoholism; in Eline Vere, Couperus charts a similar trajectory for mental illness. The heroine of l’Assomoir comes from among the lower classes. Eline, on the other hand, is of the “gentlefolk” who don’t work for a living and occupy themselves with frequent balls and parties, which is probably what made this novel more attractive to an English audience, as it’s more in keeping with Victorian literature than l’Assomoir. Zola and Couperus, to some degree, are both naturalist authors, so they both claim to employ scientific techniques in their fiction, ostensibly drawing from the fields of psychology, medicine, and genetics. L’Assomoir, however, is really the far more scientific (i.e. realistic) of the two. Eline Vere, on the other hand, reads more like a romantic opera.

Eline Vere can be called a psychological novel, but at this point psychology was still a very young field. This novel was published before any of Freud’s books. Couperus certainly makes some baby steps towards psychological authenticity, but it still reads like quite a long way from the more mature psychological novels of Knut Hamsun or Hermann Hesse. Unlike the development of Gervaise’s alcoholism in l’Assomoir, the mental illness from which Eline suffers seems like a collection of assorted symptoms that really don’t follow any logical progression. Her irrational episodes are calculated for operatic drama and not a thoughtful study of mental illness or its social causes. In hindsight, Eline’s malady would fall under the general sexistly amorphous headings of “hysteria” or “women’s nerves” that were commonly cited in fiction of this era.

Eline Vere may be the work for which Couperus is best-known outside of the Netherlands, but in my opinion, he’s got better books in his oeuvre. His follow-up to this debut, Footsteps of Fate (1890) is an improvement. Far superior is his four-novel Small Souls series (including the books Small Souls, The Later Life, The Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan), which also depicts bourgeois life in The Hague but does so with the admirable realism of a mature naturalist style. 

My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Real life, ad nauseam

About fifteen years ago, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard made a big splash in the literary world with his six-volume work My Struggle (Min kamp). Is it an autobiography or a series of novels? Only Knausgaard and his family know for sure, but it’s written as ostensibly an autobiography, so I will consider it as such. My Struggle has received much critical acclaim, but when I read Book One, I wasn’t terribly enamored with it. These volumes, however, often come up as inexpensive Kindle daily deals, so I impulsively bought Book Two and eventually felt compelled to read it.

Book Two, first published in 2009, does not pick up where Book One left off. Book One was mostly about Knausgaard’s teenage years in Norway. In his mid-twenties, he married a woman named Tonje, but we don’t really learn much about her. That period of his life isn’t covered in either of these first couple volumes. As Book Two opens, Knausgaard and Tonje have separated, and he makes a spur-of-the-moment relocation to Stockholm. In Sweden he reconnects with a prior acquaintance, Linda, and they fall in love. Despite the fact that she’s bristling with red flags, Knausgaard quickly decides to make babies with her. From that point on, the book is mostly, “Heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

Book Two is much like Book One in that Knausgaard spends many pages describing scenes from his life in minute detail. The first tenth of Book Two is occupied by a lengthy depiction of a children’s birthday party that Knausgaard and Linda attend with their two kids. This extended vignette is a skillful piece of realistic prose, but so what? I’ve already been to this party dozens of times with my own children. Hundreds of years from now, some historian studying the social customs of 21st-century Nordic parents could use this book as a reference, but to me, spending so much time reliving the author’s experience felt pointless. Knausgaard’s writing is at its best when he delivers brief essay passages with his philosophical thoughts on life, death, love, and marriage, but unfortunately such interludes are only a few pages out of each hundred otherwise devoted to the mundane details of everyday life. Much of the book is spent discussing Knausgaard himself and analyzing his character, which he obviously finds fascinating. Such is the subject of a very long evening Knausgaard spends in conversation with a friend over a few beers that amounts to an egomaniacal My Dinner with Andre.

