Non-US

From Electric Lit:

Journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel Your Presence Is Mandatory is a poignant look at the reverberating effects of war through the story of a Ukrainian World War II veteran’s struggle to hide a damaging secret for the sake of his family.

Vasilyuk’s book begins with death—the first chapter featuring a family at the grave in Donetsk, Ukraine of main character Yefim Shulman, paying their last respects. Shortly afterwards, his wife finds a letter in his belongings addressed to the KGB, a confession that launches the family to reconsider the man they thought they knew. The novel then takes the reader back to Yefim as a young soldier in Stalin’s army stationed in Lithuania in 1941, shortly before Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. Yefim’s experience as a soldier left him with a secret he was so afraid to reveal, even to his own family, that he took it to his grave. 

The book skips between Yefim’s experiences serving in Stalin’s army and the remainder of his post-war life in Ukraine, even extending 7 years after his death to the beginning of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the start of war in Donetsk. Your Presence Is Mandatory is a timely look at survival that will make you question how wars, both past and present, shape future generations.

I interviewed author Sasha Vasilyuk over the phone about the discovery of her grandfather’s letter to the KGB that change her family narrative about who he was.

. . . .

Katya Suvorova: Sasha, you’ve talked about how, after your grandfather’s passing, your grandmother and aunt found a real-life secret letter that your grandfather wrote to the KGB that totally upended your family narrative about who he was. How did this letter inspire Your Presence is Mandatory?

Sasha Vasilyuk: My grandfather was a Jewish Ukrainian World War II vet, but he didn’t ever talk about the war. From the few things that I and the rest of my family knew, we thought of him as a war hero, because he survived from the first day of the war until the last day four years later. Given that WWII killed 27 million Soviet people, this made him seem like a brave and lucky soldier. But his letter, which was addressed to the KGB and written back in the 1980s, revealed a very different story. Imagine thinking of your grandpa as a star of Inglorious Bastards where Jewish soldiers take revenge on the Nazis and finding out he was more like The Pianist. The letter was a shock to my family, but I immediately thought: this is a novel. I wasn’t just interested in how he survived WWII, but also in why he’d kept it a secret his whole life. Interestingly, it took my grandma several months to tell me about the letter because she too wanted to keep his secret a secret.

KS: Why do you think your grandmother hid the letter from you? 

SV: So the Soviet government punished and shamed those who survived the war in non-heroic ways. That shaming culture was so strong that even after the USSR fell apart, people who’d internalized that shame continued to feel it. I think my grandpa, who inspired the main character Yefim, didn’t tell us what really happened to him during the war first to protect us from the government and later because he was ashamed. When my grandmother and my aunt discovered his letter, they also felt ashamed. At least at first. 

KS: So do you think they finally accepted that he was a victim and that’s what brought them to tell you?

SV: I think they realized their shame stemmed from decades of propaganda and of living under a regime of fear. And maybe they saw that hiding one’s past makes it easy for future generations—like me—to not know your family history, or even your national history.

KS: I was reminded frequently while reading your novel of the parallels between passages describing the destruction and occupation of Ukraine by Nazi Germany in World War II and contemporary news reports of the Russia invasion of Ukraine. With your family being from the Donbas, how did your personal experience with Russian occupation affect your characters?

SV: After my grandmother found the letter, I didn’t sit down to write this novel for the next 10 years, primarily because I couldn’t imagine writing about World War II. It felt entirely too daunting. I felt like I couldn’t imagine what it was like to survive a war, even if I’ve seen the movies, like we all have, and read other books. As somebody who was trained as a journalist, I couldn’t write about war until war broke out in my family’s town in the Donbas. This was in 2014 and I visited in 2016 when it was supposed to be safer. 

There, I heard shelling. I saw bullet holes on every surface. I saw the way people scurried about and I experienced the fear of war. And only then did I feel like I could portray those feelings in my characters with any, you know, realism.

As far as how it affected my characters, what I was surprised by was how the war changed how my family identified themselves. They shifted from this sort of a general Soviet identity, where we’re all brothers, toward a more nationalistic identity that very clearly distinguished Ukrainians from Russians. Now that we have a full-scale invasion this shift in identity really took over the entire Ukraine. There have been so many essays on this subject and so many people in Ukraine talk about how they’ve been perceiving themselves very differently because of the war. So when writing my characters, I thought about how war changes our identity and our relationship to home, to the state, to the enemy. Those things were all interesting to me.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From Writer Unboxed:

 Greek on the Rosetta Stone. By 1814 he had completely translated the inscription. You read that right: he decided to tap away at it and a year later he’d cracked it wide open. He’s rightly credited with deciphering a language that I as a student called Demonic because of its impenetrability.

Young’s contributions to the study of hieroglyphs had the potential to be equally transformative, but there’s the catch: “potential.” Young was a polymath, a brilliant scholar who never committed to one passion. He practiced medicine. He created a formula for understanding blood flow. He contributed the term “Indo-European languages” to linguistics. He’s considered the founder of physiological optics. Einstein praised his work because he freaking developed the wave theory of light.

As you might imagine, all of this work didn’t leave him a lot of time to study hieroglyphs. He came, he saw, he went off to conquer something else.

The stories of these two men were on my mind last month when I led a tour group around Egypt. Nearly every ancient site we visited was covered in hieroglyphic writing, and thanks to their breakthroughs, I could translate quite a bit of it – but not all.

