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.

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.

Metropolis by Thea von Harbou

Simplistic dystopian epic adapted into a landmark film

The 1927 science fiction film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is widely considered one of the masterpieces of the silent era of film. Few these days are likely to remember, however, that the film was adapted from a book. Metropolis the novel, published in 1925, was written by Thea von Harbou, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. She and Lang were married at the time.

The novel takes place at an unspecified time in the future, though some promotional copy for the book states the date as 2026, a hundred years after publication. Metropolis is a technologically advanced urban industrial center. It is not intended to be a future vision of New York or London, both of which are mentioned as separate cities. It’s unclear exactly where Metropolis is supposed to be located, though Germany would be a safe bet. Metropolis is ruled by wealthy capitalist oligarchs who live in lofty towers. Chief among these is Joh Fredersen, the city’s most powerful citizen, dubbed “the brain of Metropolis.” The army of laborers who operate Metropolis’s machinery of production dwell in underground cities. Existing only to perform their robotic jobs, they are veritable slaves to the machines they tend.

Joh Fredersen has a son, Freder, who lives an idle life hanging out at the Club of the Sons, a resort for male heirs of the oligarchs. One day while visiting his father’s place of work, however, he develops sympathetic feelings towards labor. He also falls in love with a beautiful woman who seems to run the factory’s day care. As he pursues this mysterious maiden, Freder learns that she is the leader and cult figurehead of an underground (literally) revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, a mad scientist has created a robot woman, which you likely already know if you’ve ever seen a single shot from the movie.

The story is fine, though rather predictable. I didn’t care much for the way that story is told, however. Von Harbou grandiosely exaggerates every phrase. She saturates the text with biblical imagery and constant hyperbolic references to “the gods.” Realism is not a concern. The prose is largely written in incomplete, choppy sentences, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. In spite of the futuristic sci-fi trappings, the story resembles yet another Victorian-era romance. I guess this is German expressionist literature, but if so, it’s not as effective as German expressionist film or visual art. What makes Lang’s Metropolis such a stunning film are the visuals, which were developed apart from the novel. Von Harbou’s text doesn’t contain much visual description at all, not even of the robot woman. The author doesn’t go into a great deal of detail in describing the dystopian future she has created. There isn’t much futuristic tech, for example, or sophisticated social and political commentary. The most outstanding feature of this dystopia is the obvious extreme disparity between the lives of the rich and poor.

The revolution of the workers against the oligarchs inevitably delivers a socialist message, though it feels half-hearted, intended more to generate drama then for actual political persuasion. If social reform or forebodings of an authoritarian future were the important concern here, the novel would have needed more of a grounding in the reality of the class struggle. Metropolis reads more like opera than realism. It has more in common with sci-fi films like Star Wars or Logan’s Run than with novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), or even Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Metropolis is what it is, and it’s pretty good at what it is, but the film is more impressive than the book.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories by B. Traven

Ten well-drawn tales of Mexico

The information we have on author B. Traven’s life is sketchy. The name is a pseudonym, and he deliberately kept his real identity a secret. Journalists and literary scholars have connected him to prior aliases, but I don’t think his actual birth name has ever been ascertained with certainly. He was born in Germany and emigrated to Mexico in 1924. Traven wrote all of his literary works in the German language, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories, a collection of Traven’s short fiction, was published in 1966 by the American publisher Hill and Wang. Some of the volume’s ten stories had been previously published in a German-language collection entitled Der Busch, published in 1928. One story, “The Cattle Drive” is an excerpt from Traven’s debut novel The Cotton-Pickers (1926). As is typical of Traven’s work, all of the stories in this volume take place in Mexico.

Two of the stories included here are longer and more substantial than the other eight. In “The Night Visitor,” an American farmer in Mexico loses himself in his neighbor’s extensive library and becomes obsessed with pre-Columbian Mexican history. “Macario” has the feeling of an old Mexican folktale that Traven has adapted for modern readers through some O. Henry-esque storytelling. The title character, a poor, overworked woodchopper, has one great desire in life: to eat a roasted turkey all by himself. This humorous story takes some wonderfully unexpected turns. In both these selections, Traven inserts some supernatural elements that create a Twilight Zone effect. He doesn’t overdo it, however, to the point where these tales venture into the horror or fantasy genres. Of the book’s shorter entries, the aforementioned “The Cattle Drive” and the comical “When the Priest Is Not at Home” are both very vividly rendered and engaging stories.

