“The Slaughterman’s Daughter” by Yaniv Iczkovits (translated by Orr Scharf)

This novel, translated from Hebrew, has its fair share of Yiddish sprinkled in. It takes place during the nineteenth century in the Pale of Settlement. Most of the action takes place in Motal, a predominantly Jewish village with a few muzhiks in the mix. It has quite the cast of characters—a mute Russian Army veteran, a degenerate-gambling Jewish cantor, a hobbling Okhrana officer, a brothel owner, an apocalyptic Yeshiva scholar, and, of course, a slaughterman’s daughter or two. “Fanny feels the sheath against her thigh: Why has she continued to carry the knife even after abandoning her career of slaughtering? She does not know. She intended many times to bury it in the back of a cupboard, but whenever she removed the blade from her body she felt as though something was amiss, as if it were another body part in addition to the 248 that the Sages of antiquity had enumerated in the human body.” Fanny belongs to an insulated rural Jewish community, but is a bit of an outcast, having married a stoic cheesemaker, who lives dangerously close to the goyim. “The righteous do not take political positions, they strengthen their allegiance to the Blessed Holy One instead, and they could not care less whether the nobility is bickering with the peasants, and it is all the same to them if Polish nationalists are clashing with Russian oppressors. If there is something to sell to the gentiles or to buy from them in order to make a living, so much the better—but this is where the line between them and us is drawn. We share with them the same soil but not the same world.” The adventure Fanny will end up going on will bring death aplenty, as well as soul searching, hero-making, and reconciliation. “Now she is proud of the riff-raff she has gathered around her, the types that townspeople would point at and say: “See them? They’re exactly what we’re not.” Well, this is her army. And although none of them would admit it, she knows that whatever powerful thing it is that unites this divided, battered crew, it has made waves throughout the entire empire.”

“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s novel is about the birth of the nation of India, as told through the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, the day of Indian independence. In fact, Saleem often switches between first and third person narration when recounting his tale, as much as he switches back and forth between the history of his family and the history of India. “Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale.” In Rushdie’s novel, one man’s history is used as a lens to chronicle the birth-pangs of a new nation, ever-shaped by its colonial past. ““Bad business, Mr. Sinai,” Methwold, sips his Scotch amid cacti and roses, “Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then suddenly, up and off. You’ll admit we weren’t all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see it. And now, suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I’m dead against it myself, but what’s to be done?”” The narrator, Saleem, looks back on the day of his birth as well. “A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivaled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

Throughout the tale, Rushdie seamlessly weaves together historical truth with mystical fantasy. “So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry … but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose … to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!) … and to me, the greatest talent of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.” Islam and Hinduism also play indispensable roles in the story’s telling. “But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s (like India’s first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivaled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.”

In Rushdie’s telling, it is impossible to separate the single life of Saleem with that of the life of India writ large. “Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” As the narrator, Saleem, looks back on his past, now the manager of a chutney factory in Bombay, he realizes that it all might not make much sense after all. “Sometimes, in the pickles’ version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little, at other times, too much … yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that’s how it happened.”

“Stages of Life” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This book is divided into four parts, each with their own fictitious author, each complete with their own backstory and persona, in the style common to Kierkegaard. The first section is titled “In Vino Veritas” and it is an account of a decadent banquet held in an exotic locale, in the depths of the woods, outside of Copenhagen. It is attended only by a small group of men, who have all pledged to get drunk and give soliloquies on the nature of love. “For anyone who has once understood what recollection is has been captured for all eternity and is captured in it; and anyone who possesses one recollection is richer than if he possessed the whole world.”