Most of the narrative takes place in Sweden, but Knausgaard doesn’t really like Sweden. Based on his descriptions and comments, Norway seems a lot like the Wisconsin I grew up in—very alcoholic and a little rednecky, but charmingly unpretentious and laid-back. Knausgaard’s take on Sweden, on the other hand, is very pretentious, uptight, and cumbersomely woke. I feel like I have a lot in common with Knausgaard: none of his good qualities, like his creative passion for writing; just the bad ones, like his misanthropy, low self-esteem, degrees of cynicism, nihilism, and narcissism, and a longing for solitude. It’s his ability to write with authentic psychological realism that allows me to identify with him, but am I supposed to take some kind of pleasure or satisfaction from that? While reading this book, I didn’t. Book Two is an exploration of, or perhaps more accurately a wallowing in, everything that sucks about marriage and parenthood. Even worse, it just comes across like Knausgaard is blaming everything on his wife (I don’t know if Knausgaard and Linda were ever legally married, but they’re at least common-law spouses). This volume reads like it was written as a deposition to support his claim in a custody battle, except Knausgaard doesn’t want custody; he just wants to be left alone.

I thought My Struggle was worth a second look, but Book Two was even more frustrating and disappointing than Book One. Knausgaard is very good at the descriptive diary stuff, but after about a thousand pages, I feel like I wasted a lot of time on one guy’s obsession with his own not-so-extraordinary life. I don’t know if Knausgaard ever got the freedom from his wife and kids that he so desperately craves in Book Two, but from now on, I for one will leave him alone.

A Drama in Muslin by George Moore

Realistic critique of the Victorian marriage market

The Irish author George Moore (1852–1933) was an open admirer of the writings of French novelist Emile Zola. Influenced by Zola’s school of Naturalism, Moore argued for more realism in Irish and British literature, and he practiced what he preached. His novel A Drama in Muslin was published in 1886. In later editions, Moore changed the title to simply Muslin. A type of cotton fabric, muslin is meant to symbolize the white dresses traditionally worn by young women at balls and parties as they “come out” into society. When actually describing women’s garments in the novel, however, Moore more frequently references silk and satin.

The Bartons are a well-to-do family of Galway. Mr. Barton is an absent-minded painter preoccupied by his own little artistic dream world, presumably living off of inherited wealth. His wife, Mrs. Barton, as they say, wears the pants in the family. The Bartons have two daughters. The eldest, Alice, is a very intelligent young woman, somewhat plain in appearance, who exhibits characteristics of what we today might call a feminist or at least an independent woman. Her younger sister Olive is a beautiful young girly-girl who embraces the traditional doll-like Victorian gender role of the feminine sex. Like all aristocratic young women of their time, the two young ladies’ primary goal in life is to find a suitable husband. Fortunately or not, Ireland had an established and regimented system for accomplishing this. For part of each winter, the girls and their mothers would relocate to Dublin where they would take part in a series of dances, dinners, and parties in which the prospective would associate with eligible prospective grooms. This was known as the “castle season” because some lucky ladies would be invited to balls at Dublin Castle. When the Barton women venture to Dublin for their coming out, the beautiful Olive is hailed as the belle of the season, with a possible royal title in her married future, while Alice is less enthusiastic about the whole process.

Meanwhile, back home in Galway, the Bartons and their set of land-owning aristocrats are having trouble with the Land League. The tenant farmers of Ireland have essentially unionized in an attempt to combat exorbitant rents charged by abusive landlords. Much mention is made of Griffith’s Valuation. This was a survey of land appraisal values in Ireland, in this case serving a purpose similar to today’s Blue Book of automotive values. The tenants demand to pay only the rent appropriate to Griffith’s Valuation, while of course the landlords want more. This class struggle has become violent, leading to murders and destruction of property.