The American writer whom Traven most calls to mind, stylistically and philosophically, is Jack London. London spent a few years in Alaska and the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush and was able to parlay that experience into half a career’s worth of novels and stories. He brought the Klondike alive for armchair readers who would never venture there. Traven does the same for Mexico. Both writers depict their chosen settings in a naturalistically realist style but draw romantic touches from regional folklore and legends. London was a socialist; Traven an anarchist. Both often feature proletarian themes and critiques of capitalism in their fiction. Later in his career, London did travel to Mexico and wrote one excellent story set there, entitled “The Mexican.” Traven, however, is the best writer of fiction about Mexico who’s not actually Mexican. Katherine Anne Porter might be his only real competition in English-language literature.

Traven’s writing on Mexico is more than just typical tourist fare. He really makes an effort to understand and interpret the culture, mindset, and spirit of the Mexican people, including the nation’s Indigenous inhabitants. As a Mexicophile myself, I appreciate that Traven gives Mexico the same attention and consideration that countless other authors have given to Paris or London. Traven’s work sometimes resembles the writings of the great Mexican author Juan Rulfo, whose landmark collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, was published in 1953. In general, the stories here in The Night Visitor are more lighthearted than Rulfo’s, but they share a similar grittily authentic, sometimes eerie atmosphere and a respect for the Mexican peasant, the Indian, and the working man. For an American reader, it is surprising that it takes a German author to reveal Mexico to the non-Latino. These enchanting stories make one wonder why more authors from the U.S. haven’t ventured south of the border for literary inspiration.

Stories in this collection

The Night Visitor

Effective Medicine

Assembly Line

The Cattle Drive

When the Priest Is Not at Home

Midnight Call

A New God Was Born

Friendship

Conversion of Some Indians

Macario

Aslan Norval by B. Traven

Late-career oddity

B. Traven, real name unknown, was a German author who emigrated to Mexico but continued to write in the German language. He was mostly active during the 1920s and ‘30s, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or Latin America. After not publishing much of anything during the ‘40s and ‘50s, Traven’s final novel, Aslan Norval, was published in 1960. He died in 1969. Aslan Norval is not only a couple decades removed from Traven’s better-known works but also quite different in style and subject matter. This novel is set in the United States, mostly New York, and features a Korean War veteran as its protagonist.

In the opening chapter, Clement Beckford, the veteran in question, is hit by a car. Although not seriously injured, he is rushed to the hospital and forced to undergo medical examinations so the hospital can rake in some insurance dollars. Luckily for Beckford, the motorist who struck him is a beautiful billionairess who wants to make up for his inconvenience and minimal pain and suffering. This woman, named Aslan Norval, invites him to lunch and inquires into his situation. Since returning from the war, Beckford is down on his luck. He can’t find a decent job or get a useful education. He tells her that what he’d really like to do is hydrological engineering—the construction of dams and canals. Within a few days, he finds that the wealthy woman has established a new company in his chosen field and installed him as president. She then reveals her grand plan to build a canal across the United States, thus circumventing the need for the Panama Canal, which is inconveniently located in a foreign nation. Rather than reveling in the generosity of his benefactress, Beckford can’t help but think that she has an ulterior motive. Either she wants to have an affair with him, he surmises, or she wants to set him up as a patsy in some fraud scheme.

Traven always emphasizes anarchist, leftist, and socialist themes in his work, and Aslan Norval is no exception. In this late-career offering, however, his political message is less pointed and more scattershot. In the opening chapters, he manages to satirize and/or complain about the insurance industry, for-profit hospitals, ambulance-chasing lawyers, veterans’ benefits, and higher education. Later he turns his attention to the Panama Canal project, Congressional corruption, defense spending, foreign aid, the arms race, the space race, and Cold War paranoia. His critical darts are dispersed all over the board, so he never really hits the bullseye with any of them. His sense of humor also seems to have suffered with the passing of time. Slapstick and sarcasm are distributed in a haphazard, willy-nilly fashion. The result is something that reads less like classic Traven and more like one of Upton Sinclair’s lesser efforts.

Despite the odd humor, there is somewhat of an odd film noir atmosphere to this book, with Aslan Norval as the femme fatale. At first, Traven seems to want you to root for Beckford and Norval, but he then has them both behave in unethical ways that makes you like them less. There are a couple of “love” scenes in this book that are rather creepy and off-putting. Overall, the plot is not well constructed, dragging in some portions while fleeting in others. Aslan Norval almost reads like a novel that was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. You wonder why Traven chose to waste the second-to-last chapter dwelling on a pointless romantic subplot instead of building the canal story towards a conclusion. Then he wraps up everything way too quickly and unsatisfactorily in the final chapter. In general, I really like Traven’s writing, so this book was not a worthless read for me, but it certainly isn’t anywhere near as good as those Latin American novels (The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Bridge in the Jungle) that he wrote in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 by Ritchie Robertson

An erudite, pan-European survey of the era

Ritchie Robertson is a British academic who has published several books on German literature. With his most recent book, however, Robertson has broadened his scope to encompass the pan-European movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Published in 2021, Robertson’s book The Enlightenment is a sweeping synthesis that attempts to, and in my opinion succeeds in, providing a comprehensive summary of the era that encapsulates the intellectual and social landscape of the period.

