“The Architect’s Apprentice” by Elif Shafak

Set in sixteenth century Istanbul, this novel follows an architect’s apprentice, Jahan, who is also the mahout to the sultan’s albino elephant, Chota. The novel is historical fiction, but takes liberties with dates and chronologies of real events, sometimes truncating timelines or fudging a historical figure’s age. Portends in the sky, battles at sea, and the spread of plague on the ground are all instrumental. Three Ottoman sultans, Suleiman, Selim, and Murad, feature prominently, as well as their industrious Chief Royal Architect, Sinan. In his almost hundred years, he supervised the construction of hundreds of mosques, tombs, palaces, and shrines. “Upon finishing it, no matter how great the building, he would leave within it a flaw—a tile placed the wrong side up, an upended stone or a marble chipped on the edge. He made sure the defect was there, visible to the knowing eye, invisible to the public. Only God was perfect.” The book is also a love letter to the magic and mystery of the city of Istanbul. “But Istanbul is a city of easy forgettings. Things are written in water over there, except the works of my master, which are written in stone.” The book contains warfare, mystery, bitter professional rivalry, murder, and unconsummated love; but it is, above all, a story about fate and the contingencies of life. “Fate was odd. The day before he was drawing designs on the floor with shit. Now he was perched on silk cushions, eating caviar from the hand of his beloved. And as he closed his eyes for a moment, he could not tell which was real and which was someone’s else’s life.” It is also a love story between a mahout and his beast. “Gradually Jahan forgave the elephant for the way he behaved on the battleground. He covered his knife-like tusks with two silken balls, and made a new mantle for him with his own hands. He garnished the trims with silver bells and sewed on blue beads against the evil eye. Languid and placid sunsets slipped by. Blissful days these were—though, as too often happens with blissful days, they would be appreciated only when they were no more.” In this bildungsroman, Jahan comes to realize late in life who and what are the essential things. “In that moment Jahan understood that life was the sum of the choices one did not make; the paths yearned for but not taken.”

“The Magnificent Conman of Cairo” by Adel Kamel (translated by Waleed Almusharaf)

This novel, written in 1942, details the lives of both rich and poor in pre-war Cairo. It follows the life of Khaled, son of a wealthy judge, educated in England, and returned to Egypt with enlightened views of the world. “On the one hand, he could change society, shape it according to his desires. This was, of course, impossible. On the other hand, he could change himself, shape himself to conform to what society desired. This was even more impossible, for he was young, living in a world of words and meaning.” His father, the Pasha, needless to say, held more conservative opinions on the need to reform Egyptian society. “A government of the people that you are talking about is the closest thing to bending over in front of an ass and asking it to ride you. Me, I like to ride my ass, not the reverse. You damned fool. I regret spending money on your education. It’s gone to something worse than wine or women.” The novel’s unacknowledged narrator cannot help but interject his two cents, “What a strange young man, this Khaled is! If we could open his head, we would see two compartments. In one, we would see the twentieth century lying squarely in the middle, with its machines and equations. In the other, there would be the eighteenth century, gallivanting along in a forest through which a stream ran.” A mysterious Bohemian psychoanalyst is given the last word on the spirit of the age, “We have no need for literature or art. We need labor. Bold, decisive labor. What good has it done the East, all this poetry that its poets have produced across the ages? None. None save the fact that the word ‘East’ has come to be synonymous with fairy tales and delusions. The poetry of the East is like an opiate imbibed by a lazy failure of a man. We recite poetry because we are incapable of work.”

“Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World” by Daniel Bell and Wang Pei

This is a strange little book, which is at once a defense of hierarchy in social relations and an apologia for Chinese Communist Party dominance on the global stage. The authors begin, “In a purely descriptive sense, a hierarchy is a relation that is characterized by (a) difference and (b) ranking according to some attribute. Social hierarchies tend to have a normative dimension: They are social systems in which there is “an implicit or explicit rank of individuals or groups with respect to a valued social dimension.””

Bell and Pei first discuss hierarchies within the family. “The idea that there is hierarchy between elders and younger people is central to Chinese culture…. Throughout Chinese history, this idea was institutionalized by means of laws and informal norms that empowered the elderly in a variety of economic, social, and political ways…. Age-based hierarchies are rooted in the idea of filial piety. We ought to revere elderly members of the family, and then extend that reverence to elderly people as a whole.” This reverence for elders extends even into adulthood. “In China, the assumption is that parents continue to have some form of unequal authority over adult children and adult children are supposed to serve their elderly parents. They are not equals, even when both are adults.”

Next, the authors extol the benefits of a system of political meritocracy over democratically elected politicians. “From a normative perspective, the ideal of political meritocracy is most compelling at higher levels of government in large-scale political communities. The reason is that it is much more difficult to rule and manage huge and incredibly diverse countries such as China…. At higher levels of government of large countries, problems are complex and often impact many sectors of society, the rest of the world, and future generations. In large countries, political success is more likely with leaders who have political experience at lower levels of government and a good record of performance.” Lang Shuming expounds, “If we regard life as a process of moral improvement, rather than the satisfaction of ordinary desires… we would naturally choose the leadership of a minority and not decide by majority vote.”