While the inclusion of this social issue is in keeping with the naturalist ethos, the material on the Land League is really just background context in this novel. The main issue under consideration here is the commodification of young women in the marriage market. Moore’s coverage of the social maneuverings involved includes a fair amount of satirical humor. Mrs. Barton is depicted as a calculated schemer trying to pimp her daughters out to the highest bidder. There are, however, more serious aspects to Moore’s consideration of women’s roles. One of the young women is an atheist, another is a lesbian, and another undergoes an unwed pregnancy. While Emile Zola’s novels were more overtly scandalous, Moore does push the envelope of Victorian literature into a realm of realism that was no doubt controversial for its time. Unlike most of his British contemporaries, Moore writes women well. Alice is a commendably well-drawn and intelligent modern woman, but even Olive and her more traditionally feminine cronies come across as quite realistic in this novel. With A Drama in Muslin, Moore manages to deliver a story in which drama and suspense are generated by the question of who will marry whom, while also calling into question and satirizing the restrictively sexist emphasis that Irish society placed upon that very question.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Latin American Balzac

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is probably the biggest name in Latin American literature. Intellectuals might argue for Jorge Luis Borges, and general readers might cite Isabel Allende, but people in both camps have probably read a García Márquez novel. His 1961 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is his best-known work, but Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, is a close second. Both books have sold tens of millions of copies and have been translated into at least 30 languages.

Love in the Time of Cholera is set in an unnamed Colombian town on the coast of the Caribbean Sea. The story takes place from about the 1880s to the 1930s. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, an aged physician, is one of the town’s most distinguished citizens. He and his beautiful wife, Fermina Daza, lead a wealthy and cultured life. A cholera epidemic has recently raged through the region, killing thousands, and still lingers on in some villages. As a medical man, Dr. Urbino is ever on the watch for this deadly disease, but his own untimely demise comes about as the result of an unfortunate accident. At his funeral, an eminent crowd of mourners gathers in the Urbino mansion to offer their convalescences to his wife. One attendee, however, uses this inappropriate moment to declare his undying love to the widow Urbino before her husband’s body is even in the ground.

This lovestruck man, by the name of Florentino Ariza, did not just pop up out of the blue, however. It turns out that he and Fermina Daza have a history that goes back almost a half century. The story then flashes back to their first meeting in their teen years and follows their relationship through the intervening decades. Dr. Urbino obviously has an important part to play in that story as well, and the three form one of the most memorable and moving love triangles in all of literature.

I had mixed feelings towards One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I was immediately captivated by Love in the Time of Cholera. In One Hundred Years, the story revolves around this confusingly byzantine family tree that the reader has to decipher. Love in the Time of Cholera, on the other hand, focuses on three, maybe four people. García Márquez describes these characters in intimate and intricate detail that brings them vividly to life. Along the way, you get some glimpses of life in Colombia during this period in history. The Latin American atmosphere is palpable, but this is still a universal story of love and longing. García Márquez’s prose (judging by the English translation) is rich and artful. Every sentence is full of meaning, and few words are wasted. It’s really a joy to read. The one reservation I have about this novel is some pervy sexual content. One character’s relationship with a much-younger girl would not fly in today’s cancel culture.

Love in the Time of Cholera doesn’t seem to be set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez is noted as a writer in the style of “magic realism,” but this book is decidedly less magic in character than One Hundred Years. No supernatural events occur in Love in the Time of Cholera, and I prefer it that way. The story is at times quirky and fanciful, and the characters lead exaggerated, larger-than-life lives, but everything that occurs is within the realm of reality. If this novel is considered magic realism, then Balzac invented magic realism, because this is basically a Balzac novel set in Colombia. I wish García Márquez had been as prolific as Balzac because I would gladly read many more novels like this.

In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

The Inner House by Walter Besant

A love letter to class inequality

The English author Walter Besant (1836–1901), though generally not known as a pioneer in the science fiction genre, did publish two novels set in dystopian futures. The Inner House, published in 1888, is one; the other being The Revolt of Man (1882). The Inner House opens with a German scientist calling a press conference in London. He announces that he has discovered a process to stop aging. This means immortality for mankind, at least as far as natural causes are concerned. Those undergoing this process will be frozen at their present age and able to survive for centuries, excepting any fatal accidents.

Flash forward to hundreds of years later. Most of the same characters are still alive. Society (the whole Earth or just England? it’s unclear) is now ruled by a socialist regime governed by an authoritarian intellectual elite, the Holy College. All individualism has been stamped out, all problems have been solved, and a tremendous apathy has settled over mankind. Humans have little interest in doing anything except eating, working, and sleeping. The past has been forgotten, until one young woman starts researching the 19th century. This sparks a small rebellion of disgruntled citizens who want what the past had to offer: individuality, capitalism, and love.

