My Year in Reading, 2024
Although disasters—both natural and political—have made this annual post of mine very late, here is my year in reading for 2024, better late than never.
Favorites
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), by Alfred Döblin • New York Review Books, 2018
For fans of: Berlin; literary modernism; linguistic exuberance; epic stories about the little guy
Alfred Döblin’s modernist masterpiece hits you like a hammer—indeed the very same hammer that its narrator warns from the first page of the novel will come down upon its main character, Franz Biberkopf, “with monstrous and extreme violence.” Already we appear to know the whole story about this obstinate, child-like, small-time criminal, who has just served time for killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage and who is back on the street, seeking the straight and narrow (albeit not for long). But, like the traditional Bildungsroman, of which this story is both an indirect example and an ironic travesty, the narrator has a moral purpose in mind. We are meant to learn something from Franz’s woes; what and how we are meant to learn is what makes this novel different from its literary predecessors.
The hammer is the cacophony of Berlin in 1927: the tumult of its trolleys and construction piledrivers and police raids shaking up the city; the specter of PTSD stalking its veterans of the Great War; the martial drumbeat of its nationalists declaring themselves openly in the streets at the beginning of the end of Weimar. Above all, the hammer is the brute fact of destiny, which, like the God of Job, hovers in the background like a mute shadow until the moment he unleashes a wind-blown clamor of suffering:
Water in the thick dark woods, terrible black water, you are so quiet. You lie there quiet and terrible. Your surface is not moved, no, not when the forest is hit by storm and the pines begin to bend and the spiders’ webs between their branches tear and the branches themselves begin to crack. Then you lie down in the hollow, you black waters, and the boughs fall. (187)
Now we have the boom-boom, without drums and fifes. The trees swing left and right. Boom-boom. But they can’t keep time. When the trees are just leaning left, the it’s boom-by-the-left, they bend over, crack, clatter, burst, shear, clump down. Timing. Boom goes the storm, you go left. Hoo-hoo-ah-oo-hoo, back, that’s over, it’s gone, you just need to catch the right moment. Boom, here it is back again, watch out, boom, boom, boom, those are bombs, the fighter plane wants to knock over the wood, it wants to bomb the whole forest.
The trees draft and sway, there’s a rustle, they break, a clatter, boom, life is at stake, boom-boom, the sun is gone, weights crash, night, boom-boom. (339)
Michael Hofmann’s excellent translation makes this text feel alive, and the experience of reading it is almost like inhabiting the Geist or electric current that flows between all of the component parts of the great city, human and non-human. We jump back and forth between perspectives and scenes and places, sometimes at random, often not knowing who exactly is doing the talking or sounding. Fragments and premonitions of future and past events slip their way into the flow of consciousness and lend a sense of inexorable pull to Franz’s prophesied fate.
In its avant-garde techniques, the novel is much like Joyce’s Ulysses, its modernist counterpart which also plays with language and form. But while Joyce, it seems to me, is more attuned to the aural landscape of speech and language as such, Döblin’s text is experienced like a film montage, another modernist innovation: scenes, images, and fragments—whether of news headlines in Berlin, Greek tragedy, or biblical legends—are spliced next to one another to create a visual whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This book is rich, funny, and deeply moving, and its images are hard to forget. Its inner core reveals a profound empathy for and psychological understanding of Franz’s existential predicament, which stands, I think, as a proxy for the German people. They too have no idea what is about to hit them a few years after the events of the book. Döblin’s gift of sight as a an outsider—an intellectual Jewish agnostic who later converted to Catholicism in exile in Los Angeles while writing dime-a-dozen film scripts—gives this book a depth that is only magnified with the hindsight of the coming historical tragedies.
Despite all of that, Döblin leaves us with a resolute rejoinder to the twin angels of Death and History, the true lesson learned after a modern-day descent into Hell: “You don’t need to respect something as destiny, you should look at it, turn it over in your hand and destroy it.” A motto for anti-fascist resistance.