Bell and Pei also describe hierarchy among nation-states. “Hierarchical relations between states must be reciprocal: They must benefit people in both powerful and weaker states. In other words, they must be “win-win.”” In the realm of state relations, there is a tension between power and responsibility. “With extra powers come extra responsibilities, and it’s not completely utopian to suggest that strong states do occasionally act on those responsibilities and should be held accountable if they fail to do so…. So with a combination of wealth, military might, and strategic reliability, a self-interested but honest hegemon can establish mutually beneficial interest-based relations with weaker states.” The authors conclude, “The web of caring obligations that binds family members is more demanding than that binding citizens, the web of obligations that bind citizens is more demanding than that binding foreigners, and the web binding humans is more demanding than that binding us to nonhuman forms of life.”

“Dostoevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears” by Laszlo Foldenyi (translated by Ottilie Mulzet)

This collection of essays by Fodenyi revolves around the idea of man’s shadow, what is not a part of him, yet what he can never get away from. A recurrent theme in the essays is Fodenyi’s attempt to throw shade on the entire project of the Enlightenment and of our contemporary age of reason. “During the Enlightenment… the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things… became ever more resolute…. In the history of human cultures until that point, only God (or the gods) had the right to absolute autonomy.” Fodenyi urges a reconnection with metaphysics. “Even in a secularized age, a sense for metaphysics can be maintained and nurtured: this is the sense for the uniqueness of our life, for the exceptionality of our existence within this universe, for the great wonder of the incomparability and unrepeatability of each moment of every one of our lives…. These two unknowns—preceding and following existence—form the roots of susceptibility to metaphysics.”

In his first essay, “Mass and Spirit,” Fodenyi asserts that modernity has tried to impose the will of man upon the entire cosmos. “Humanity became haunted by the thought that history was something that could be made and formed…. Humans now regard themselves as the prime movers of the universe. In other words, they wish to usurp the role of the Creator.” As man has sought his independence from nature, he has become undifferentiated from himself. He has become the mass-man. “The souls and the spirit had to “become massed together,” namely, it was necessary for people to grow indifferent to their spiritual roots…. The mass comes into being when every one of its members has been freed from differentiation and they all feel themselves to be uniform.”

Fodenyi, in his title essay, seeks to take on Hegel’s conception of history. He defends Dostoyevsky’s primacy of the individual within time. “If someone truly feels and experiences the weight of his own existence, then he is, so to speak, torn out of history, and that same weight—one that is beyond history—weighs upon him in Semipalatinsk as it does in Berlin.” Fodenyi defends that which in life is irrational. “In the name of rationality, one must look away from the most crucial human experiences. One must look away from suffering, from death, from the unverifiable, namely from all that of which man is not lord and master…. When Hegel reduced world history, God, and the absolute spirit to a common denominator—subordinating them to the principle of rationality—he was ultimately turning his back on freedom. Rational freedom is not freedom. What is rational is always confined; freedom is unconfined…. Hegel became the victim of the mistaken belief that he could explain the unexplainable…. He is terrified of everything that he cannot comprehend with reason.” Modern man is also a child of reason. “Never has humanity been so satisfied with its own self—like a spoiled and careless child, left to itself, allowed to do whatever it wishes. But that same child, when evening descends, having no idea of what to do with its freedom and fearful, is suddenly filled with anguish…. We have murdered God with our ambition—an ambition which at the beginning might have even met with the approbation of God himself. And it is none other than our drive to find an answer for everything.” The quest to encapsulate the world within the bounds of reason has become our hell on earth. “When the entirety of existence, the cosmic whole is reduced to a world that can be technically manipulated—this is hell. It requires no devils, no tongues of flame leaping into the heights or lakes filled with boiling tar. All that is needed is oblivion and the illusion that the confine of humanity is not constituted by the divine but by the tangible, and that the nourishment of the human spirit is not the impossible but the possible—monotonous beyond all measure, and rational.”

In his essay, “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” Fodenyi deals with the theme of fiction and death, while recounting the famous double suicide of Heinrich von Kleist. Fodenyi affirms the porous bounds between the page and the real world, “a [fictional] work may be read exclusively as a self-contained autonomous system, [but] there are always fictional protagonists who step out from the cover of that book containing them with ease, freely moving between reality and fiction.” As regards to Kleist, Fodenyi has particularly in mind Goethe’s young Werther, Kleist’s obvious model. “Suicide is one variation of a dialogue carried on with the world, even if its goal is the final suspension of this dialogue…. It is impossible to read even one line of Kleist without thinking of how he put an end to his own life. His suicide preceded, as it were, his life’s work.” For Kleist, the quest for encapsulating reason is what destroyed him. He wrote to his sister in the midst of his “Kantian” crisis, “The thought that we here on earth may know nothing, nothing at all of Truth, and that what we call truth, has quite another name after death, and that therefore all attempts to win possession that goes with us to our grave are quite vain and fruitless: this thought has shattered me in the innermost sanctum of my soul.—My single, my highest goal has sunk from sight and I have no other.” Fodenyi explains why all Kleist had left for himself was to be the master of his own death. “For Kleist death would be a kind of positive reference point: the one irrefutable truth, the single incontrovertible certainty which rises like a cliff out of a creation that has lost its purpose.” Kleist’s purpose was to reclaim the Self in the age of the mass-man. “The great dream of Kleist was for the singular to be granted its own right, and for the momentary to be made conclusive. He tried to grasp the Whole so that at the same time the part—the single, the personal, the individual, the unrepeatable, the ineffable—would also remain eternal.”