Not all, because like Young I’ve scattered the seeds of my time across multiple terrains rather than planting them in one field. I have spent years of my life learning to excavate archaeological sites, teach, do linguistic analysis, play the piano and clarinet, and sing. I have baked bread and made jam and quieted a crying baby, sometimes simultaneously. I’ve practiced the basics of knitting and crocheting and tapestry weaving. I’ve run a marathon and given birth three times without pain medications. Not to brag, but sometimes I can even do a yoga flow without resorting to child’s pose in the middle. My scattershot years weren’t wasted; I just didn’t “give myself up entirely” to one thing, as Champollion did.

I know I’m not alone. Many writers have other careers prior to writing, or simultaneously with it. You can probably name your own favorite authors who did X and Y before writing, and usually those experiences were what they drew upon to create their unique voices and worldviews. Most of the time I’m heartened by these examples, but in the dark nights of the tortured writerly soul, I fret: Is greatness–or even competency– a realistic goal for someone who has fiddled away so many years on other projects? If it takes ten thousand hours to get decently good at something, who’s got that kind of time, after spending a thousand hours here and another thousand there and a few thousand more binge watching police procedurals?

If you and I have missed the chance to be the Champollion of fiction writing, whatever that might look like, can Thomas Young provide a good alternative? He was less celebrated in any one field, but darn good at a lot of them. He did also have the leisure of an inherited fortune and brilliance of a kind most of us can’t fathom – so what I really want to explore is whether mere mortals can still create a meaningful life’s work after doing other things.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Hieroglyphs on the Temple of Kom Ombo, Egypt

Coptic – Parchment fragment. Verso. Book of Jeremiah. White Monastery, Sohag (Egypt), tenth century

From The Economist:

The book is on the minds and lips of presidents. Recently Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s leader, praised “La Vorágine” (“The Vortex”), a novella by José Eustasio Rivera, for having words that “still shine like stars” and showing how “the destruction of the jungle fills human beings with nothing but hatred”. Mr Petro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, both spoke about “The Vortex” at the International Book Fair of Bogotá. This year’s biblio-bonanza is celebrating the relationship between literature and nature, as well as the centenary of the publication of “The Vortex”, which was written in April 1924.

Rivera told his story through Arturo Cova, an equivocal narrator who seduces a woman, Alicia, in Bogotá and then flees with her to los llanos in the east. Greed and cruelty drive the people they encounter, who desire only to “steal rubber and hunt Indians”.

“The Vortex” evokes the region’s colonial history, when conquistadors pillaged jungles and slaughtered inhabitants in pursuit of riches. It also excoriates the abuses that the rubber industry inflicted on indigenous people serving as indentured workers in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest. As the forest is despoiled and a tug-of-war plays out between those wanting to prioritise environmental protection over economic growth, the book feels modern and timely.

It can also be read as pioneering eco-literature. Rivera’s vivid, poetic prose transforms the jungle into a living being, “a green hell” that fights back against its persistent invaders. Thundering rapids drown men; ants as poisonous as scorpions prey on human flesh. At one point Cova hears a tree’s vengeful thoughts.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Economist:

Of the world’s 7,000-odd languages, almost half are expected to disappear by the end of the 21st century. Two culprits are usually considered responsible for this decline. The first is colonialism: when great powers conquered countries, they imposed their language in government and schools and relegated local ones (or banned them outright). The second is capitalism. As countries grow and industrialise, people move to cities for work. They increasingly find themselves speaking the bigger language used in the workplace rather than the smaller one used at home.

English, as the most dominant language in the history of the world, often stands as a symbol of homogenisation and the steamrolling of smaller cultures. So it may come as a surprise that the most linguistically diverse spot on Earth spans a few square miles in New York. Ross Perlin’s new book, “Language City”, is the story of what he has learned as the co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organisation that has managed to identify some 700 languages spoken in New York, a number vastly greater than the 100 or so listed in America’s official census.

Mr Perlin profiles speakers of six languages. Each tongue is threatened by different, larger neighbours. (English is by no means the only linguistic juggernaut.) Seke, from Nepal, is squeezed by Nepali and Tibetan. Wakhi, from Central Asia, sits between Chinese, Persian and Russian; its speakers also usually speak Tajik with others from their home country.

Nahuatl—though not a tiny language, as it is spoken by more than 1.6m indigenous Mexicans—is giving way to Spanish. N’Ko, a sort of alphabet-cum-written-standard meant to serve several closely related Manding languages of west Africa, must compete with French, the language of prestige in the region. Yiddish is losing out to English in New York and to Hebrew in Israel. As the language of secular Ashkenazi Jews it is nearing extinction (though it is flourishing among the ultra-Orthodox).

The people Mr Perlin meets are multilingual by necessity. Together they speak more than 30 languages; each person has “to move nimbly from one linguistic ecology to another”, he writes. They refuse to stop using their cherished language—despite incentives to do so—in order to preserve something of the associated culture.

The death of languages often follows the same pattern. Conquest and colonisation lead to poverty, and sometimes an internalised shame. As a result, parents often choose to raise their children in a bigger language for their own economic benefit. Whether a language disappears altogether is determined by the next generation: many assimilate and their language is lost for good. But sometimes they may try to reverse the decline.

Can outsiders aid preservation? Many speakers of small languages treat them as a kind of sacred or scarce good that outsiders do harm to by learning and documenting; they do not think of their languages as objects of scientific curiosity. So those trying to help, including Mr Perlin, are learning to tread carefully. (In the book he describes an initially wary encounter with the last known native speaker of Lenape, New York’s own indigenous language.)

