nonfiction – Page 3 – Koba English

Educated

On a whim I decided to join a bokcirkel at the local library, and the organizer cheerfully informed me that the next book would be Tara Westover’s Educated.

Much like the neighborhood book club, I’d signed up in hopes of reading Swedish books, rather than Swedish translations of American bestsellers, but here we are! Not to mention that Educated was one of those phenomenon books where, thanks to everyone talking about it, I felt like I had read it by osmosis. Having now actually read it, I can indeed confirm that the experience of hearing everyone talk about it is enough to really get the gist of the book. Westover has an incredibly isolated and traumatic childhood, decides against all odds to go to college, comes to terms with her childhood trauma and by the end has become a history scholar. No surprises there.

My hypothesis is that part of the reason Educated made such a huge splash was that by 2018, Mainstream Liberal America had realized that Hillbilly Elegy was Bad, Actually and saw in Educated an attempt to make amends for hyping up Elegy. Obviously I can’t exactly prove this, and J. D. Vance didn’t complete his face heel turn until 2022, so who’s to say. (Go give the If Books Could Kill podcast episode a listen for more on Hillbilly Elegy.)

This is not to throw shade on Educated. Westover overcame tremendous obstacles to be where she is today and for that she deserves accolades. And unlike Vance, she’s not trying to make a larger political point or diagnose the ills of large swathes of the American population. If you grow up Mormon, you’ll end up talking about other Mormons in your memoirs, but Educated never feels like an explainer on Mormonism, or like a critique or an apology. The book itself is…fine? I think it was probably an essential part of Westover’s recovery process to write the whole story out and to present it to a public after spending several years being gaslit by her family about her own memories.

What makes me uneasy about Educated is where it lands in the book market and the reasons the reading public has for latching on to it. It’s not quite circus sideshow gawking, but it’s not quite not circus sideshow gawking, either. However, the fact that I read this in order to discuss it with a group of Swedes (and that I’m already anticipating being asked to give an impromptu “US History and Culture” lecture) might be coloring my reaction here. There’s also a part of it that feeds into the collective American obsession with rags-to-riches “bootstraps” stories, where a particular kind of reader might point to Educated as proof that America really is a meritocracy and that if you’re not succeeding you’re just not working hard enough.

Again, I don’t think Westover is deliberately writing to pander to either of those instincts. How the public responds to a book and where one particular life story falls in the general ideological fabric of a culture is kind of beyond the scope of an author’s consideration. There’s something to said about a publisher saying “yes” to this particular life trajectory but “no” to others.

Also, unrelated to anything, but a huge content warning for pretty frank descriptions of gruesome accidents of all kinds: serious burns, head injuries, gashes, you name it. I’m squeamish so those were sections I just skimmed through. A significant portion of the book also focuses on the abusive behavior of one of Tara’s older brothers, again with pretty frank descriptions of bullying and violence.

The Best of Myles

Fresh out of college, I read At Swim-Two-Birds at the recommendation of a friend who went on a bit of an Irish literature kick after studying at Trinity College Dublin. Not long after that, I stumbled across The Best of Myles on a visit to The Strand in New York City; so well disposed was I to Brian O’Nolan that I added it to my basket. Plus it was an old, possibly original hardback edition (and pretty beat up at that), and I’m a sucker for old books.

And then it languished in my collection for something like thirteen years!

Push came to shove when an Irish co-worker moved into a new apartment. “Wouldn’t that make for a reasonably appropriate housewarming gift?” I thought. And then later, as I read it: “It certainly makes more sense in his library than in yours.”

Not that I didn’t enjoy it, or that it’s not funny, but I’m not Irish and I have yet to do an obsessive deep dive into Irish history*, so a good portion of the references were beyond me, including the occasional section written in Irish. Hardly surprising, considering that O’Nolan’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” column anthologized in the collection was written in both English and Irish.

An overall fun read, and a reminder that I should dip my toe back in the pool of O’Nolan’s novels. There aren’t that many, after all, so might as well read the entire collection.