The first to speak is an unnamed young bachelor. “I have renounced all erotic love, for my thought is everything to me. If love is the most blissful desire, then I renounce the desire without wishing either to offend or to envy anyone; if love conditions the highest benefaction, then I reject the occasion for it, but my thought is saved. Not that I am without an eye for beauty, not that my heart is unmoved when I read the poets’ songs, not that my soul is without sadness when I indulge in that beautiful representation of love, but I refuse to be unfaithful to my thought, and what would be the use of it, because for me there is no bliss where I have not saved my thought…. I do, of course, perceive that if anything may be sacred, then it is love, that if faithlessness is debased anywhere, it is in love, that if any deceit is abominable, it is in love. But my soul is pure; I have never looked at any woman to desire her.” Johannes, known to readers of “Either/Or” as the seducer, responds thus, “For what else is woman but a dream, and yet the highest reality…. With man the essential is the essential and thus always the same; with woman the accidental is the essential and in this way an inexhaustible heterogeneity. Brief is her glory, but the pain is also quickly forgotten, and when the same glory is offered to me again, it is as if I had not even felt the pain.”

The second section was written by the devoted Judge, again from “Either/Or”, titled “Some Reflections on Marriage in Answer to Objections.” He opines, “A married man who is that with his whole life and soul is certainly the one who has ventured and ventured most of all. He ventures out of infatuation’s hiding place with the beloved one…. He does not know what would happen, but this he does know—he can lose everything; and this he does know—he cannot evade a single thing, for the resolution holds firmly there where his love imprisons him but also holds him undaunted there where falling in love laments.” He goes on to expound on his conception of the internal versus the external. “From a purely external point of view, there certainly are hundreds and hundreds more who have risked more than a married man, risked kingdoms and countries, millions and millions of millions have lost thrones and principalities, fortunes and prosperity, and yet the married man risks more. For the person who loves risks more than all these things, and the person who loves in as many ways as it is possible for a man to love risks most of all.” He concludes on the love of the married man versus the lust of the poetic lover, “A married man risks every day, and every day the sword of duty hangs over his head, and the journal is kept up as long as the marriage keeps on, and the ledger of responsibility is never closed, and the responsibility is even more inspiring than the most glorious epic poet who must testify for the hero. Well, it is true that he does not take the risk for nothing—no, like for like, he risks everything for everything, and if because of its responsibility marriage is an epic, then because of its happiness it certainly is also an idyll…. Marriage is the fullness of time.”

By far the longest section of Kierkegaard’s book is ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, in which a gentleman, who has broken off his engagement to the sweetheart he still desperately loves, debates within his diary the consequences of his actions. (One should, of course, keep in mind Kierkegaard’s actual personal history when reading this section, particularly.) The diary entries alternate between his reflections during the day, which look back on his thoughts in the immediacy of his decision to separate, and those written at midnight, which reflect back through time on the separation with the benefit of months of hindsight. He begins with sorrow, “To want to proceed jointly along this path will produce again that dreadful misrelation that I already feared in that two-month period: that we would jointly sorrow over an unhappy love affair. It cannot be. What similarity is there between her sorrow and mine, what solidarity is there between guilt and innocence, what kinship is there between repentance and an esthetic sorrow over life, when that which awakens repentance is that which awakens her sorrow? I can sorrow in my way; if she must sorrow, she must also do it on her own account.”

Writing in his dairy by the light of day, the gentleman immerses himself in the moments just before the affair was broken off. “Happy with me she will never be—no, never! It is possible that she can make herself believe it, but I do not understand it, and that, too, certainly belongs to her happiness. And if we are united, it will eventually come to the point where she will someday sense with terror what I ought to have prevented…. What to me is the vital force of my spiritual existence—equality in the essentially human—she destroys. She does not care at all about the infinite passion of this freedom; she has erected an illusion, and she is satisfied with that. I, too, believe that one can love, can sacrifice everything for one’s love, but whether I am going to see good days or am going to risk my life, the deepest breathing [Aandedraet] of my spirit-existence [Aands-Existents] I cannot do without, I cannot sacrifice, because that is a contradiction, since without it I indeed am not. And she feels no need for this breathing.”

At heart, the difference in the two lovers is their conceptions of the meanings of the finite and the infinite. “One may die, one may become unhappy, but one can still preserve meaning in one’s life and faithfulness to the idea. Now that is at an end. And who is to blame for that? Someone else would perhaps say: It is she, to whose apron strings you still are tied. But I would not say that, for I usually refrain from such nonsense, that someone else is to blame when I do something wrong. I prefer to say that I myself am at fault. The fault is mine, is my weakness, and the difficulty is that my understanding guarantees me that it can be beneficial to her in the finite sense, whereas my sympathy would rather love her in the infinite sense. This relationship has humbled me.”