Besant’s intention with The Inner House seems to be a heavy-handed critique of socialism. In that regard, it reads like a precursor to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but without the sense of humor. It’s never convincingly explained how the discovery of immortality would lead to such a bizarre and extreme system of socialism, nor does the apathy and inactivity of the citizens ever seem logical. If they have so much time on their hands, and so little work to do, why wouldn’t they spend that time learning and amusing themselves, or striving for achievements in the arts and sciences? Instead, Besant depicts a very unintentionally cartoony caricature of a socialist society.

These rebels who idolize the past—what do they miss the most? For the women, it’s fancy clothes and shiny jewels. And hey, remember when men used to go off to war and kill each other? That was really cool! The men, of course, miss beautiful women in fancy clothes. What both genders long for more than anything, however, is the beloved British system of inequality. What I hate most about English literature is its relentless reinforcement of an oppressive class system in which one person is born with better “blood” than another. No nation buys into the trickle-down effect of the divine right of kings more than England. Wealthy people are born good and noble. Poor people are born evil. Hard work and education won't save you. Born a servant, always a servant. All Victorian literature endorses this genetic feudalism to some extent, but few authors or novels are as blatant about it as Besant and The Inner House. All of the rebels who so idolize the past are former “gentlefolk” who would no doubt prefer the way things used to be. One of the rebels defiantly scolds the Holy College with “You have made us all equal who were born unequal,” as if that were such a bad thing. (It’s not the “unequal” to which I object, but rather the “born.”) The villain of the novel is a former servant born in poverty, so naturally wicked. The hero is a former gentleman, so naturally virtuous.

Maybe The Inner House was the first novel to show a dystopian future in which individuality was prohibited. Since then, however, there’s been plenty more, and all of them better: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), to name but a few. Therefore, there’s no reason to read The Inner House. I read it so you don’t have to.

The Copernicus of Antiquity: Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath

Very brief and awfully arcane

In his popular book and television series of 1980, Cosmos, astronomer and author Carl Sagan includes a chapter/episode on Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek scientist. In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus conceived the heliocentric model of our solar system, meaning the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. We know this because Archimedes informs us of Aristarchus’s accomplishment in one of his scientific publications written about a century later. Aristarchus was not able to convince many of his contemporaries, however, and, like much of ancient Greek scholarship, his work was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus established and mathematically proved the heliocentric model in his publication On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and the rest, as they say, is history. In Sagan’s summary of Aristarchus’s career, his heliocentric theory was only one of the ancient Greek’s precocious discoveries. In many ways he was a scientist way ahead of his time.

A desire to learn more about this interesting character led me to The Copernicus of Antiquity, published in 1920, a brief biography of Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath. This book is only about 60 pages long, and the biography is further shortened by the fact that only the second half of the book is actually about Aristarchus. The first half of the book is a brief recap of earlier Greek astronomers and their discoveries, including such ancient cosmographers as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and roughly a dozen others.

The Copernicus of Antiquity was published in a series of books entitled Pioneers of Progress: Men of Science, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. It was likely adapted from an earlier, more extensive book by Heath from 1913. I would assume the Men of Science series was intended for a general non-academic reading audience, but this book certainly isn’t written that way. A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader. Heath writes as if he expects his audience to have read much ancient scientific literature in the original Greek. He also expects the reader to have memorized all of the mathematical operations in The Elements, Euclid’s classic book on geometry. Granted, many college students of 1920 would have studied Greek, but most were neither professional classicists nor mathematicians. While it’s a well-known fact these days that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, few, if asked, could conjure up the angle at which the Sun subtends the zodiac circle, but Heath writes as if this and many similar astronomical measurements were common knowledge. The book is full of complex mathematical computations that will be over the head of curious casual readers.