*The universe seems to have heard my request in this matter and brought Fintan O’Toole as a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. I immediately put a hold on We Don’t Know Ourselves at the Stockholm library.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Sometimes the books we read transcend their mere bookishness in the world and become something akin to life milestones, mementos of a particular point in our lives. Under the Net is a fantastic book on its own, made all the more fantastic for me because I bought it at the now-defunct “What The Book?” in Seoul and read the bulk of it in Gimpo airport, hoping against hope that a seat would open up after I missed my initial flight to Jeju. (One did. I had a great time.) Naturally that specific copy that I own, with the handwritten note to the previous owner and a What The Book? receipt still in it, immediately transports me to South Korea in July 2012. But any discussion of that book in general, or Iris Murdoch generally, will also bring along memories of that time of my life.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Jerome K. Jerome is similarly of a specific time for me, though in a grimmer way. An acquaintance recommended it (another left field book) sometime in 2019 and close on to winter I was reading a free ebook version from Project Gutenberg on the subway to work. I remember closing the ereader app and pocketing my phone as I came up the stairs of Hötorget, dawn only just getting started, everything still half-dark. I remember pulling my phone out on my way home in the evening and dashing off a quick message to them to say, Thanks for the rec, this is hilarious! before opening the ereader app back up for the return trip.

And then I didn’t have many commutes for a long time after that, for some reason!

I also forgot about Idle Thoughts for a long while, though whether that’s because of Covid or because of my own distractability is hard to say. Here I am, three years later, and I finally finished it, and now the book has become emblematic of my journey through coronatider.

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. I have a good memory for a lot of things, but I would be hard pressed to summarize the entire collection and tell you which essays I finished before Covid, which during, and which after (if you want to say that there’s an after, which is debatable). Another book that needs no review, no introduction, no hype; Jerome has earned his place in English literary history. But for all of that historicity, reading Idle Thoughts today feels surprisingly fresh and relevant. Plus ça change.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Here’s the rare “book off the TBR” win! Of course, Debt: The First 5,000 Years was a relevantly recent TBR addition that has not undergone the shameful, years-long limbo that other titles have, but any progress is progress.

If you look back at the non-fiction I read in 2022 (especially the non-fiction I read and enjoyed in 2022), you can see something of a common denominator:

Caliban and the Witch, Jakartametoden and Handels: Maktelitens Skola all go a very long way towards explaining how capitalism as we know it came to be and how its current norms and structure are maintained. Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2022 is reportage often aimed at critiquing those norms and structure and, if you want to stretch the conceit, ancient Rome is where we like to start the story of Europe, and it is Europe from which springs everything else the other selections touch on. (Temples of the Sky is the odd one out, a niche hobby read.)

Whether this trend is due to the natural progression of my interests, the years I’ve now spent absorbed in financial reports, the turbulent times we live in, or some other constellation of factors, who can say. Regardless, it continued straight away into 2022 with Debt.

I’m not lucid enough a thinker to provide a pat nutshell summary of my own, so I’ll lift the one on the book’s Archive.org page:

[Debt] explores the historical relationship of debt with social institutions such as barter, marriage, friendship, slavery, law, religion, war and government; in short, much of the fabric of human life in society. It draws on the history and anthropology of a number of civilizations, large and small, from the first known records of debt from Sumer, in 3500 BC until the present.

And then the one from the back of the book itself:

Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong.

We are still fighting these battles today.

This is the best kind of nonfiction: written by a knowledgeable academic for a lay audience without insulting their intelligence or devolving into jargon and obscure terminology, with a heaping helping of works cited at the end.