Tim Brookes, a British writer and the executive director of the Endangered Alphabets Project, another non-profit group, describes his own approach in his recent book, “Writing Beyond Writing”. He makes a persuasive case that linguists have long neglected writing systems in their well-intentioned push to give dignity to spoken as well as written languages. Linguists have tended to ignore the wonderful and hugely varied scripts that are threatened by behemoths including the Latin, Arabic, Devanagari and Chinese systems. As well as research and advocacy, Mr Brookes makes beautiful wood carvings in the scripts he describes. Like Mr Perlin, he is careful always to put the native users of a language at the heart of the story. The field has no time for white-saviour narratives anymore.

Julia Sallabank, a linguist at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, has described how experts have historically approached languages in danger of extinction. In decades past a Western linguist would show up, learn as much as possible, then publish the results back home. In time, academics came to assist the language community by producing grammar books, dictionaries and recordings for speakers to use and pass down. Next came collaboration. Scholars and activists would sit down together to work out exactly what the group needed for the language to thrive.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Bronze Age in the Near East and Aegean region began around 3000 B.C. It peaked in the 1500s B.C. and ended gradually, then suddenly, in the Late Bronze Age collapse of the late 1200s and early 1100s B.C. The Egyptian empire went into terminal decline. The Hittite empire fell, and the Assyrian and Babylonian empires faltered. The Mycenaeans, Minoans and Canaanites disappeared from the record. Mainland Greece’s population halved and its palaces collapsed, along with literacy and even the concept of a supreme ruler. Welcome to the age of ignorance, war and poverty that Hesiod called a “race of iron.”

Modern historians attributed the collapse to the Dorian Greek invaders whom the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples; a horde of them sailed into Egypt in 1177 B.C. These categories now seem to be a retrospective mirage. Various peoples came to the Eastern Mediterranean over a period of centuries, some by land, some in peace, and many driven by drought, but none understood themselves as Sea Peoples or Greeks. The crisis at Egypt’s southern border, the wave of tomb robberies attributed to “foreigners” and the partisan paralysis of Egypt’s administrators were consequences as much as causes of Egypt’s demise.

In his 2014 book, “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” Eric H. Cline attributed the Late Bronze Age collapse to a “systemic failure with both a domino and a multiplier effect.” Mr. Cline, a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, applied complexity theory and systems analysis to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. He detected a cascade effect of unpredictable interactions and nonlinear outcomes, often amplified by the sophistication and interdependence of imperial economies throughout the Mediterranean world. The Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt in 1177 B.C. remains a pivotal event, a proof of decline akin to the barbarian sack of Rome in A.D. 476. But the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age was a “rolling” process. The mighty Bronze Age kingdoms and empires took decades to crumble, and the city-states of the early Iron Age took decades to cohere.

History is one sequel after another, and in “After 1177 B.C.,” Mr. Cline describes what happened next. These were, Hesiod wrote, times of “sore trouble,” but “even these shall have some good mingled with their evils.” Late Bronze Age societies adapted and transformed, or they faced eclipse and extinction. What did the dawning Iron Age do for us? Monotheism, coinage, innovations in iron-working, the Greek alphabet, the polis (city-state), the origins of democracy in Athens and the nation-state in Jerusalem, and, as Mr. Cline’s expert, ingenious and endlessly fascinating book shows, an ancient lesson in the lately rediscovered virtue of “resilience.”

Ramses III of Egypt saw off the Sea Peoples in 1177 B.C., but two decades later he was murdered, his throat cut in a “harem conspiracy” led by one of his wives and her son. His predecessor Ramses II became the “Ozymandias” of Percy Shelley’s poem, a “colossal Wreck” in the sand. Egypt went the same way through food shortages, palace intrigues, political schisms and pressure on the southern border. Neither adapting nor transforming, the Bronze Age superpower suffered a “rapid decline” in its standing and stability.

Around the same time the Hittite empire in Anatolia (modern Turkey) shattered. Attacked from the west by Sea Peoples and from the east by Assyria, the empire broke into as many as 15 small “Neo-Hittite” states populated by a “host of political entities and various ethnicities.” Hittite culture survived—the Israelite king David falls in love with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite—but the Hittite capital of Hattusa was leveled and the Hittites’ cuneiform language, a Bronze Age lingua franca, fell into disuse.

The Babylonian and Assyrian empires survived drought, famine and plague, and eventually revived in a new form. Babylonia’s population collapsed and Assyria’s record-keeping seems to have stopped in the mid-1100s B.C., but their “Neo-Babylonian” and “Neo-Assyrian” successor empires retained cultural continuity, governmental capacity and military strength. Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylonia defeated his Elamite neighbors so severely, Mr. Cline writes, that they left “no written records and little archaeological evidence” for centuries. When writing resumed at Nineveh in Assyria, it recorded victories over the Aramaeans, a nomadic people who, displaced by drought, were raiding Assyrian cities. Their language, Aramaic, would become the lingua franca of the Near East in the Iron Age.