Not surprisingly, Robertson focuses primarily on France, Britain, and Germany, but he does often reach farther afield into many other European nations, demonstrating that this was a truly continent-wide phenomenon. The United States doesn’t get a great deal of coverage. Jefferson and Franklin are occasionally discussed, and there’s a brief section on the American Revolution. Rather than examining specific nations or specific thinkers in turn, this book is organized thematically by issue or discipline. The result is much rapid jumping around among diverse locations and historical personages, but this approach helps in gaining an understanding of the overall zeitgeist and important debates in Enlightenment thought. Figures like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, or Voltaire are mentioned in almost every subchapter. If you wanted to get an overall picture of Kant’s thought, for example, you’d have to search around for two sentences here and three sentences there, but if you did so, you’d get a very good understanding of what Kant was all about.

The one thread that tied the myriad endeavors of the Enlightenment together was a striving for an improvement in the happiness of the human race, whether it be through technology, philosophy, politics, law, or some other means. That may seem like an obvious and simplistic answer. Hasn’t mankind always striven for happiness? Well, no, not really. For much of the past two thousand years the prevailing view (at least in the Western world) was that life is an ordeal to be endured so that one could be rewarded with happiness in the afterlife. The Enlightenment is often thought of as a period of extreme secularization and rising atheism, and there definitely was some turning away from prior superstitions and religious dogma, but Robertson asserts that the religious landscape of the Enlightenment was far more complex and heterogenous than widely assumed. The trend of the age was not necessarily antireligious but rather an effort to reconcile religion with reason, to question religion and theology in order to clarify them, so that religion is the product of active thought rather than passive acceptance.

Robertson’s study is not only through but also well-balanced. This isn’t just a book about how great certain Enlightenment thinkers were and what important political and scientific advances were made. Robertson also pays attention to the prejudices, superstitions, and ignorances active during this period. He presents the progress of Enlightenment thought as a series of debates, or exercises in trial and error, and gives as much consideration to those in the wrong as those in the right.

I takes a very skilled writer and researcher to encapsulate an era in one volume like this. Robertson’s book is comprehensive enough to serve as a textbook for an undergraduate course, but it doesn’t read like a textbook. The prose is accessible to general readers, and history buffs will find much food for fascination here. Robertson’s breadth of knowledge is impressive. He seems to have read just about everything published between the two dates in the subtitle, as well as the scholarly literature of recent years. For anyone interested in this period, the notes and bibliography are a treasure trove of further readings. Though I thought I had a good idea of what the Enlightenment was all about, Robertson really broadened my understanding and heightened my interest in this pivotal age in history.

Cosmos, Volume I by Alexander von Humboldt

All of the things that go to make Heaven and Earth

If you’re old enough, you may remember the classic 1980s television series Cosmos, created and hosted by the astronomer Carl Sagan. Or, you might recall the 2014 series Cosmos, a tribute to Sagan’s work, hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Both, however, stole the idea of Cosmos from Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Just as Sagan and Tyson were likely the most famous scientists in America at the time their TV shows were broadcast, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in the world when he published his late-career magnum opus Cosmos. This landmark work of science literature was published in five volumes, the first of which, the subject of this review, came out in 1849. Humboldt’s Cosmos is an attempt to synthesize all knowledge of the natural sciences up to the mid-nineteenth century. It reads as if Humboldt wrote it for his scientific peers, but Cosmos also enjoyed an immense popular readership in its day.

Humboldt unfurls his scientific overview in a systematic fashion, beginning with the large and moving to the small. He starts by discussing “nebulae” that we now know to be other galaxies. He then examines the various components of our solar system before moving on to the Earth’s seismic and volcanic activities and its rocks and minerals. Then it’s on to oceanography and climatology before finally arriving at life in the form of plants, animals, and humans. Although Humboldt proceeds with systematic rigor, he was also notoriously prone to digressions on whatever topics interested him. The book gets off to a slow start with about a hundred pages of introductory material in which he outlines how scientists should write about nature, how he’s going to write about it, and what exactly he’s going to tell you, before he ever gets around to telling it. As an example of Humboldt’s wandering mind, even in this “general” introduction, there is a three-page footnote about the elevation of the snow line on various mountains of the world. When he finally gets to his “General Review of Natural Phenomena,” delivers it in typical nineteenth-century fashion: all in one long chapter with no breaks or subheads. Humboldt gives special extended attention to some of his “pet” interests, such as the zodiacal light (sunlight reflecting off cosmic dust). The English edition that I read from 1868 (translation by E. C. Otté) has only one appendix; it’s about prehistoric birds in New Zealand.