The Tender Passion
The Tender Passion: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, by Peter Gay • Oxford University Press, 1987
For fans of: Overwrought nineteenth-century prose; psychoanalysis as applied to history and literature; spicy details about the emotional and erotic lives of people 150 years ago
If you thought a 500-page book about the erotic lives of Victorians would be boring (or the punchline of a joke), you would be wrong. This is the subject of historian Peter Gay’s book The Tender Passion, the second entry in his five-volume series, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Gay’s works are endlessly fascinating, because he examines the assemblage of thoughts, experiences, and lives that form the constellation of the period under consideration. Although it can be helpful to speak in historical shorthands, there is no one, overarching truth or theme that emerges as a neat summary of Victorian life. Instead, there is only the immense variety of experience and the anxious strivings of the Victorians themselves to make some kind of unified sense of their time.
The Victorian era is a prime subject for a historian like Gay, who brings a committed Freudian lens to the writing of history. This allows him to plumb the culture’s unconscious, literally reading between the lines of novels, essays, pamphlets, and even personal letters to find the unstated, and thereby truly representative, preoccupations of the psyche. For the Victorians, the central struggle on an individual and collective level was between the conflicting emotional spheres of “tenderness”—the safe haven of bourgeois domesticity—and “passion”—the tumultuous Sturm und Drang inherited from Romanticism. As Gay notes, “the question that remained was whether middle-class lovers, supremely rule-bound and conventional as they appeared to their critics, could ever attain this exalted ideal, the perfect compound,” between tenderness and passion (46). Although they might not have attained the ideal, Gay rescues their experience as one that had significant leeway, within culturally established forms, to attempt the ideal, more so than we might think today.
Just because the Victorian era was a society that did not leave conspicuous records of everything it thought or experienced doesn’t mean that its people weren’t thinking or experiencing them. Literature was one sublimated realm where much could be explored and voiced, from anxieties about the breakdown of old certainties and mores to more taboo subjects like homoerotic desire and other “problematic attachments.” These “fantasies” stand at the boundary between individual and collective life, and bear witness “far less to journalistic precision” than to fiction’s “capacity for analyzing, representing, and in significant ways distorting the erotic experience of contemporary culture” (142).
And so this book offers up a menagerie of texts and cultural artifacts, which are amusing, touching, and poignant all at the same time, because they reflect the real dilemmas of real individuals: the vehement love letters of the erstwhile phlegmatic economist Walter Bagehot; the private diaries of Beatrice Webb, who after suffering the “devastating erotic injury” of a failed affair with the dashing Joseph Chamberlain, found a tempered happiness and life partner in her husband Sidney Webb, the “ugly little socialist” (her words); the stuffy English tirades against French decadence in journals of literary criticism that read like emissions of the modern-day mano-sphere; the cheeky and didactic treatise on seduction and marriage by Balzac; the novels of George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Henry James, José Maria de Eça de Queirós, and many others that chart a tenuous path between “erotic expressiveness and reserve.” All in all, a superb book that suggests we in our age are closer to the Victorians in our inner lives than we might like to think.
Atheism in Christianity
Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom (1968), by Ernst Bloch • Verso, 2009
For fans of: Theology that doesn’t suck; highly creative interpretive readings of the Bible; the Marxism-religion synthesis
“The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.” (epigraph)
A prime example of Bloch’s own definition of the “warm current” of Marxism, this book—dense, often opaque, but highly original and stimulating—seeks to rescue the liberatory, utopian impulse veiled behind religious expression, while at the same time vaunting atheism beyond a simple anti-religious sentiment. For Bloch, the two are inextricably intertwined: “only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist.” Rejecting “just another grey and compromising dialogue” between two opposing orthodoxies, he instead attempts to construct an alternative, dialectical understanding of the Christian gospel as the fullest expression of an atheistic current that runs through the entirety of scripture. Rather than contradict each other, the two strands combine to form the true idea of utopian becoming—a transformed, unalienated world that we embrace as home.