The Mycenaean and Minoan societies of mainland Greece and Crete ended by the late 1100s B.C. Contact with the Near East dwindled, writing stopped and only “survivors or squatters,” Mr. Cline writes, lived amid the mainland’s ruined palaces. The Bronze Age was remembered in Homer’s oral legend, and Greek civilization took centuries to rebound. As everywhere, the collapse of large sociopolitical units gave space to city-states. The polis, which the Greeks would export across the region, was born from this power vacuum. The cities of Bronze Age Canaan were reborn as a mishmash of Phoenician cities, an Israelite state in the southern hill country, and, after a Sea People called the Peleset had annexed Canaan’s coastal strip, a league of Philistine cities.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From The Economist:

Until recently Captain James Cook was not a particularly controversial figure. But in January a statue of the 18th-century British sailor and explorer was toppled in Melbourne and the words “The colony will fall” spraypainted on the plinth. In Hawaii an obelisk in Cook’s memory has been splattered with red paint and the message “You are on native land.” Cook has joined Edward Colston, Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes as a focal point for anti-colonialist ire.

In fact Cook was neither a slave trader nor much of an imperialist. He was, first and foremost, a brilliant navigator and cartographer. Acting under Admiralty orders, he undertook three pioneering voyages in the Pacific between 1768 and 1779. His mapmaking transformed Europeans’ knowledge of the world’s largest ocean.

An excellent new book draws on Cook’s letters and notebooks to tell the story of his third and final trip. Cook was almost 50 when he set off on hms Resolution in July 1776. Among the crew he took were William Bligh (later captain of the Bounty before the mutiny in 1789) and Mai, a Tahitian prince noted for being painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Cook had secret instructions from the Admiralty not only to claim new territory for Britain, but to search for a north-west passage via the Bering Strait (a task even someone with his navigational experience found impossible).

The author, Hampton Sides, focuses on Cook’s return to Australia and New Zealand—countries the explorer had first encountered almost a decade earlier—his discovery of the Society Islands (today part of French Polynesia) and his time in Hawaii. It was there, in February 1779, that he was killed after a botched attempt to kidnap a local chief in response to the theft of a longboat.

Cook was a man of his times. He believed Europe would have a civilising influence on many benighted folk in the Pacific. He was distinctly cruel in meting out punishments, to his own crew as well as to any indigenous people who opposed him.

Yet Cook also admired many of the people and places he encountered in the South Pacific. Unlike the Spanish, he had no interest in religious conversion. He tried hard to stop his men from spreading venereal disease. For the most part, his land claims were aimed not at promoting a British empire but forestalling grabs by Britain’s rivals, France and Spain.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Chinese Communist Party has already crushed freedom in Hong Kong. Now it’s beating a dead horse.

As directors of Next Digital, we saw three years ago the jackboot effect of the security laws Beijing has imposed on Hong Kong. The company published Apple Daily, a lively independent newspaper founded in 1995 by businessman Jimmy Lai. With no judicial process, Hong Kong’s security secretary froze the company’s bank accounts, forcing the paper to close. Mr. Lai was already in jail and is now on trial on national-security charges.

Now the Communist Party is going after Apple Daily’s readers. On June 24, 2021, the paper’s last day of publication, people lined up for hours to show their support by buying a copy. More than a million were sold in a city of fewer than eight million. Under the latest national-security law, which took effect last month, possession of “seditious publications” is a crime. A Hong Kong resident could go to prison for having a keepsake copy of Apple Daily at home.

Think we’re exaggerating? On March 10 the Global Times, a Communist Party propaganda organ, published what it billed as “a rebuttal to Western media hype targeting the law.” The “rebuttal” described Mr. Lai as a “modern-day traitor” and Apple Daily as “the secessionist tabloid, depicted by Western politicians and media as the so-called defender of freedom of speech.”

During what passed for a debate over the bill in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, lawmaker Peter Koon asked an official to clarify the provision. Apple Daily “is certainly seditious,” Mr. Koon allowed. “But what if some people intend to keep a record of such a bad newspaper and had two copies at home? Would that be counted as possessing seditious publications?”

Security Secretary Chris Tang said that it would depend. The Global Times “rebuttal” quotes him: “For example, ‘I’ve placed it [seditious item] there for a long time, I didn’t know it was still there, the purpose wasn’t to incite, I didn’t know about its existence,’ that could constitute a reasonable excuse.” Feel better? The law also authorizes the police to use “reasonable force” to remove or destroy seditious publications.

. . . .

But more nonmedia companies are likely to find the risks of doing business in Hong Kong too great. The new law expands on the old one by incorporating China’s criminalizing of “state secrets.” That can include not only journalism but also the kind of information-gathering routinely done in a global financial center by industry and company analysts, investors, consultants, lawyers and accountants.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG says this is a sobering story likely to spur sales of outbound airline tickets from Hong Kong. Such activity will move a great many intelligent and talented people out of Hong Kong for long-term stays outside of China.

Perhaps Chinese leaders believe the nation has a surplus of such individuals within its 1.4 billion population, but PG thinks they’re mistaken.

From The Economist:

When the captain of a Korean tuna-fishing ship first caught sight of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey bobbing in the Pacific Ocean in June 1973, he could not work out what they were. About four months earlier, while they were trying to sail from England to New Zealand, their boat had crashed into a sperm whale. The couple was stranded in a tiny inflatable life-raft tied to a flimsy dinghy, subsisting on rainwater, turtles whose throats they had slit, birds they strangled and sharks they suffocated. Unable to stand and wearing clothes that had disintegrated, their skeletons looked ready to burst through their skin.

Miraculously, they were alive. In “Maurice and Maralyn”, Sophie Elmhirst . . . draws on her own reporting, Maralyn’s diaries, the memoirs that the two published and a trove of news clips to tell the tale of this couple’s survival—and the love story that bubbled alongside.