It’s really interesting to learn about the state of science in 1849, and how scientists and explorers of that era went about obtaining knowledge of our universe. This was before the discovery of continental drift or Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but such revelations are certainly foreshadowed in this work. I’ve always admired Humboldt as an explorer and a naturalist, but when reading Cosmos one can’t help but admire him as a researcher. He seems to have read everything that had been published in four or five languages, no small feat when you consider how difficult it must have been just to get one’s hands on a specific book in those days, or how much time, effort, and patience was required for correspondence with one’s scientific colleagues.

Though he had an encyclopedic mind and a voracious appetite for specifics, as evidenced by some of the trivial rabbit holes he ventures down in this book, Humboldt was science’s master generalist. He was well-versed in a multitude of scientific disciplines, and his writings emphasize how all natural phenomena are intricately connected into a cohesive and interdependent whole. In this regard, Humboldt was the founder of ecology as we know it. In the introduction to Cosmos, he explains that he wants to write a work that assembles precise empirical data but never loses sight of the essential beauty and wonder of nature, the emotional effect so important to the Romantic movement. As far as imparting the beauty and sublimity of nature is concerned, Humboldt was more successful with his earlier work Views of Nature. Cosmos, on the other hand, reads more like a relentless torrent of data, but it’s a fascinating torrent to mentally bathe oneself in. Reading Cosmos is like living vicariously through a golden age of natural science, as if you were one of Humboldt’s associates. It’s a difficult read, not for everybody, but if you enjoy science history, a trek through Volume I of Cosmos is an inspiring and enlightening experience.  

The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor Storm

Dark Frisian fable of seawalls and specters

Theodor Storm (1817-1888) was a German writer, but he comes from a very specific area of Germany, North Frisia in Schlesweig-Holstein, that has a mixed cultural history of German, Dutch, and Danish influences. He was born on the coast of the Wadden Sea, which is presumably the setting of his novel The Rider on the White Horse, published in 1888. I don’t believe the word Frisia is ever used in the novel, but I assume this story is meant to take place on the German stretch of the coast. To an American reader unfamiliar with the region, however, this novel that’s largely about dike building will seem Dutcher than an orange tulip growing out of a wooden shoe.

An anonymous narrator traveling along the coast comes across a rider on a white horse. The rider has a crazed look with glowing eyes and an overall Headless Horseman vibe, but with head intact. The narrator then pulls into a nearby inn where he asks the locals about this fearsome apparition. There in the tavern, and later in his home, the town schoolmaster regales the traveler, and us, with the origin story of this mysterious horse and rider.

The schoolmasters’s tale flashes back to the 1740s and ‘50s. Hauke Haien is the son of a farmer and surveyor of middling means. Though born and raised on a farm, Hauke is not really cut out for farming, or at least his heart isn’t in it. He is more interested in book learning and has a head for engineering. In his teens, Hauke’s father manages to get him a position as an apprentice to the dike master, the official who is responsible for overseeing the dikes that protect the local farmers’ lands from the sea. An added bonus of this job is that Hauke gets to spend time with the dike master’s lovely daughter Elke, with whom he forms a close bond. Hauke would like to become dike master himself some day, but that position usually goes to the wealthiest landowner in town. If he wants the job, therefore, Hauke must strive to elevate himself above his modest status and financial means.

There’s a whole lot about dike building in this novel. This was at a time when all the work was done moving earth with shovels, carts, and horses. I sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what Storm was saying in regard to the design, construction, and workings of the dikes, but it didn’t affect my appreciation of the human story. Although there are elements of this novel that make it feel like a fable or fairy tale, the book provides a realist view of the lives of the farming community in this time and place. After reading this novel, I find it amazing that anyone can live in these coastal lands reclaimed from the sea, with nothing but a handmade wall of dirt protecting their homes and crops from flooding and devastation.

Storm is regarded as one of the most important figures in German literary realism. Though this story is primarily realistic, it does have some supernatural elements, including the implication that God is expressing himself through nature to either benefit or punish the characters. One admirable aspect of the book is Storm’s sensitive portrayal of a child with a developmental disability. The characters here feel real, and it is easy to sympathize with them. If this is intended as a fable, the moral is not obvious. Is this merely a case of bad things happen to good people? I presume that we are supposed to find Hauke guilty of the sins of pride and ambition, which he pays for with the hardships that befall him, like Icarus flying too close to the sun. From the perspective of this 21st-century reader, however, his ambition just seems like hard-working industriousness, for which he should be rewarded, not castigated. More pious readers of the 1880s would have seen it differently. Nevertheless, I found this a compelling story, very well told by Storm, and I learned an interesting thing or two about North Frisia.