In many ways, this is the less crackpot-y, more grounded and more academic answer to Sacred Economics, which I read a few years ago and which helped keep me oriented in Debt. A lot of what Eisenstein describes as “gifts” seems to overlap with what Graeber describes as the favors that, with the advent of currency, turn into debt. Neither of them mention each other, however. Both books came out in 2011*, so I’m not sure whether it’s Graeber or Eisenstein who should be referring to the other. (Graeber might have felt that Eisenstein wasn’t nearly academically rigorous enough to cite and too out-there to be worth engaging with otherwise, and I can’t say I would have blamed him.) They definitely draw from at least a few of the same sources, such as Marcel Mauss.

I expect I will end up re-reading it later in the year, as it’s so dense with information and argumentation that there’s no way you can absorb it all at once. (Maybe you can. I can’t.) For now, time to give my brain a bit of a break.

*I think. It’s hard to tell, precisely, with Sacred Economics beyond “before 2012.”

The Big Balloon (A Love Story)

I decided to get an early start on some classic New Year’s resolutions like decluttering and ending long-term toxic relationships by having an emergency gallbladder removal two days after Christmas!

Medical drawing of a gallbladder — This one does not spark joy!

It also left me with three and a half days of nothing to do but chip away at my ebook collection; I didn’t take my purse and its ever-present paperback with me to the ER, as I fully expected to return home the same day. Well, well, well. Fortunately my phone is a miniature library of obscure and half-forgotten ebooks and I could keep myself distracted in the long waits between ultrasounds and discussions with surgeons. Most of that time was spent with the back half of Rick Berlin’s The Big Balloon (A Love Story), which up to that point I’d been reading on my morning commute.

I’m not hip to the Boston art scene, I didn’t know who Rick Berlin was before I bought the book, I’d never heard of any of his musical projects. But he put out an ad for the book on one of my go-to podcasts and since the premise sounded unique, or at least interesting, I decided to give it a try. I feel that’s only worth mentioning because someone who’s either a fan of Berlin, or familiar with his artistic milieu, will probably have a different response to it than I did.

Out of every possible Pandemic Project or Pandemic Novel, The Big Balloon is maybe the only one I can imagine that will be at all tolerable to revisit in more normal times (if we ever have more normal times). Even though the book is the direct result of COVID-19, it’s never about COVID-19. The conceit is simply this: The Big Balloon is a collection photos of items around Berlin’s home and reflections, stories and reminisces related to each item. Each little essay is entirely self-contained, with no attempt to impose chronological or thematic order on the collection (aside from organizing it into chapters based on rooms). The result is like a literary version of a Cubist portrait, where different years of Berlin’s life and different aspects of himself are presented simultaneously—or as close to simultaneously as you can get in something you read. Something about using the limitations of lockdowns to open up a vast interior world, etc. etc.

The Big Balloon worked well for commute and hospital reading because each essay was never especially long, so I could dip in and out according to subway arrivals or morphine-addled focus. And that was precisely the intended effect:

There is no linear structure to this book. No over-arching narrative. Each entry is self-contained. One piece can relate to another, but it isn’t necessary to make that connection. The reader can pick it up, crack it open anywhere, read a section and put it down. The ‘chapters’ are just the rooms in my house.

It could be said that I chose this odd-ball format for bathroom reading. For those with short attention spans. On the other hand, much as I love the twists and turns of a full blown story, the Haiku simplicity of disparate entries exposes Berlin as if opening the paper window flaps of a Twelve Days Of Christmas holiday card in no particular order.

The highly personal nature of the material also, in a way, made up for the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. I wasn’t exactly starved for social contact generally, between the two other patients sharing my room and chatting with the nurses doing their rounds, but that’s not the same as time with your nearest and dearest in the darkest, coldest days of the year. The next best thing was Berlin plunging right to the depths of his own psyche to share with me, and the rest of his readership:

The Big Balloon is super personal. Most art, at least the art I love best, is personal. From another’s truth one extrapolates one’s own echo, wisdom, embarrassment and laughter. That’s what I’d hope for you, dear reader. That you’d laugh or at least find something self-relevant in these independent passages of my peculiar life.

A creative not-so-little undertaking that makes me want to ask the same of my friends, or save up for a dry spell on the ol’ bloggo. “Choose ten things around your house and write an essay about each one of them.” Maybe make that an additional step in the KonMari method.