The pair had met a decade earlier at a car rally in Derby, England. Maurice was older and flew planes, but was lonely, awkward and felt that he had “so much to wade through before he could do anything”. Maralyn was chatty and brave and, unlike Maurice, “seemed to know instinctively how to do things”. They married, bought a home and then sold it, using the money to buy a yacht. Their dream was to become explorers.

They found their adventure. But despite the seafaring and adrenaline, in “Maurice and Maralyn” it is love itself, “a terrifying fluke”, which makes life extraordinary. Two people choose and are chosen, “and, most unlikely of all, these choices must happen at roughly the same time”, Ms Elmhirst writes.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Paris Review:

While reading Maradona’s autobiography this past winter, I found that every few pages I would whisper or write in the margins, “I love you, Maradona.” Sadness crept up on me as I turned to the last chapter, and it intensified to heartbreak when I read its first lines: “They say I can’t keep quiet, that I talk about everything, and it’s true. They say I fell out with the Pope. It’s true.” I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope. 

I started reading El Diego: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Footballer, ghostwritten by Marcela Mora y Araujo, on the basis of a recommendation by an editor I have liked working with. He said reading it was the most fun he’d had with a book. I came to El Diego with basically no knowledge of Maradona or even of soccer. I would have said I hated soccer actually. I hate the buzzing noise the crowds make on the TV. But from the very first page I found Maradona’s voice so addictive and original that reading El Diego felt like falling in love. 

Maradona’s skirmish with the Pope goes the way of much else in the book. Because of his extraordinary talents and global fame, Maradona is invited to the Vatican with his family. The Pope gives each of them a rosary to say, and he tells Maradona that he has been given a special one. Maradona checks with his mother and discovers that they have the same rosary. He goes back to confront the Pope and is outraged when the Pope pats him on the back and carries on walking. 

“Total lack of respect!” Maradona fumes. “It’s why I’ve got angry with so many people: because they are two-faced, because they say one thing here and then another thing there, because they’d stab you in the back, because they lie. If I were to talk about all the people I’ve fallen out with over the years, I’d need one of those encyclopedias, there would be volumes.” 

Whether it be FIFA, money-hungry managers, angry fans, the Mafia, drug tests, or the tabloids, Maradona never takes anything lying down. He stews and stews, and this fuels him to play better and better soccer. There is an Argentinean word Maradona uses for this: bronca. Mora y Araujo explains, in an introduction in which she lovingly details the difficulties of putting Maradona’s unique voice down on the page, that this basically means “fury, hatred, resentment, bitter discontent.” But the difficulty of choosing a translation left her to simply leave bronca, and many of Maradona’s other favorite catchphrases, as they were. The result is a narrative voice which is totally distinct, and an overall energy out of sync with the pristine, restrained public image most celebrities seek to cultivate, especially in the social media age. 

Maradona first learned to play soccer on the streets of Villa Fiorito, the extremely poor city on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where he was born. He played all day in the blazing heat and then when the sun went down too. Early on in the book he says: “When I hear someone going on about how in such and such a stadium there’s no light, I think: I played in the dark, you son of a bitch!”

I still don’t know enough about soccer to verify my impression that he is one of the greatest soccer players ever. But Wikipedia asserts this too. El Diego tells the story of his extraordinary rise through the world of small, local kids’ clubs to a glittering career which involved World Cups (one of which he captained Argentina for), a transformative stint for the Italian team Napoli, setting the world record for transfer fees twice, scoring a famous handball goal against England, and lots of other things I don’t really understand properly but felt enormously gripped by.   

It’s an incredible life story, shadowed by, as well as his constant fights, a cocaine habit and a string of extramarital dalliances. But mostly I was gripped by the way he tells it. At one point, when FIFA bans him from a match, he says: “My legs had been cut off, my soul had been destroyed.”

I started El Diego in the airport, on my way back to Belfast for Christmas. A young man on my flight pointed at my book and asked me what I was reading. (I discovered over the next few weeks that reading the book in public places was a magnet for men.) I showed him the cover.  

He said: Oh yeah I thought it said Maradona. You like football? 

I said: Oh no I don’t know anything about football. 

He said: Why are you reading it then? 

At the time I told him it was because I wanted to read something different from what I usually read. If he’d asked me the same thing when I finished it, I would have said it’s not really about football. It’s about being in love. It’s about the little guy against the big guy, I would have declared. And believing in something. And respect. It’s about having a sense of who you are.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From The Guardian:

A group of Uyghur friends are having a late-night chat. “I wish the Chinese would just conquer the world,” one says suddenly. “Why do you say that?” another asks, surprised. “The world doesn’t care what happens to us,” the first man replies. “Since we can’t have freedom anyway, let the whole world taste subjugation. Then we would all be the same. We wouldn’t be alone in our suffering.”

It is an understandable outburst of bitterness. The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who live mainly in China’s north-western Xinjiang region. They have long faced discrimination and persecution. Since 2016, the repression has greatly intensified, with mass detention, forced sterilisation and abortion, the separation of thousands of children from their parents, and the razing of thousands of mosques. Yet support for Uyghurs has been equivocal, not least from Muslim-majority countries, many of which are outraged by the burning of a Qur’an in Sweden but remain silent about the detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, for fear of upsetting Beijing.

Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, which recounts that conversation, is not, however, a bitter book. It is suffused, rather, by a deep sense of sadness, and of despondency even amid hope. “Yet our words could undo nothing here,/even the things we brought to be”, as one of Izgil’s poems laments.