Of course, the fault is probably not with Heath but rather with whoever edited the Pioneers of Progress series. They took a full-length scholarly monograph intended for classical philologists and mathematicians and condensed it down to a pamphlet size, but they didn’t adjust the content for a pamphlet audience. I learned much more about Aristarchus from Sagan’s chapter in Cosmos than I did from this book by Heath. With the exception of a few facts here and there, I found it a waste of time. If an overview of ancient Greek astronomy is what you’re looking for, undoubtedly better texts exist than this.

Crashing Suns by Edmond Hamilton

Typical star wars fare

American science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton’s career spanned from the late 1920s through the 1960s. His novella Crashing Suns was published in the August and September 1928 issues of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. This is one of Hamilton’s first handful of published writings. He was a prolific contributor to Weird Tales, making his debut in 1926 and eventually publishing 79 stories and novellas in that magazine.

Crashing Suns takes place about a hundred thousand years in the future. Mankind has colonized all the planets of the solar system. (No mention is made of Martians or other alien races.) The narrator, Jan Tor, is a captain in the Interplanetary Patrol, the law enforcement agency for the solar system. He gets summoned by the Supreme Council, the governing body of the League of Planets, to return to Earth for an emergency meeting. In this council meeting, it is revealed that a nearby star system, that of the red giant Alto, has changed its course and is heading towards our sun. In a few months, Alto will collide with our solar system, wiping out all human life.

Much like Bruce Willis in Armageddon, Jan Tor is tasked with leading a mission to stop this catastrophe. Engineers on Earth have created the first-ever interstellar spaceship, in which Jan Tor will lead a small team to Alto to investigate the cause of the red giant’s wandering trajectory. After literally five minutes of preparation, Jan Tor and his crew load into the new spacecraft and take off for Alto, a voyage that will take a few weeks. What they find when they get there will be no surprise to anyone, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say. For the most part, the story proceeds as expected from that point forward. Crashing Suns is the first in a series of seven stories featuring the Interstellar Patrol, presumably the successor to this story’s Interplanetary Patrol.

I had read a couple of Hamilton’s stories in the past and found them to be quite original and innovative. Crashing Suns, however, is very familiar fare. That’s likely due to the fact that it was so early in Hamilton’s career that he was still finding his way, as was the science fiction genre in general. Much of the sci-fi published in the pulp magazines of the 1920s all reads alike. One can tell from Crashing Suns, however, that Hamilton is a good writer in terms of characterization and suspense, but the general plot is common to many science fiction stories and every sci-fi movie since Star Wars. I will continue to look into Hamilton’s work, since what little I’ve read indicates a promising talent, but next time I’m choosing a story I’ll aim closer to the 1960s than the 1920s.

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

A quarter millennium of rich intellectual history reassessed

British historian, novelist, and journalist Peter Watson has published over two dozen books over the past 50 years. He is best known for his nonfiction books on intellectual history or the history of ideas. Rather than tell the history of the world through its wars, dynasties, and diplomacy, Watson examines world history through the arts, sciences, literature, and social sciences. In his 2010 book The German Genius, Watson explores the prodigious intellectual achievements of Germanic Europe, a realm that includes not just Germany but other German-speaking lands, including Prussia, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and more. The book covers a time span from 1750 to the present. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany (collectively speaking) led the world in a vast assortment of scholarly disciplines: philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and music to name a few. Germany’s intellectual profile took the ultimate turn for the worst in the 20th century, however, with the Nazi atrocities of World War II and the persecution of academics under that authoritarian regime. Watson examines how this nation stacked with geniuses fell from the zenith to the nadir of intellectualism, and how that fall has affected Germany’s intellectual legacy.