Happy New Year!

Handels: Maktelitens skola

I have no end of studying to do for Kammarkollegiets Auktorisation exam, which means now was the perfect time to dig into a completely unrelated 500-page sociological tome on the Stockholm School of Economics (hereafter just “Handels”). Trust me, that’s actually 5D space chess levels of expert studying strategy. It has nothing to do with the fact that the cover caught my eye when I was in the library to pick up Kammarkollegiet study material.

The best kind of nonfiction books answer a question you would have normally never asked, and answer it so thoroughly that you’re left wondering why you would have never asked it to begin with. With Handels that question is, “Why do business schools exist?”

If you’d asked me that question a month ago I would have said something like, well I guess they’re just kind of a natural outgrowth of an already-established scholastic tradition. We add new fields of study all the time in other disciplines, after all. And then they spin off and form their own highly specialized institutions for any number of reasons, and that’s how we have Handels.

Mikael Holmqvist goes on a deep dive into the history of Handels, from the original motivations behind its establishment through the administrative decisions made throughout the century up to how it operates today. The short version of the argument that Holmqvist makes is that Handels, like other business schools at the time, was founded to lend an air of academic authority and social prestige to the growing business class in society and to the field of economics generally. This particular task now a fait accompli, Handels occupies a normative role in our neoliberal society: creating an “employable” pool of people for a specific industry by imbuing them with specific ideologies and personality traits that are compatible with neoliberal market values. News to me, but not to anyone who makes a career out of studying this sort of thing, I suppose. Similar arguments have been published by anglophone academics, including several books cited by Holmqvist (most notably Debra J. Schleef’s Managing Elites: Socialization in Law and Business Schools). I don’t know that there’s an English translation in the works for Handels; I don’t really know what the point would be? But on the other hand it appears that there’s an English version of Holmqvist’s previous work on the neighborhood of Djursholm so maybe there is some kind of niche demand for this kind of thing in English.

My tone sounds a bit “damned by faint praise,” though, and that’s not my intention. This was one of those books where I had to stop three or four times per chapter to send a quote to a friend, along with my own comments, in order to pick their own brain on the topic. (Deep appreciation to those friends for indulging me and my not-always-well-lit photos of walls of text.) Likewise, I found myself wishing there already was an English version that I could share with my policy nerd friends who can’t speak Swedish. (“Aren’t you a translator? Surely it wouldn’t be hard to toss off your own translation of a couple paragraphs?” The cobbler’s children has no shoes, my friend.)

If you can read Swedish, Handels is absolutely worth your time. If it comes out in English I’ll certainly be recommending it to a very particular subset of nerdy policy people that I hang out with. Until then there’s a very thorough works cited I can dig through to find the best and most interesting English equivalent.

La Gloire de mon père & Le château de ma mère

Marcel Pagnol’s Souvenirs d’enfance were burned into my memory at some point during my French studies—I watched Le Gloire de mon père for class, and I had an abridged or otherwise simplified edition of the book for course literature (that I don’t think I ever actually read, and that I definitely didn’t hold on to). Trying to track them down at the library or at the handful of international bookstores I knew of in Stockholm never got me anywhere. Nor did I think to check at Språkbokhandeln, the absolute treasure trove nestled in Lund, when I was there in 2020. It all worked out, though, because I can’t think of a better souvenir (hah) from Paris: one book from each bookstore we visited!

I packed both books for vacation and assumed that would keep me well occupied, but to my surprise I absolutely tore through each book in little over a day. Usually my reading experiences in French require frequent dictionary breaks just to follow what’s going on (George Sand, Simone de Beauvoir), but Pagnol did me favor and kept it relatively simple—even with all of the terminology for wildlife and hunting, I could keep up with the story. Dictionary breaks could wait until a re-read.