A poet and film-maker, Izgil is famed for bringing a modernist sensibility to Uyghur poetry. He did not set out to be a political activist. The very fact of being a Uyghur, though, in a country that seeks to erase Uyghur existence, both culturally and physically, turns everyday life into a political act. And for a poet living in a culture within which “verse is woven into daily life”, writing is necessarily also an act of witness and of resistance.

Despite the subtitle of the book – “A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide” – there are no depictions here of genocide, or of torture, or even of violence. We know all these things are happening, but off-page. Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book’s restraint is also its strength. The tension in the narrative flows from the dread captured in the title – the dread of waiting to be arrested, to be vanished into detention, a dread no Uyghur can escape.

Beijing’s strategy has been, over the past decade, to cut Uyghurs off from the rest of the world and from one another, too. When censorship and surveillance made it impossible to link to the internet beyond the Chinese firewall, many Uyghurs took to keeping in touch with the outside world through shortwave radios. Until, that is, the government banned the sale of such radios and organised mass raids into people’s homes to confiscate them. “We suddenly found ourselves living like frogs at the bottom of a well,” Izgil observes.

Beijing seeks to cut off Uyghurs from their past and their traditions, too. Qur’ans are seized and history books banned, including many previously authorised by the state. Even personal names become part of the assault on Uyghur culture. Beijing’s list of prohibited names tells Uyghurs what they cannot call their children. Some names are apparently too “Muslim” – Aisha, Fatima, Saifuddin; others, such as Arafat, too political. When the list was first introduced, newspapers carried announcements such as: “My son’s birth name was Arafat Ablikim. From now on he will be known as Bekhtiyar Ablikim.”

The greatest dread is of the physical repression wreaked upon Uyghurs: mass detentions, torture, violence. We get a glimpse of the horror when Izgil and his wife, Marhaba, attend a police station to have their biometric details collected – fingerprints, blood samples, facial scans. Along a basement corridor, `they see a cell fitted out with iron restraints and a notorious “tiger chair”, used to force detainees into agonising stress positions. On the floor are bloodstains.

People start disappearing, first in small numbers, eventually up to 1 million. They are taken to “study centres” – the code for mass detention camps – though nobody knows which one. “They simply vanished,” Izgil writes.

The police knocked on the door when “your name was on the list”. There was, though, “no way to know if or when your name would show up on the list. We all lived within this frightening uncertainty.” It spawned a climate in which people feared one another as much as they feared the authorities.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The New Yorker:

When she died at a hundred and one in January of 2019, Diana Athill had publicly chronicled both ends of her long life in a series of nine memoirs. The first of these, “Instead of a Letter,” was published in 1963 and recently rereleased in the U.S. as part of the NYRB Classics series; it recounts her jolly, upper-class English childhood on the family estate of Ditchingham, in Norfolk. The last book that she wrote, “Alive, Alive Oh!,” came together in her “darling little room” at the Mary Feilding Guild, in Highgate, London, a garden-set home for the elderly; it’s a high-spirited, recalcitrant account of “waiting to die” at ninety-six.

Athill was the sort of character who ought to have seen her obituaries before she went. First, because she would have bewitchingly written off any high praise—the New York Times noted “her luminous prose, gimlet social acuity and ability to convey a profound sense of place”—with her brand of droll humor. (She refused burial at the Highgate Cemetery because of the cost: “I think being dead is an expensive business.”) And, second, because she would have enjoyed the evidence of how much her reputation had emerged; she’d worked behind the scenes for meagre wages and little adulation as one of the century’s great editors. In 1952, she became a co-founding director of the publishing house André Deutsch, and, until her retirement, in 1992, shepherded the likes of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Jean Rhys to publication. Athill wrote seven of her memoirs after leaving her nine-to-five, but, until that relatively late turn toward autobiographical mania, she knew her place. “We must always remember that we are only midwives—if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own,” she writes, in “Stet: An Editor’s Life.” We might not have known her had she not brought forth her own romping and exuberant litter.

Critics frequently used the terms “frank” or “candid” to describe Athill’s memoirs. But Athill doesn’t write as if no one is watching; she writes as if she’d never even imagined someone might watch, and therefore doesn’t have a scruple to hold on to. To describe honesty as her hallmark isn’t quite enough: that’s the least we can ask of our memoirists. What she is marvellous at is admitting, sans self-recrimination. In the early twenty-first century, the memoir has turned into a confessional, in a nearly religious sense. Writers go there to seek redemption, and to chart their evolution from naïve to knowing: no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis. Athill doesn’t treat her foibles and losses—of love, of money, of caste, of certainty—as traumas, events that would define her life as troubled and scarring. Instead, she makes the case that being kicked out of Eden is good for the soul.

“I am glad that I have not inherited money or possessions,” Athill writes, striking a defiant note in “Instead of a Letter.” Inheritance was never her due, though as a child she once counted the bodies that stood between her and the palatial Ditchingham estate. “It appeared that at least twelve people, seven of them my contemporaries, would have to die before I would have a claim, and I hardly thought I ought to pray for this however much I would have liked to.” Ditchingham belonged to her mother’s parents, who offered it out as the extended family’s seasonal home, where they spent long summers and holidays throughout her early life. The thousand-acre estate with a twenty-bedroom, fully staffed house granted the family security in their Englishness, as members of an élite and unquestionable class. Athill stresses that the experience of growing up with such surety turned Ditchingham into a cocoon, a secure location from which to launch a life, but also a place she would inevitably leave. “There I used to be,” she opines, “as snug and as smug as anyone.” From an early age, she knew that adulthood would exist elsewhere.