As a Marxist-Jewish philosopher writing in the mode of a mid-century Protestant theologian, Bloch’s vision—draped in untranslated Latin phrases and allusions to Blake and Gnosticism—stems from a particularly interesting, “rebelliously different” reading of the Bible. The Old and New Testaments do not present a unified narrative of one God. Instead, they unconsciously record a long-standing conflict between dichotomous forces: on the one hand, a static, theocratic religion of priests and prophets, whose mythic Creator-God imposes an authoritarian order of sin, law, and social control from above; and on the other, a subterranean, revolutionary movement of exodus and liberation from below. The latter is found in the discontented “murmurings of the people,” the slaves of Egypt released from bondage, whose hidden God is not the imperative “I am who I am,” but the more dynamic promise, “I will be what I will be.” This God is not the same for all eternity, but grows and changes in tandem with the growth of revolutionary consciousness.
Remarkably, traces of this heterodox tradition are evident in the text (most prominently in the book of Job), but require “detective work” to draw out—namely, source criticism and a Hegelian master-slave dialectic. Bloch draws attention to the meaning of the word religion itself: re-ligio, or a “binding back” to a mythical Creator-God, who in Bloch’s schema is the opposite of the future-oriented Exodus-God. And so, Bloch asks, to which direction do we turn? Back, to the beginning and all the limitations of nature and history? Or forward, to the future and the exodus out of all oppressions, including that of the concept of God itself?
The exodus begun by Job from the Caesar-like concept of God, when he placed [humankind] above all forms of tyranny—above the very questionable tyranny of righteousness from on-high and the neo-mythical tyranny of majestic nature—this exodus is not one away from Exodus itself. Far from it: it is precisely the rebel who has trust in God, without believing in him. (107)
This exodus from God is continued by Jesus (whose full human equality with God thereby abolishes God as “on-high,” as a being existing over humanity) and must be taken up by contemporary Christianity as a new and different kind of atheistic faith. This tradition is atheistic precisely because it is positioned against the social and political order of theistic religion, upheld by its ruling classes; theism is inseparable from this privileged position as status quo.
Although Bloch can be a demanding writer, he is bracing to read and still speaks to the current moment (and reading him alongside my good friend Ben was a great pleasure and advantage). He skirts possibly a little too closely to a kind of supersessionism or problematic dualism that reads the Old—i.e., Jewish—Testament as suspect, and finds in Christianity a more progressive realization of its ideals, a standpoint which has fueled anti-Semitism for centuries. But, even if he privileges Christianity in a sense (or at least in the title of this book), Bloch is aware of this danger, and I think he is trying to accomplish something more nuanced. He does not present a linear progression from an old, bad God to a new and better God; rather, he charts a theological-social struggle between varying conceptions of God that is baked into religion from the start. And none of those conceptions of God survive if we take the true substance of what they promise seriously.
Bloch communicates, through a glass darkly, all of the hopeful longing for a better, more dignified world that religion (both Judaism and Christianity) promises, but can’t deliver on its own—“a world as yet still undiscovered, but already somehow sensed.” And he exhorts Marxism, in turn, to take on the depths of the foreign utopian vision of religion, which it is often lacking in itself. Above all, Bloch leaves it up to us to continue the undoing of religion by religion, of resisting things like Christian nationalism through faithfulness to Christianity’s own subterranean tradition of godless rebellion.
The Stone Face
The Stone Face (1963), by William Gardner Smith • New York Review Books, 2021
For fans of: Existentialism in fiction; Black internationalism; Richard Wright and Chester Himes, Fanon and Sartre
This semi-autobiographical novel by the African-American writer William Gardner Smith follows a young Black man named Simeon who, fleeing the hatreds of American racism in Philadelphia, emigrates to France to seek out the cultured sphere of Black intellectuals in Paris. Among fictional stand-ins for such figures as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes, Simeon is astonished to discover that in France, in stark opposition to America, he is afforded the full dignity of personhood: white French people treat him as an equal citizen, and he has the full freedom of movement and being that constitutes the freedom of the subject as such.