I had previously read Watson’s 2022 book The French Mind, in which he gives a similarly comprehensive, centuries-spanning overview of French thought and culture. I would assume his latest book, The British Imagination, does the same for the UK, but I haven’t yet read it. The German Genius is a better book than The French Mind, which tried too hard to advance a specific thesis and was only partially successful. The German Genius mostly just lets the Germans’ achievements speak for themselves. While The French Mind pushed a very feminist argument, feminists will not be happy at all with The German Genius, where maybe five women are mentioned for every thousand males. In both his French and German studies, Watson makes the convincing case that Britain and the United States could learn a thing or two from the way these cultures view the world.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Third Reich. Watson doesn’t excuse or deny in any way the evils perpetrated by the Nazis or the horrors of the Holocaust. He calls out many scholars and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. The question Watson grapples with in this book is to what extent should the Nazis’ wrongs negate German achievements before and after the Third Reich. He traces a continuum of intellectual cause and effect from Immanuel Kant to the present day. Romanticism led to inwardness, which led to cultural pessimism. Social Darwinism led to nationalism and antiSemitism. The horrors of the Nazi years are a part of this continuum, not removed from it, but how much of this spectrum of thought should be darkened by that black mark, and where exactly is the line of demarcation? Friedrich Nietzsche’s work had philosophical value, for example, but was co-opted and misconstrued by the Nazis, thus tainting his name. Martin Heidigger, on the other hand, was a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Does that render his philosophy totally invalid?

Watson asserts that, because of animosity generated by the World Wars, many Germans who made important contributions to knowledge and society have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. He even includes an appendix on 35 semi-forgotten Germans we should all know better. Watson also points out the important contributions to American and British science, arts, and culture made by German immigrants who fled the Nazi regime.

Watson is really great at writing these sweeping historical syntheses. He summarizes vast quantities of information and explains complex concepts in engaging and accessible prose, all the while pointing out interesting connections and drawing insightful conclusions. I come away from each of his books with a long list of interesting people, ideas, and books to explore further. I enjoy Watson’s books so much, I purposefully read them slowly too make them last longer. I would suggest starting with his worldwide histories Ideas and The Modern Mind before venturing into his regional studies like The German Genius and The French Mind.

The Great Return by Arthur Machen

An underdeveloped quickie by an otherwise great author

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) is a respected old-school master of the fantasy and horror genres. His novella The Great Return was published in 1915. Because it is quite short, it probably just barely qualifies as a novella. It is so short, in fact, that it’s difficult to summarize the plot without giving away any secrets or surprises.

The narrator, a Welshman, frequently scans the local newspapers for items about “remarkable occurrences.” This man’s profession is unclear, but he has an avid enough interest in the occult to investigate matters that suggest an inkling of the supernatural. Vague mentions in the papers of unusual goings-on lead him to the coastal village of Llantrisant. Some mysterious lights have been seen out at sea, and some folks have heard the peal of a bell from no apparent source. That’s about all I can tell you. Machen draws on a combination of Christian mysticism and old Welsh pagan folklore for this story. This isn’t really horror because it’s not really scary, but it does fit into the Twilight Zone range of spooky fantasy.

The Great Return, unfortunately, reads more like The Mediocre Return. This is more of an idea for a story than an actual story. One can imagine a Stephen King novel based on this premise, and knowing Stephen King, that novel would be way to long. As Machen presents it here, however, it’s way too short. Not much happens in the first three chapters. Some minor rumblings occur in chapters four and five. Then in chapter six it takes a big leap and goes full-on occult fantasy in the seventh and final chapter. The payoff is too little too late. A big problem with this tale is the way it’s narrated. The story is related by a long-winded narrator who’s full of himself and digresses into subjects you don’t want to hear about rather than focusing on the miraculous supernatural events at hand. His personality is obtrusive. A disembodied third-person narration would have been more successful.

I only recently discovered Machen, and I’ve been singing his praises in this blog over the past year. His novels The Great God Pan, The Terror, The Hill of Dreams, and in particular The Three Impostors are all very good. The Great Return is the first piece of writing by Machen that hasn’t impressed me. It’s not going to stop me, however, from continuing to work my way through his corpus of writings. 

Penguin Island by Anatole France

Satire in the tradition of Voltaire

The French writer Anatole France (1884–1924) won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Penguin Island, published in 1909, is probably his best-remembered work, at least in the minds of English-language readers. In this comedic and critical novel, France establishes himself as the inheritor of Voltaire’s role as the great satirist of French literature.