Athill’s joy in Ditchingham, the children’s after-tea appearance in front of the grownups in the drawing room and the horsemen wandering across the fields, is the bright marrow of her writing: it suffuses her later life, and her prose, with bubbling, fresh oxygen. But, in “Instead of a Letter,” she writes as if she’s relieved that she got away from the estate and its inhabitants. “Like anyone else they had their charms,” she writes of her family, but “physically, intellectually, and morally, they were no more than middling.” Yet they thought themselves superior beings: “Smugness is too small a word for what it feels like from inside. From inside, it feels like moral and aesthetic rightness; from inside, it is people like me, who question it, who look stupid, ugly, and pitiful.”

Hence her happiness that she didn’t inherit: staying on at Ditchingham for a lifetime might have trapped her in the same small, closed life. Her childhood remained blissful to her as she aged because it lived on in her memory but didn’t define her future. “Never to have broken through its smothering folds would have been, I have always thought, extremely depressing,” she writes. “But on the other hand, not to have enjoyed a childhood wrapped warmly in those folds—that would be a sad loss.” Cousins were saddled with managing the finances of an upkeep-heavy country pile, whereas she, the oldest child of a fourth daughter, absorbed the bliss of the place but not the narrowness.

Ditchingham wasn’t the only inheritance that Athill would forgo. At thirteen, her mother told her that they’d “lost” their money, but what she meant was that they’d spent it all. “My parents felt they were living austerely because we ourselves looked after our ponies and they had not kept on their own hunters,” Athill writes, dryly. She recounts her mother telling her that “the really bloody thing about being poor is that if you leave something on the floor when you go out, you know that it will still be there when you get back.” Along with her two younger siblings, the family had been living in a well-staffed, six-bedroom house in Hertfordshire since her father had retired from the Army. Financially, they fell out a window but landed on a mattress—Athill’s grandparents rented them Manor Farm, a house on the estate, for cheap. A governess cost too much, so Athill was sent to Runton, a girls’ boarding school on the North Sea, and then up to St. Mary’s College at Oxford, in 1936.

When Athill was twenty-two, her future disintegrated again. She’d been engaged for two years when her fiancé, a Royal Air Force pilot named Tony Irvine, was deployed to Egypt. Then his letters suddenly stopped. She discovered in rapid succession that he’d married someone else while abroad and then been killed in action. “A long, flat unhappiness” set in, her sense of her own value collapsed, and her twenties were filled with broken-off relationships with incompatible men. “By the time I had reached my thirties,” she writes, toward the end of “Instead of a Letter,” “I was convinced that I lacked some vital quality necessary to inspire love.” At age ninety-nine, she explained in an interview, “there was a basic, underlying sense of failure—and it came from the very simple thing of having been brought up expecting to get married.”

“How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions. Typical culprits are poverty or abandonment, sometimes a remarkable, indelible catastrophe. Cheryl Strayed’s mother died when Strayed, the author of “Wild,” was in college: she calls it her “genesis story.” Dani Shapiro, the author of five memoirs, starts her autobiographical path in “Slow Motion” with the story of her parents’ tragic car accident. Even Joan Didion reached new heights of cultural resonance with “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her memoir of the year following her husband’s death. The modern memoir is the proving ground for our national obsession with trauma, a place to gawk at whoever comes through the emotional meat grinder with the good sense and talent to finesse their damage into a redemption song.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

Ditchingham Hall. (2022, April 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditchingham_Hall. Photographer – Stephen Richards, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0)

From The Economist:

“In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if other people notice any of your smelly filth.” This useful bit of advice for young courtiers in the early 13th century appears in “The Book of the Civilised Man”, a poem by Daniel of Beccles. It is the first English guide to manners.

Ian Mortimer, a historian, argues that this and other popular works of advice that began appearing around the same time represent something important: a growing sense of social self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-control. Why then? Probably because of the revival of glass mirrors in the 12th century, which had disappeared from Europe after the fall of Rome. The mirror made it possible for men and women to see themselves as others did. It confirmed their individuality and inspired a greater sense of autonomy and potential. By 1500 mirrors were cheap, and their impact had spread through society.

Mr Mortimer sets out to show that the medieval period, from 1000 to 1600, is profoundly misunderstood. It was not a backward and unchanging time marked by violence, ignorance and superstition. Instead, huge steps in social and economic progress were made, and the foundations of the modern world were laid.

The misapprehension came about because people’s notion of progress is so bound up with scientific and technological developments that came later, particularly with the industrial and digital revolutions. The author recounts one claim he has heard: that a contemporary schoolchild (armed with her iPhone) knows more about the world than did the greatest scientist of the 16th century.

Never mind that astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo knew much more about the stars than most children do today. Could a modern architect (without his computer) build a stone spire like Lincoln Cathedral’s, which is 160 metres (525 feet) tall and was completed by 1311? Between 1000 and 1300 the height of the London skyline quintupled, whereas between 1300 and the completion of the 72-storey Shard in 2010, it only doubled. Inventions, including gunpowder, the magnetic compass and the printing press, all found their way from China to transform war, navigation and literacy.

This led to many “expanding horizons” for Europeans. Travel was one. In the 11th century no European had any idea what lay to the east of Jerusalem or south of the Sahara. By 1600 there had been several circumnavigations of the globe.