The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology by Bernd Heinrich

Intriguing memoir of father and son zoologists

Bernd Heinrich is a German-American entomologist, ornithologist, and professor of biology at the University of Vermont. In addition to his scientific papers published in academic journals, he has written quite a few books on science and nature for the general public. Bernd’s father Gerd Heinrich (1896–1984) was a self-taught naturalist, zoologist, and entomologist. The Snoring Bird, published in 2007, is a dual (auto)biography, written by Bernd Heinrich, about his father’s life as well as his own. The title refers to a rare Indonesian bird, the snoring rail or Celebes rail, that Gerd pursued on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. This father-son memoir provides a revealing look into the lives and research pursuits of these two scientists. By following the arcs of their scientific careers, the reader gains an understanding of how practices and priorities in the field of biology have changed over the past century.

Bernd Heinrich’s upbringing was uncommon, to say the least. His father was involved in unconventional relationships with women that amounted to unofficial polygamy, with three—sometimes four, perhaps—wives/lovers living together in the same household. One of these was Bernd’s biological mother, but for all intents and purposes he was raised by three moms. Though the Heinrich family was German by heritage, they owned a feudal estate called Borowke, located at times (and currently) within Poland. When World War II broke out, the Heinrichs found themselves caught between the Germans and the Russians. Gerd, though firmly anti-Nazi, enlisted in the Luftwaffe (German air force) to avoid execution. When Bernd was five years old, the family fled to West Germany just ahead of the Communist invasion. Several years later they emigrated to the United States.

Throughout all this turmoil, one constant in the family’s life was a love of nature. Gerd Heinrich traveled all over the world gathering animal specimens, some for his own studies and many for natural history museums. In his personal area of expertise, ichneumon wasps, he named over 1,000 new species. Bernd Heinrich began assisting his father at a young age, gathering wasps and taxidermizing small mammals. After the family fled Poland, they lived for several years in a cabin on a West German nature preserve, where Bernd developed a love for the outdoors. Later the Heinrichs settled on a farm in Maine, where Bernd would spend all day out in the woods and meadows, engaged in entomological and zoological activities.

I had previously read A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich, and I found it rather boring. Though I share Heinrich’s love for birds, I am less than fascinated by the minutiae of his insect research. Overall, however, I found The Snoring Bird quite captivating. I was more enthralled by the first half of the book (mostly about Gerd), because of its World Wars and exotic expeditions, than the second half (mostly about Bernd). Like just about every autobiography these days, there’s an element of “Daddy didn’t love me the way he should.” Bernd working out his father issues doesn’t become overly obtrusive or annoying, however, because the bulk of the book concentrates on the science. The interweaving of science writing and personal memoir provides an enlightening vicarious look into the life of a biologist. One really gets an understanding of the practical work behind the intellectual pursuits. This book also sheds light on science history—biology in particular—by relating how geographical exploration, taxonomy, and description (Gerd’s domains) fell out of favor, to be supplanted by experimentation, DNA analysis, and the formulation of theories on behavioral evolution (Bernd’s world). If you’re a natural scientist, or have ever dreamed of being one, The Snoring Bird is a very stimulating read.  

Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse

Modern-day fables for grown-ups

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Black Forest of Germany. He eventually emigrated to Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen. Hesse is best known for novels like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game, but he also published two volumes of short stories. His collection entitled Strange News from Another Star was published in 1919. The eight stories contained within were written from 1913 to 1918. Despite the book’s title, there’s no science fiction here. These tales do, however, exhibit a touch of fantasy like one would find in fairy tales or an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The stories here read like Aesop’s Fables if they were written for adults of the modern world. Hesse’s writing could be characterized as neo-romantic, meaning it is heavily influenced by, but slightly more realistic than, the old-school German Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and company. In these stories, Hesse never aims for a realistic portrait of what life was like in a specific region of Germany. Instead, he strives to express universal truths about human nature. Hesse’s fiction tends to take place in vaguely unspecified quasi-medieval settings that could be anywhere in Europe. Often his characters don’t even have names, they’re simply “the young man,” “the girl,” or “the old man.” Hesse frequently presents a utopian vision of a simpler life, one where intellectual pursuits and an appreciation of nature take precedence over the more realistically pressing concerns of earning a living. Within these idyllic surroundings, however, the characters act out dramas in which peace and contentment are disturbed by the darker forces of human nature and modern life, thus forcing the protagonist to embark on some sort of soul-searching quest.