Some time in the Middle Ages, a Breton monk named Maël (later Saint Maël) decides it is his mission to sail forth to unknown lands and spread the gospel of Christ to the savages. His boat drifts way off course, and he ends up in the Southern Hemisphere, where he lands on an island full of penguins. At 99 years of age, with failing sight and hearing, Maël thinks the penguins are an Indigenous race of people, so he baptizes them into the Catholic Church. The only witnesses to this sacrament are God and His angels in Heaven, who debate how to rectify Maël’s erroneous baptism of animals. God solves the problem by turning all the penguins into humans, albeit naked uncivilized humans. Maël then tows the Penguins back to Europe, where they establish a new nation in the area of what we know as France.

Spanning centuries in the history of the Penguins, the book is divided into eight related stories taking place in eight different time periods. The early chapters of the book, in which the newly humanized penguins are learning the ways of civilization, are the most funny and entertaining. France seems to be lampooning some of the Edenic noble-savage pipe dreams of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Voltaire’s Candide, however, Penguin Island doesn’t aim its mocking barbs at just one target but rather scatters its shots to make different satirical points in every chapter. In this book everything is game for absurdity and worthy of tongue-in-cheek scorn.

After a while, the fact that these people started out as animals becomes irrelevant. The Penguins of Penguinia are simply another nation of humans, often a surrogate for the French. Some targets for spoofing include religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, capitalism, feudalism, gender roles and sexual inequality, various factions in the modern French political landscape, and even Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most extensive parody is directed at the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, in which a character named Pyrot is a substitute for Dreyfus and Columban for Emile Zola. To a French reader, the characters and events being satirized in this book would be readily decipherable, but it’s not always easy for an American reader to recognize all the players of every political plot. That doesn’t become too much of an obstacle, however, because enough of the humor and derision is universal to human nature and society, not French-specific.

The early formative years of the Penguins are laugh-out-loud silly at times, but the latter, more modern episodes of their history take the form of more wryly stated indictments of hypocrisy. There is also a science fiction element to the book as the final chapters take place in the future. After all the satire and cynicism, France ends the book on a surprisingly inspirational note of hope. Penguin Island is a work of great insight and much wisdom, but perhaps presented too cleverly for the non-French reader to grasp all in the first read. I think I’ll give it a second look, eventually, because it seems worthy of further scrutiny.   

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner

An early collection of brain teasing quickies

Martin Gardner was a popular and prolific nonfiction author of the latter half of the twentieth century. Just as Carl Sagan was the great popularizer of science during that time period, Gardner was the great popularizer of mathematics. For over 25 years, he wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he presented all sorts of mathematical curiosities and puzzles and educated readers on the mathematical laws and theories behind them. These columns were collected into over a dozen books that enlarged his audience well beyond the subscription list of Scientific American.

Mathematical Puzzles, an early collection of Gardner’s mathematical writings, was published in 1961 and later rereleased by Dover Publications in 1986 as Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles. The puzzles in this volume are not taken from Gardner’s column in Scientific American. Some of them previously appeared in a magazine called Science World, for which Gardner also wrote a column entitled On the Light Side from 1957 to 1959. These are not the chapter-length mathematical explorations from Mathematical Games but rather what one typically finds in a collection of brain teasers: items of one to two pages, essentially a word problem followed by an explanation of its solution. Altogether, there are about 60 puzzles in this book. They are arranged into ten categories such as money puzzles, speed puzzles, plane and solid geometry puzzles, and probability puzzles.

Compared to his writings for Scientific American, these little brain teasers are not Gardner’s best work. It’s amazing how many of these puzzles conclude with “Nope. It can’t be solved.” You read the first page, wrack your brain to try to come up with a solution, and then turn the page to find out there’s no viable answer. Where’s the fun in that? If it were one or two puzzles, that would be reasonable, but it seems like nearly half the book is unsolvable. Another frustrating aspect of brain teasers in general is that they are essentially mathematics written with words, and if the author isn’t exactly precise and clear in the wording of the problem, then you end up feeling like you’ve been cheated or you wasted your time. Gardner’s guilty of that as well in a number of these riddles. Such occasions call to mind the questions on your old school math tests that no one in the class got right because the teacher worded them poorly.