La Gloire de mon père was also a welcome counterbalance to the despair in Världen av i går. Pagnol was Zweig’s junior by fourteen years or so; reading the two alongside each other meant I was getting a bit of a Cubist portrait of turn-of-the-century Europe, two different perspectives presented simultaneously. The years in Berlin and Paris that Zweig writes about with the nerves of a young man were merely the warm and happy days of Pagnol’s childhood in Marseilles.

I got too cocky, though, and rushed ahead through Le Château de ma mère, which is just as drenched in sunshine and nostalgia as its predecessor…until the very last chapter, which is when it collides with the grim realities Zweig depicts in Världen av i går. A lot of crying, this vacation! Turns out I didn’t really pack as much light reading as I thought I had.

According to English Wikipedia, Pagnol is considered a bit old-fashioned and passé these days, but since I’m not French that context was completely lost on me. To an extent it’s also pretty on brand for me, anyway, considering I’ve been well behind the times for basically my entire life.

The two are collected in a single volume, both translations from Rita Barisse that were more or less contemporary with the original publication in French. Have there been more recent ones? Is it any good? Who knows!

Världen av i går & Amok

It seems I followed much of the rest of the world, or if not the world then just one friend of mine in particular, in reaching for Die Welt von Gestern in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. But since my arbitrary rule of translations is to read German originals in Swedish rather than in English, I had to wait until I came across a Swedish translation (and it never seemed to be available at the library when I remembered to check). Six years later, it appeared in front of me at Söderbokhandeln Hansson & Bruce. I took it with me for vacation reading, and while I was browsing Hubenettes in Östersund I happened to notice Zweig’s novella collection Amok on the shelves. Since they’re the same author and I read them in such close succession, collapsing them into a single blog-thought makes sense.

Amok is not any deliberate assemblage of Zweig’s or time-honored collection that’s seen international release in several languages. Instead, it’s a collection from Ersatz Förlag, only available in Swedish, featuring “The Royal Game,” “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” “Confusion,” “A Girl and the Weather,” and “Amok.”

The World of Yesterday, on the other hand, is available in several English translations: one from titan among translators Anthea Bell, which seems to be the translation put out by Pushkin Press; one from Plunkett Lake Press attributed to B. W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger; and finally a translation from Robert Boettcher independently published through Amazon.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Zweig doesn’t really discuss his own writing much in Världen av i går, at least from a personal perspective on the process. The only time he addresses the craft of writing more or less head on, he toots his own horn and talks up how one of his strengths as a writer is his ability to murder his darlings and stick to only the most essential elements of a story. After the five stories included in Amok, I have to disagree, but maybe that’s a factor of changing times and literary conventions.

Women are essentially invisible in Zweig’s depiction of Europe in general and of his life in particular. Not surprising for the content or the times, so I’m not exactly mad about it. Nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that Zweig’s first wife (who only gets two incidental mentions in Världen av i går, one of which is when Zweig is trying to divorce her) undertook a significant chunk of research and administration for him; his second wife (whose only mention is in the same breath as the aforementioned divorce) had originally been his secretary. Amazing how being able to outsource drudgery and life maintenance frees you up to be a highly productive writer!

The same lack of women more or less applies to the stories in Amok, which are all deeply anchored in a first-person perspective from a male narrator. Even “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” uses a male narrator to frame the story of the woman in question—a frame that I don’t see much narrative use for. Of course, Amok only contains five novellas out of a substantial body of work; such a limited selection is hardly indicative of an entire body of writing. I just wish there had been more thought on the publisher’s part about which stories to select.

Overall, I was touched by Zweig’s humanity and empathy, which was just as much on show in the above stories as it was in his memoirs. They are all deeply psychological, character-driven narratives rooted in human struggles, suffering, and resilience. But in all honesty, his knack for characterization is actually on better display in Världen av i går than in most of the stories in Amok. Zweig’s sketches of his contemporaries are precise and cutting, unambiguously sympathetic to the person involved but clear-eyed about their flaws or failures. The characters in the stories collected in Amok, on the other hand, are muddier and harder to pin down. I cried at some point in every chapter of Världen av i går, but I shed no tears over any story in Amok.