In the title story, “Strange News from Another Star,” a citizen of one of such Hessian utopia makes a journey to our real world of post–World War I devastation, contrasting the paradise of peace that might have been with the death and destruction of modern Europe. Although the word “star” is used, there is no space travel involved. “Star” could easily be rephrased as “another country” or “another [metaphorical] world.” Hesse was a writer who was always searching and experimenting, and as a result, his experiments don’t always pay off. In “Hard Passage” and “A Dream Sequence,” for example, the stories start out well enough but then veer off into too much surrealism that obscures the moral of the story. “A Dream Sequence” is just that, a dream scene that feels as if it were lifted out of some novel and presented out of context.

The strongest entries in the collection appear at the end of the volume. In “Fuldam,” residents of the titular town gather for their annual fair, where a mysterious stranger appears who has the power to grant everyone one wish. In “Iris,” a young boy spends his time daydreaming, studying flowers, and observing the natural cycles of the seasons. When he grows into a man, he loses his childish spirit and grows dissatisfied with life. These two stories, and most others in this volume, successfully combine elements of romanticism, fantasy, and realism. If this book had been published a half century later in Latin America, the style might have been dubbed “magic realism.”

Hesse’s other collection of short stories, entitled Stories of Five Decades, was published after his death in 1972. It is a career retrospective of sorts, containing 23 stories from over the course of his long career. That volume is every bit as good as Strange News from Another Star. Though Hesse is best known for his novels, he was a quite masterful practitioner of the short story, as evidenced in both of his fine short fiction collections.

Stories in this collection

Augustus

The Poet

Flute Dream

Strange News from Another Star

Hard Passage

A Dream Sequence

Fuldam

Iris

Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

German humor escapes me

Despite his Italian-sounding name, Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria of Spanish and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Over the course of his life he resided in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and England and eventually became a British citizen. He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, a victory claimed by both Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Canetti wrote his literary works, however, in the German language. His 1935 novel Die Blendung has been published in English translation as Auto-da-Fé and/or The Tower of Babel. The novel takes place in an unspecified European city, though there are a few indications that the characters are speaking German. The term “auto-da-fé” refers to a public punishment inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition, often in the form of burning victims at the stake. Both of the English titles are metaphorical, not literal.

Peter Kien is the Western world’s leading sinologist (scholar of Chinese philology) and the owner of a private library of rare and important books on the subject. He leads a reclusive and regimented life spent mostly within his apartment of four rooms, the walls of which are covered floor to ceiling with books. The first two chapters of this novel start out with great promise. Kien’s intellectual pursuits could possibly serve as the basis for an intelligent and engaging novel. Kien is also an extreme misanthrope who stoically critiques the idiocy of all the human beings he encounters. This dark outlook on mankind also intrigues the reader, who wonders if Kien is just a surly curmudgeon or a potential serial killer.

Auto-da-Fé never lives up to the promise of those first two chapters. It immediately takes a left turn into a slapstick comedy about henpecked husbands and shrewish wives. Like most Nobel laureates, Canetti has received much critical and popular praise. I read several reviews online that made it sound like Auto-da-Fé was not only Canetti’s greatest work but also one of the best novels of the last century. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find that his novel is terrible! I’m guessing that Canetti was going for an absurdist humor somewhere along the lines of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1938) or Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1928), neither of which I liked, but Auto-da-Fé is not even absurdist, it’s just asinine. Nor is it the least bit fun. In fact, it is incredibly tedious to slog through insanely long chapters in which the characters grind their way through interminable conversations and capers that amount to nothing. This novel is an even more colossal waste of time than The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, another Nobel-hallowed work of German-language humor that I didn’t get. Late in the book, there is a serious chapter dealing with childhood sexual abuse. It is handled very well, which makes one think that Canetti might actually be a very good writer if he would stay away from comedy.

Perhaps one reason critics and “intellectuals” praise this book is because one of its themes is the love of books. Beyond those first two chapters, however, the books in question are not discussed in any way intelligently. Kien, contrary to his personality and his profession, values all books indiscriminately as if they were just bricks of paper whose contents are irrelevant. Another defiance of logic is the fact that Kien seems to have an unlimited supply of money at hand. If pointless silliness isn’t enough to put you off this book, Canetti also provides many derogatory comments towards women and Jews. Defenders might say, “Those are the characters speaking, not the author.” Canetti himself is of Jewish heritage, so perhaps he’s criticizing anti-Semitism instead of Semitism. However, when three of the main male characters are extreme misogynists, two others are womanizers, the only female character is portrayed very negatively, and the reader has to sit through lengthy sermons about how women are simply evil, isn’t it safe to say the novel itself is misogynistic?