The gentleman describes an internal faith, well beyond public professions. “A skipper can go on swearing all day without giving it a thought, and in the same way an enthusiast can be solemn all day long without a complete or sound idea in his soul. That Gothic king refused to be baptized when he learned that he would not be together with his forefathers. The natives in America feared heaven more than hell and wished to remain pagans lest they be together with the orthodox Spaniards in heaven.” Faith and prayer must be about more than wishing and hopeful dreams. “Although I have the most inspired conception of God’s love, I also have the conception that he is not an old fussbudget who sits in heaven and humors us, but that in time and temporality one must be prepared to suffer everything…. The person who wills religiously must have receptivity precisely for the terrible; he must open himself to it and needs only to take care that he does not stop halfway, but that it leads him unto the security of the infinite.”

The gentleman knows that by breaking off the engagement he looks horrible to the outside world and, most of all, to his beloved. That is not his concern. “Even if I fall where no one dreams that a field of honor can be, even if I am buried in the graveyard of the dishonorable, if there nevertheless is one individual who, passing by my grave perhaps thinking other thoughts, suddenly stops and delivers this funeral oration to me, “How did this person come to lie here? Can one then lie without disgrace among the dishonored—and he certainly lies here with honor”—then I ask no more.”

Kierkegaard is a master of embedded fictions within fictions. In the coda to this book, he writes a “Letter to the Reader”, which is a fictional account of the writing of ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, where he reveals that the diary entries are fictional, but were written by the person of Frater Taciturnus, another fictional character himself. Taciturnus writes of the gentleman in his story, “His affront was not breaking the engagement but, with such a life-view, to want to fall in love.” Taciturnus then debates the merits of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious frameworks for going through life. “The ethical cannot regard the esthetic in any other way than to regard a direct union with it as a misalliance…. The ethical only asks about guilt or not guilty, is itself man enough to be a match for men, has no need for anything external and visible, to say nothing of something as ambiguously dialectical as fate and chance or the tangibility of some verdict document. The ethical is proud and declares: When I have judged then nothing more is needed…. The religious then plays the same role as the esthetic, but as the superior; it spaces out the limitless speed of the ethical, and development takes place. But the scene is the internal…. The principle of the spirit is that the external and the visible (the world’s gloriousness or its miserableness for the existing person, a result in the external or the lack of it for the one acting) exist to try faith, consequently not to deceive but in order that the spirit can be tested by placing it in the realm of the indifferent and taking itself back again…. Indifferent towards the externals, which the esthetic needs in the result, the religious disdains anything like that and proclaims, jointly and individually, that the person who believes he has finished (that is, fancies that he has, for such things cannot be believed because faith is expressly the infinite)—has lost…. What is expressed here about the lack of a result in the religious, I can also say in this way: the negative is higher than the positive…. For the finite being, and that, after all, is what human beings are as long as they live temporally, the negative infinity is the higher, and the positive is a dubious reassurance. Spiritual existence, especially the religious, is not easy; the believer continually lies out on the deep, has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him. However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore. He can become more calm, more experienced, find confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament—but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water.”

Taciturnus concludes the exposition of his thoughts on his fictional gentleman by dealing with the act of repentance. “A person’s highest inward action is to repent. But to repent is not a positive movement outwards or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself…. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations, so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed…. The infinite annihilating power of this repentance is best seen in the sympathetically dialectical character that it also has.”