The reason I was so unmoved by, and ultimately a bit disappointed in, Zweig’s fiction might be the same reason I could lose myself so easily in his memoirs: they are a product of a specific time. Sympathy for an amorous widow scorned by a younger lover, or for a closeted gay English literature professor, might well have been scandalous or at least unusual upon publication in the 1920s, but close to a century later those stories are fairly tame and predictable. So the wheel turns; with any luck, in another hundred years, stories like “I Sexually Identify As an Attack Helicopter” will seem confusing or just banal because we’ll live in a better world where fluid gender identities are a matter of course. While Världen av i går might as well be subtitled “Plus ça change,” stories like “Confusion” with their now-dated and unremarkable plot twists make you realize that things can get better.

A Waiter in Paris

I’m back from a whirlwind vacation in Paris, my first-ever trip to The Continent proper. I quickly realized that tourism in The City of Light leans a great deal on its literary history: the exclusive, posh Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Paris; the ascension of Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore into sightseeing destinations; the queue to get into Shakespeare and Company. This isn’t a post about my vacation, though. It’s about a book I bought (and read) in Paris. I mention Paris and my vacation because that’s the only reason this book fell into my lap. I was unaware of it, wasn’t looking for it, and wasn’t necessarily intending to ever read it.

Even though my travel companions and I stopped by Shakespeare and Company shortly after it opened for the day on a Thursday, the store was already crowded. Between the jostles and the bumps of people, and the knowledge that there was likely a queue building outside, it was hard to get into the mindset of leisurely browsing the books. In the stress of the moment I decided to focus on getting something either in French or about Paris, rather than something I could buy any old time. Et voilà: A Waiter in Paris.

Edward Chisholm and his girlfriend move from London to Paris and he decides, for nebulous “I’m going to prove something to myself” reasons, to become a waiter. A Waiter in Paris is his account of an eight-month stint at a fashionable bistro and a book-length expansion on his 2013 piece for the New York Times, “Notes from a Parisian Kitchen.” (Link is to an unpaywalled PDF version for your ease of reading.) Less generously, it’s an overly self-serious version of Rob McKittrick’s 2005 comedy Waiting.

A Waiter in Paris has glowing reviews everywhere. Publishers Weekly, Radio New Zealand…even the 3-star reviews on GoodReads are still faintly positive. Most of them seem spellbound by one, or both, of the following:

Chisholm’s depiction of the labor conditions in a French bistro
Chisholm’s observations of French (or at least Parisian) society

While I won’t fault reviewers who haven’t lived or worked in Paris, I’m concerned that anyone in the Year of Our Lord 2022 could be genuinely shocked and appalled at restaurant labor practices. Did anyone writing these reviews ever work a service job?

Bereft of the one-two punch of “working class tourism” and “cultural observations,” there isn’t much left of interest in A Waiter in Paris. Chisholm’s writing is fluid and readable, certainly, but there are a couple tics he has that border on purple prose (overblown Greek mythological allusions) or just plain “trying too hard” (too many attempts to work “liberté, égalité, fraternité” references into the narrative). He also cites Down and Out in Paris and London as a major influence, which—never remind people in the middle of your own book that there’s a better one they could be reading instead. You’re only going to invite an unfavorable comparison.

The unfavorable comparison in this case is that Chisholm could learn a thing or two from Orwell about narrative distance and detachment. Down and Out leaves plenty of room for the other people Orwell encounters, while A Waiter is essentially The Edward Chisholm Story, with his fellow restaurant staff as background characters. This reaches its peak in a couple episodes that have a very powerful r/ThatHappened vibe. Not that I doubt they happened, but rather that they serve no purpose in the book except as evidence that the other waiters like Chisholm, maybe even see something special in him.