The White Rose by B. Traven

Home sweet hacienda 

The German author who went by the pen name of B. Traven (real name unknown, or at least unconfirmed) made a career out of writing fiction set in Mexico and Latin America. In novels such as The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven painted socially and politically realistic images of life in Mexico in the years immediately following the Revolution. His works often express his anarchist views by criticizing American imperialism and the capitalist exploitation of resources and people. In his novel The White Rose, Traven continues to explore these themes. The White Rose was originally published in Germany in 1929 and wasn’t published in English translation until 1979.

In the state of Veracruz, Mexico, near the state capital of Jalapa, lies la Rosa Blanca, the White Rose, a beautiful hacienda run according to generations-old Mexican traditions. The owner of this fertile land is neither a Spanish colonist nor a White opportunist, but a man of Indian (Native Mexican) heritage, Jacinto Yañez, who presides over the land that was his father’s, his grandfather’s, his great grandfather’s, and so on. Several multi-generational families live on and work the lands of Rosa Blanca, all of them likely related to Jacinto by blood. He presides over this extended family like a benevolent godfather, and though the work is hard and modern comforts are few, the people are happy. The Condor Oil Company, an American firm, has bought up all the surrounding land to drill for oil. They want Rosa Blanca in order to fill the empty hole in their lucrative dominion. No matter how much money they offer Jacinto, however, he refuses to sell, insisting that though by law he may be the official owner of the hacienda, it is his moral obligation to steward the land and pass it along to his descendants. This refusal to play ball really sticks in Condor’s craw, and they are not used to taking no for an answer.

The first two chapters of the book, in which la Rosa Blanca and its inhabitants are introduced, immediately draws you into the pleasant life of this hacienda. Traven really understands Mexican culture and is able to capture the philosophy and mindset of a Mexican perspective. No other White author writes about Mexico with the same insightfulness and authenticity as Traven (and unfortunately, too few Mexican authors have been translated into English). He has obviously spent some time in that country, not just as a tourist but as a drifting laborer, not just in cities but in rural areas as well, among both capitalists and peasants, and his experiences inform his fiction. When this novel is set in Mexico, it’s a superb five-star read.

The problem is, most of the story doesn’t take place in Mexico, but in San Francisco. Traven devotes more chapters to the American capitalists and their oil company than he does to the Mexican farmers or their hacienda. The bulk of the book is a character study of Mr. Collins, the president of Condor Oil. At least four or five chapters are solely devoted to his extramarital affairs (Traven seems to imply, maybe not intentionally, that capitalism and its excesses are the fault of womankind). There are also a few dry chapters on stock market manipulation. These portions of the book are more predictable and less enlightening than Traven’s perspective on Mexico. They read more like an average Upton Sinclair novel than a Traven book.

All that said, I am a big fan of Traven’s writing, both as a Mexicophile and as a lover of realist literature. I am usually quite impressed by his work and have yet to be truly disappointed. The White Rose is not as excellent as The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or The Bridge in the Jungle, but it is still a very good novel. Traven deserves commendation for this eye-opening indictment of the injustices of economic imperialism in Latin America at a time when few European or American writers were concerned with such matters.

The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven

Life and death in a tropical village

I only discovered B. Traven about a year ago. Since then, I’ve read four of his novels, and three out of the four have been superb. The Bridge in the Jungle is the best one yet. It was first published in German in 1928, then in English translation in 1939. Traven was born in Germany and worked as a sailor for a while before settling in Mexico in the 1920s. It is unclear how long he lived there, but almost all of his books take place in Mexico. The Bridge in the Jungle is set in an unspecified location in Central America, though that term may be used vaguely enough here to encompass Chiapas in Southern Mexico, where Traven was known to have spent some time. Traven published a series of a half a dozen novels known as his Jungle series. Confusingly, however, The Bridge in the Jungle is not part of that series, but rather a precursor to it.

The novel is narrated by an American drifter who is once referred to by the name of Gales. (Traven readers will recognize Gerald or Gerard Gales, the name Traven commonly applied to his protagonists, though his Gales books don’t necessarily constitute a series.) This narrator visits his fellow American friend Sleigh, who lives in the middle of the jungle with his Indian wife and a few head of cattle. A bridge built by an oil company crosses a river there. Next to the bridge is a water pumping station owned by the railroad. Gathered around the bridge is a poor and tiny riverside village comprised of a few squalid huts and ramshackle houses, including Sleigh’s.