“The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard

This novel is a love story, tragedy, and unforeseen mystery all rolled into one. There are untimely deaths, love triangles, and astronomical observations. The protagonists are two orphaned sisters from Australia, Grace and Caro, who have made their way to London to seek a better life through job and marriage prospects. “You could see the two sisters had passed through some unequivocal experience, which, though it might not interest others, had formed and indissolubly bound them. It was the gravity with which they sat, ate, talked and, you could practically say, laughed. It was whatever they exchanged, not looking at one another but making a pair.” The younger, Grace, before too long, found herself engaged into a properly distinguished middle class English family— the paterfamilias, an astronomer, the betrothed, a bureaucrat in the Africa section of the foreign service on the come. “Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject of ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by an unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip…. Sefton Thrale would explain, “Christian has got himself engaged”—implying naive bungling—“to an Australian girl.” And with emphatic goodwill might add that Grace was a fine young woman and he himself was delighted, “Actually.””

The hero of the novel is Ted, a young astronomer, born into poverty, but plucked from toil, given scholarships, and recognized as a future genius within the scientific community. “Ted Tice already understood his attachment to Caro as intensification of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping.” His foil and competitor for Caro’s love is Paul. “Paul Ivory was a man of promise in a literal sense: circumstances had made a solemn understanding to see Paul prosper. His play would be widely and justly praised. Provincial towns and foreign cities would clamor for it, and a famous director would make a successful film. The radiant pre-eminence of Paul’s engagement with events was far more bridal than his prospective betrothal to Tertia Drage.” Again, the elder Thrale sets the scene, “Sefton Thrale told Ted Tice, “Paul will make his mark.” Like praising a pretty girl to a plain one. And yet there was the sense that Paul Ivory and Ted Tice were both marked men, and symbolically opposed. It was not merely that the world had set the two of them at odds. More irrationally, it seemed that one of them must lose if the other were to win.”

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

This novel, by Ishiguro, is a consideration on what it is to be human. It is narrated by an Artificial Friend, Klara, an AI, who is brought home by a sickly teenage girl, Josie. However, the first part of the novel takes place in the AF store, before she is bought. Klara, at this time, is still using her machine learning skills to decipher the human world. She is curious about everything. “When AFs did go by us they almost always acted oddly, speeding up their walk and keeping their faces turned away. I wondered then if perhaps we—the whole store—were an embarrassment to them. I wondered if Rosa and I, once we’d found our homes, would feel an awkwardness to be reminded that we hadn’t always lived with our children, but in a store.” Behind the plot, Ishiguro makes the reader wonder about the nature of consciousness. The novel is a meditation on materialism vs. Cartesian dualism and, also, even determinism. A scientist, Mr. Capaldi speaks to Josie’s mother, “We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now.” Later in the novel, Josie’s father admits, “I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond a doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know any better.” It takes Klara, in the end, to perhaps straighten them all out, “Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong.”

“Laws” by Plato (translated by Trevor J. Saunders)

This is Plato’s longest dialogue. It deals with establishing the proper laws for the founding of a hypothetical colony as a new State. An unnamed Athenian gives most of the answers as he debates Clinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan, as they travel along from Cnossus together. First, the Athenian lays out the list of supreme human and divine benefits. “Health heads the list of the lesser benefits, followed by beauty; third comes strength, for racing and other physical exercises. Wealth is fourth—not “blind” wealth, but the clear-sighted kind whose companion is good judgment—and good judgment itself is the leading “divine” benefit; second comes the habitual self-control of a soul that uses reason. If you combine these two with courage, you get (thirdly) justice; courage itself lies in fourth place.” The lawmaker’s role is to encourage these virtues. “At every stage the lawgiver should supervise his people, and confer suitable marks of honor or disgrace…. He must use the laws themselves as instruments for the proper distribution of praise and blame.”

The lawmaker must use education to inculcate these higher virtues in the populus. “The earliest sensations that a child feels in infancy are of pleasure and pain, and this is the route by which virtue and vice first enter the soul…. I call ‘education’ the initial acquisition of virtue by the child, when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, that well up in his soul are channeled in the right courses before he can understand the reason why…. Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion…. Education, then, is a matter of correctly disciplined feelings of pleasure and pain.” However, there is a difference. "Pleasant and painful things come to a stop simultaneously, whereas good things and bad ones do not, because they are in fact different things.” The proper education of a child is no easy task. “Of all wild things, the child is the most unmanageable: an unusually powerful spring of reason, whose waters are not yet canalized in the right direction, makes him sharp and sly, the most unruly animal there is.” A well-served education must last throughout a man’s life. “We do not hold the common view that a man’s highest good is to survive and simply continue to exist. His highest good is to become as virtuous as possible and to continue to exist in that state as long as life lasts.” 