And that’s kind of where it falls apart for me. Underneath the razzle-dazzle, it’s just The Edward Chisholm Story, and Chisholm is, demographically speaking, exactly the kind of guy I went to college with—the kind of guy reading this book to begin with. A kind of guy with which I’m well familiar by this point. The real interesting part is the other people working in the bistro, but at the end of the day we don’t get all that much about any of them.

Of course, eight months isn’t exactly long enough to build enough trust with someone to find out their life story. Especially in a chaotic atmosphere like a restaurant where there’s not necessarily a lot of downtime to make smalltalk, and when you haven’t yet mastered your French, and when people will come and go at random. But whatever part of personal biography you can’t access or divulge, you can make up for by providing larger context and history, even if a nutshell version, and there’s nothing of that in here. What conflict was our Tamil Freedom Fighter actually involved in? What’s the prevailing French attitude towards the Portuguese? Are there historical or social reasons the Maghrebi waiter is so (seemingly hypocritically) dismissive of les africanes? The intersection of politics and history in the kitchen of just about every restaurant in Paris (and probably in most of Europe, if not the world) is a great lens through which to examine colonization and globalization. Missed opportunity, in other words.

At the end of the day, though, it was the writing that put me off A Waiter in Paris more than anything else. I’ll close out my thoughts by returning to that aspect of it, because this was the most damning aspect of all.

There is a sort of arch tone that expats take in their writing, including yours truly. (I’m the guiltiest of all.) On one hand, we make evident our limitations by conceding we don’t speak the language well enough yet, or loudly bemoaning that this or that thing is utterly opaque or impenetrable to us. But on the other hand, we relish the idea of others considering us insiders or experts, since from their perspective that’s exactly what we are, and so we continue to hold forth. Maybe I recognized too much of myself—or projected too much of myself—in the writing and in my imaginary version of Chisholm to really enjoy the book.

In other words: “It’s not you, it’s me.”

The Burnout Society

Three things happened over Easter weekend. First, my sambo remarked offhandedly that PewdiePie has started making YouTube videos about philosophy. Then I tried to start reading Cat Rambo’s You Sexy Thing, but after about ten pages was ready to throw the book across the room in revulsion. Finally, a friend of mine was in town over the weekend and wanted to meet for dinner in the opposite end of Stockholm.

These disparate events led to me picking up the slim but impactful Tröthetssamhället: I had a sudden craving for scholarly rigorous philosophy and meaty content, and the small book fit neatly in my purse.

The Burnout Society (German original: Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) had probably been on my TBR for a year and a half by the time I saw it on the shelves at Söderbokhandeln in February. Han outlines his points in clear, direct language so it goes down smooth.

There’s not a whole lot in this essay that’s particularly revolutionary for anyone who’s familiar with Arendt, Foucault or Handke. Han’s comparisons and criticisms are certainly interesting, but not mind-blowing. For the layperson, The Burnout Society serves as an excellent introduction to a strain of academic philosophy that’s immediately relevant to their lives and concerns.

I have only one minor criticism. Han suffers from a problem specific to philosophers—attributing existential and abstract causes to phenomena that could easily have material origins and subsequently eschewing any reference to scientific research. There are two instances of this in The Burnout Society. One is only incidental to his claim, but the other is more closely tied with one of his central premises.

Right at the start, Han describes ADHD, depression, and borderline personality disorder as results of an excess of “positivity” in today’s society, as if there’s no underlying brain with its attendant neurological wiring and chemical (im)balances that come into play. However, he doesn’t claim that the prevalence of these conditions somehow irrefutably proves his point. Rather, Han seems to take them merely as examples of the problems he is discussing.

On the other hand, Han seems to build a rather large part of his argument on ideas about the differences between human and animal cognition (focus versus multi-tasking) that lack any reference to contemporary studies or research. It’s a metaphorical leap that I can accept because I’m sympathetic to Han’s ultimate thesis, but as a premise it requires more scientific backing.

At the end of the day, I’d love for Han to replace our current crowd of useless “public intellectuals” but life isn’t fair, is it?