Gales and Sleigh attend a party that’s being held in the village near the pump station. It’s an impromptu dance held in someone’s front yard. Villagers of all ages attend, bringing food or musical instruments or whatever else they can contribute. At first, it takes a while for this party to get off the ground. The promised musicians are no-shows, and Gales and Sleigh are clearly disappointed. For a while, it seems like this is what the book is going to be about: a bummer of a party in the middle of nowhere. The occasion is disrupted, however, when an unforeseen crisis befalls one of the families of the village. The nature of this catastrophe is best left unsaid here, to avoid spoiling too much of the plot. What the novel relates, however, is how the entire population of the village accepts the stricken family’s troubles as their own and comes to their aid and support.

This is not a feel-good story, however. It is a vivid immersion into the reality of life among the rural poor in a developing country. I’ve traveled enough in Mexico to appreciate the gritty realism of Traven’s depictions of that country. While I may be merely a dilettante tourist, he was the real deal who lived the life of the drifters about whom he wrote (see also The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). The village depicted in The Bridge in the Jungle is no doubt based on a community among which Traven lived for some time, and his vivid recollections bring this world to life. He doesn’t just describe the trappings of these people’s environment but also lets the reader in on their thought processes and philosophy of life. Here, as in all of his books, Traven includes some pro-socialist, anti-imperialist comments, but such social criticism plays a minor role in a story that is much more personal than political.

While reading The Bridge in the Jungle, I couldn’t help wondering how a writer like Hemingway is immortalized with a Nobel Prize while Traven is allowed to fade into obscurity. This novel is more powerful than anything I’ve read by Hemingway and at least as profound as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, without all the annoying stream-of-consciousness wordplay. Traven’s writing delivers the unvarnished realism of a John Steinbeck or Jack London but without any of their literary pretensions. The more I read of his work, the more impressed I am by the perceptive naturalism and plainspoken style of his storytelling.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Too absurd to alarm

Austrian-Czech author Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in modern European literature. In the early 20th century, he pushed the envelope of what literature could be by applying dark, dystopian, surrealistic, and deliberately absurd imagery to existential themes of modern life. Kafka wrote three novels—The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika—all of which were unfinished at the time of his death but nevertheless were left complete enough to be hailed as masterpieces by literary critics of the last century. The Trial was first published, posthumously, in 1925, but was written about a decade earlier. I had previously read Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis and found it worthy of high regard. The Trial, on the other hand, left me quite disappointed and even annoyed.

The Trial concerns the legal troubles of Josef K., a chief clerk at a bank. On his 30th birthday, two law enforcement officers show up at his apartment to arrest him. The nature of his offense is never disclosed, neither to K. nor to the reader. The particular agency these officers work for is unknown, and it doesn’t seem that any formal charges are ever made. K. is not taken into custody, but released on his own recognizance, able to live and work much the same as before. It is made clear to him, however, that he is regarded as a criminal and will have to undergo a long, complicated, and labor intensive trial process that will likely dominate his life for years to come and may result in a serious sentence. In the process of preparing for his trial, the workings of which he knows almost nothing, K. consults a number of people for assistance, including lawyers, a businessman, and a painter. 

Much like George Orwell’s 1984 and other 20th-century dystopian novels, The Trial reflects the unfortunate reality of Justice in many authoritarian and non-democratic nations. The fact is, there were, and probably still are, many countries where you could be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night, for no specified crime, imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed. There are moments in The Trial where Kafka brings that horror vividly to life.

The effect is ruined, however, by the juxtaposition of such political paranoia with humorous and absurdist elements. The legal proceedings described are unrealistically byzantine and bizarre, and the details are often revealed through somewhat silly conversations with characters that I assume were meant to be satirical characters. Every woman K. meets along the way throws herself at him, and he engages in bumbling, fumbling romances with a few of them. The overall effect is something like that of a German expressionist print. On the one hand, the rude, angular depiction of human figures engenders disturbing feelings of anxiety, revulsion, and paranoia. On the other hand, there is also something humorous about the rather cartoony and distorted style of expression. Sometimes that humor is intentional (as in George Grosz) and sometimes not (as in Egon Schiele). In The Trial, it is hard to tell what is intentionally humorous and what is not. For today’s reader, a century after the book’s initial publication, the difficulty is compounded by an ignorance as to what life was really like in Bohemia or Czechoslovakia a hundred years ago. For example, court proceedings in The Trial are held in the attic of a tenement building. Was that a real thing? Or is that just a joke?

Having only read a couple of Kafka’s works, I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s overrated. I do feel fairly confident, however, in saying that The Trial is overrated. If literary critics want to hail one innovative early-2oth-century Czech author as a godfather of modernism, my pick would be Karel Capek rather than Kafka.