Nevertheless, there’s still fun to be had here and math to be learned. Every puzzle has its little twist that forces you to think outside the box of straightforward solutions. As the aforementioned list of categories indicates, there are little lessons on geometry, probability, and arithmetic. These are not easy math puzzles, but you don’t need to know algebra or calculus to figure them out. The most unfamiliar area for most will probably be the little section on topology. Gardner also describes some games of the abstract strategy variety (think checkers or tic tac toe, for example) that can be played with pencil and paper, coins, or other everyday items.

The material here may not be Gardner’s most ingenious writings, but this little book still does its job adequately. The next time I download a volume of Gardner’s mathematical puzzles, however, I’ll make sure it’s one of the 15 volumes from his Scientific American series. 

Reeds and Mud by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Compelling Spanish regional naturalism

Reeds and Mud, a novel by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was originally published in 1902 under the Spanish title of Cañas y barro. Blasco Ibáñez was a realist writer, and sometimes a naturalist (a specific form of realism), and Reeds and Mud qualifies as both. He was born in Valencia, a city on the Mediterranean Coast of Eastern Spain, and most of his fiction takes place within that district. Reeds and Mud is set in the town of Palmar in the Albufera region of Valencia. The Albufera is a large lake or freshwater lagoon, surrounded by marshes and separated from the ocean by a thin strip of land. It is to these marshes that the title of the novel refers, as well as to the homes of the area’s inhabitants. At the time this story takes place, about half of Palmar’s residents are still living in traditional fishermen’s huts of reeds and mud, while the other half resides in more modern wood-frame houses.

For centuries, the primary mode of life in the Albufera has been fishing, with eels being particularly bountiful in these waters. The residents of Palmar also do quite a bit of hunting, though much of it in the form of poaching in a nearby forest where they’re not supposed to venture. At the time of this story, agriculture is starting to gain a foothold in the region. The novel focuses on three generations of one Palmar family. The grandfather, Tío Paloma, is an elderly boatman, fisherman, and hunter who embodies all the traditional customs and lifestyle of the Albufera. His son, Tío Tóni, on the other hand, dreams of being a successful landowner and struggles to coax a profitable crop out of the marshy soil. This contrast in lifestyles­—old ways vs. new, fishing vs. agriculture—causes conflict between father and son. Meanwhile, the grandson, Tonet, is a lazy ne’er-do-well who would prefer to avoid work altogether; neither fishing nor farming for him. His grandfather feels some affinity towards the young man, but his father considers him a disgrace..

In addition to the drama within the family, Tonet is involved in a love triangle that brings further conflict and suspense into the story. There’s more going on in this sunny fishing village than just picturesque rural living. Blasco Ibáñez turns over some stones to reveal the darker side of this community, and the story occasionally ventures into some frightening scenes. Naturalist authors like Emile Zola were often criticized for their vulgar and disturbing subject matter, but Blasco Ibáñez includes one image in this novel that is so graphic and horrifying I would be surprised if this book wasn’t banned by the censors of its day.

The Albufera region has no doubt changed much in the eleven decades since Blasco Ibáñez wrote this novel. What’s great about Reeds and Mud, in addition to its compelling story, is that it functions as a historical document of the people, customs, and natural environment­ of this specific time and place. That’s one of the valuable aspects of the naturalist novel—when done right, it functions as a sort of time-capsule for historic preservation, like a National Geographic article but deeper and more personally engaging. Almost every chapter of Reeds and Mud centers around a traditional public event, like a religious festival or the drawing of lots to assign fishing grounds. Instead of photographs, the reader gets the rich empirical description of reality characteristic of naturalist texts. Blasco Ibáñez was one of Spain’s great realist chroniclers, along with Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Peréz Galdos.

Since I discovered Blasco Ibáñez a couple years ago, he has become one of my go-to authors for fiction. I can always count on him for a rewarding read. As good as Reeds and Mud is, I like his novels The Cabin (La Barraca) (1898) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) even better.