Next, the Athenian begins by detailing the aims in the basic formation of the State. “A state ought to be free and wise and enjoy internal harmony, and that is what the lawgiver should concentrate on in his legislation…. There are two mother-constitutions, so to speak, which you could fairly say have given birth to all the others. Monarchy is the proper name for the first, and democracy for the second…. It is absolutely vital for a political system to combine them… if it is to enjoy freedom and friendship applied with good judgment.”

The Athenian realizes that in every successful State there must be rulers who stand below the laws. “Such people are usually referred to as ‘rulers’, and if I have called them ‘servants of the laws’ it’s not because I want to mint a new expression but because I believe that the success or failure of a state hinges on this point more than on anything else…. If law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise.” Laws must both be written down and embedded within the traditions of the society. “All the rules we are now working through are what people generally call ‘unwritten customs’, and all this sort of thing is precisely what they mean when they speak of ‘ancestral law’…. Although ‘laws’ is the wrong term for these things, we can’t afford to say nothing about them, because they are the bonds of the entire social framework, linking all written and established laws with those yet to be passed. They act in the same way as ancestral customs dating from time immemorial, which by virtue of being soundly established and instinctively observed, shield and protect existing written law…. We must do our best not to omit anything, great or small, whether ‘laws’, ‘habits’, or ‘institutions’, because they are all needed to bind a state together, and the permanence of the one kind of norm depends on that of the other.”

The Athenian adds some words of caution. “We should treat as the biggest enemy of the entire state the man who makes the laws into slaves, and the state into the servant of a particular interest, by subjecting them to the diktat of mere men.” Men must also know their place in society. “A reckless lack of respect for one’s betters is effrontery of peculiar viscousness, which springs from a freedom of inhibitions that has gone much too far.” The rulers and teachers bare the most responsibility. “Total ignorance over an entire field is never dangerous or disastrous; much more damage is done when a subject is known intimately and in detail, but has been improperly taught.” Vice is common to the common man, but the select few must rise above such pettiness. “Only a small part of mankind—a few highly-educated men of rare natural talent—is able to steel itself to moderation when assailed by various needs and desires; given the chance to get a lot of money, it’s a rare bird that’s sober enough to prefer a modest competence to wealth.”

Finally, the Athenian concludes by detailing the laws relationship to social relations and the common weal. “It is vital that men should lay down laws for themselves and live in obedience to them; otherwise they will be indistinguishable from wild animals of the utmost savagery. The reason is this: no man has sufficient natural gifts both to discern what benefits men in their social relationships and to be constantly ready and able to put his knowledge to the best practical use. The first difficulty is to realize the proper object of true political skill is not the interest of private individuals but the common good. This is what knits a state together, whereas private interests make it disintegrate. If the public interest is well served, rather than the private, then the individual and the community alike are benefited.” That is why, in the ideal State, reason must rule over all. “Knowledge is unsurpassed by any law or regulation; reason, if it is genuine and really enjoys its natural freedom, should have universal power: it is not right that it should be under the control of anything else, as though it were some sort of slave…. Law and regulation, which embody general principles… cannot provide for every individual case.”

In this exemplary society, dictated by the Athenian, obedience and lack of freedom among its citizens is a feature of the system, not a bug. “The vital point is that no one, man or woman, must ever be left without someone in charge of him; nobody must get into the habit of acting alone and independently…. In peace and war alike we must give our constant attention and obedience to our leader, submitting to his guidance even in tiny details…. In short, we must condition ourselves to an instinctive rejection of the very notion of doing anything without our companions; we must live a life in which we never do anything, if possible, except by combined and united action as members of a group…. This is what we must practice in peacetime, right from childhood—the exercise of authority over others and submission to them in turn. Freedom from control must be uncompromisingly eliminated from the life of all men, and of all the animals under their dominion.”