This seemingly enlightened and progressive veneer is shattered as Simeon encounters the Algerian population of Paris, who are treated as subhuman. The Algerian War had been raging since 1954, and France’s tactics to crush the independence of its former colony were increasing in their brutality at home and abroad. After witnessing all-too-familiar police brutality against a group of Algerians, and when one of the Algerians later accosts Simeon in the street—“hey white man!”—he is suddenly thrown into the experience of the oppressor. Simeon becomes the perpetrator, rather than the recipient, of the Sartrean “look” against the Other, and is complicit in the act of social alienation he knows too well. In a complex social alchemy, he has “become white”—not in a racial sense, but exactly in the sense of his relative, “situational privilege,” as Adam Shatz remarks in the introduction.
What follows is Simeon’s struggle to come to terms with this “double perspective” of oppressor and oppressed, and to move from an inner self-disposition of exile to that of comrade. Essentially, the novel presents Simeon’s narrative in terms of the “situation” of existentialism—given this contingent set of circumstances, what do you choose to be? Do you remain complacent, as many of Simeon’s artist and intellectual friends choose? Do you escape into celebrity and materialism, as Simeon’s girlfriend, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, chooses? Or do you find a way to shatter the binary, to break the “stone face” of hatred that comes from alienation by the Other?
Simeon comes to understand that there is no true inner, metaphysical reality of “blackness” or “Algerian-ness” or any other label as such, but that these categories are imposed from the outside, always in contextual and situational ways. But this insight allows him to choose a position of solidarity with the oppressed that threads together anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-fascism à la the Tricontinental Conference. The Stone Face is a challenging and highly relevant novel, an education about how to choose humanness in the face of inhumanity.
Reading Paths
The Social Novel (Book Club)
Felix Holt: The Radical
The Stone Face
Boys Alive
Père Goriot
Berlin Alexanderplatz
This year I was part of an amazing book club that set out to read “the classics” but ended up following, intentionally or not, an interesting path of what I think can be called “the social novel,” including some of the favorites I have already mentioned. From George Eliot’s examination of how public and private life are linked together by authenticity and integrity; to Balzac’s skewering of the vanities and insensitivities of the upper classes (showing why he was one of Marx’s favorite writers); to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unflinching, neo-realist look at post-war Roman poverty—these novels all, in their own way, analyze and reflect social structures and chart how individual characters respond to them.
Victorian-ish
The Tender Passion
Felix Holt: The Radical
Père Goriot
The Turn of the Screw
I spent a lot of time with nineteenth-century writers this year. The Tender Passion was an excellent companion to the novels I read in book club, and it put a lot of things on my reading list. The Turn of the Screw stands out as one of the best novellas I have ever read: formally perfect, unsettling, and ripe with interpretive possibilities. Fredric Jameson remarks of the “Jamesian sentence” that, in its endless equivocations and deferrals, it reflects
…voyeurism and suspicion, the hermeneutic ferreting out, the curiosity of a self-doubting speculation that must both keep itself alive by remaining in the dark, by preserving the secret of the primal scene, at the same that it enlists our own commitment to the urgency of the search. (Inventions of a Present, 56)
In The Turn of the Screw this style is perfectly matched to its subject, the creepiest ghost story you can imagine. I highly recommend the novella and the 1961 film adaptation, The Innocents, for a Gothic fix.
Weimar Autumn
Weimar Culture
Berlin Alexanderplatz
A Short History of the Weimar Republic
As the Brat Summer raves began to wane last fall, I started joking to friends that its natural successor, given the failing state of our country, should be Weimar Autumn. Well, we appear to have blown through our own Weimar Republic to outright fascism, but I still read a number of books from this period as a way of coping, led yet again by the inimitable Peter Gay and his excellent survey, Weimar Culture. Gay reflects that Weimar was a period in which the “outsider became insider”; those formerly at the margins—including socialists, artists, and Jewish intellectuals and politicians (including Alfred Döblin)—were suddenly thrust into positions of leadership and influence without any true base of power. A historical picture emerges of an imperfect, contradictory, and vulnerable society which long foresaw coming doom but couldn’t do anything about it—sounds about right!
2024 Reading Stats
Compared to previous year (in parentheses):
- Books read from: 23 (-15%)
- Books finished: 14 (-22%)
- Unique authors: 21 (0%)
- Average reading time (finished books): 7 weeks
- Pages read: 5,849 (-19%)
- Pages per day: 16.0 (-19%)