Law and order was another frontier. Thanks to the arrival of paper from China in the 12th century and the advent of the printing press in the 1430s, document-creation and record-keeping, which are fundamental to administration, surged. Between 1000 and 1600 the number of words written and printed in England went from about 1m a year to around 100bn. In England, a centralised legal and criminal-justice system evolved rapidly from the 12th century. Violent deaths declined from around 23 per 100,000 in the 1300s to seven per 100,000 in the late 16th century.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

The British explorer Ranulph Fiennes is the first person to have crossed Antarctica on foot and the only living person to have circumnavigated the planet by its poles. In 2000 he fell through the ice while walking solo to the North Pole, leaving the fingertips of his left hand severely frostbitten. When he got home, Mr. Fiennes, a veteran of the elite Special Air Service, trimmed the fingertips with a saw, saving himself £6,000 in medical expenses and, he says, considerable pain.

In 2003 Mr. Fiennes had a heart attack and a bypass operation, then completed seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. In 2009 he reached the summit of Mount Everest on the third attempt. His other feats of endurance include writing more than 30 books, including biographies of the polar pioneers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, handbooks for ultrarunners and travelers with weak hearts, and the perhaps inevitable family history “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”

Mr. Fiennes (pronounced “Fines”) is a classic English type, the diffident hero and driven adventurer. He is the square peg who inspires irregular soldiers in inhospitable places. He crosses deserts, forests and frozen wastes, facing down danger and the limits of human endurance, death included.

The rarest such figure, combining all these characteristics of imperial legend with lasting historical significance, was T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935). Dubbed Lawrence of Arabia in his lifetime and immortalized twice over, once by himself in his 1926 memoir “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and again by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” Lawrence played a crucial but thwarted role in the shaping of the modern Middle East.

In 1916 Britain was at war with Germany’s Ottoman Turkish allies. Lawrence, an archaeologist turned intelligence officer, helped organize the Arab tribes of the Hejaz (today’s western Saudi Arabia) into a guerrilla army and led the Arab Revolt that, in October 1918, displaced the Turks from Damascus. The revolt raised hopes for a unified, self-determining Arab nation, but Lawrence’s political masters and their French allies connived at frustrating that ambition. After the war, the British and French took over from the Turks and created new borders and nations. The events of that era still complicate today’s local and global politics.

Mr. Fiennes’s “Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T.E. Lawrence” is a casually elegant biography and an expert reflection on the kind of irregular warfare that Lawrence pioneered and Mr. Fiennes experienced as a young officer fighting a Marxist insurgency in the mountains of Oman in the late 1960s. Lawrence’s example, Mr. Fiennes writes, preceded him and “often inspired me to victory in life-or-death situations.” But Lawrence was also his companion in facing “impossible military and political odds, as well as confronting personal scars.”

The second of five sons, Lawrence grew up in a villa in Oxford. Fascinated by military history, especially the Crusades and Napoleon Bonaparte, he was pushed by his mother to achieve greatness. Lawrence’s motives in risking his life, Mr. Fiennes writes, were not just “his attachment to the Arabs and his hatred for the Ottomans.” He was not who he claimed to be or who he wanted to be. “Lawrence” was an assumed name. His father, an Irish baronet named Thomas Chapman, had eloped with the family maid. When Chapman’s wife refused to grant a divorce, he and his mistress adopted a new name and pretended to be married. Lawrence’s mother saddled him with the “burden that he was special” and a mission to “redeem the family.” Raised a strict Christian, Lawrence was 10 years old when he discovered his illegitimacy.

He became a feted student at Oxford, then cultivated the English romance with tribal life while digging at ancient Carchemish, north of Aleppo, Syria, from 1911 to 1914. “I am Arab in habits and slip in talking from English to French to Arabic unnoticing,” he wrote home. When war broke out in 1914, the British army needed Arabic speakers with local knowledge. Lawrence’s old Oxford tutor, now an intelligence officer, summoned him to Cairo as a mapmaker and adviser. But Lawrence already had a plan to redraw the map by unifying the Arab tribes against the Turks. “I want to pull them all together,” he wrote in 1915, “and roll up Syria by way of the Hedjaz” in the name of Hussein Ibn Ali, the Emir of Mecca.

Meanwhile Hussein and his four sons secretly planned their own revolt, but needed weapons and support. The British could not spare soldiers, but they sent Hussein money and antique rifles, as well as a promise from Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, to recognize Hussein’s rule from Aleppo to Aden if the revolt succeeded.

In July 1916, Hussein’s followers expelled the Turkish garrison from Mecca but, lacking heavy weapons, they were repulsed at the ports of Jidda, Yenbo and Rabegh. In October, with the revolt stalled and British confidence faltering, Lawrence sailed from Egypt for Jidda. From there, he disguised himself in Arab robes, crossed roughly 100 miles of desert by camel through sandstorms, bearing the heat and weeping saddle sores, met Hussein’s son Feisal at the rebel camp and launched his legend.

Lawrence said he preferred “the Arab untouched” to the “perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanized Arab.” In Feisal he found his ideal partner, tall and white-robed, with a “strange still watchfulness” and an “almost regal” bearing that reminded Lawrence of Richard the Lionheart and the young Napoleon. Returning to Cairo, Lawrence secured explosives, the support of Royal Navy ships and British advisers “to train Arab bands,” and a supply of gold.

The Turks controlled the Red Sea ports of the Hejaz via their new Damascus-Medina railroad. Lawrence soon saw that the Arabs could not match well-drilled Turkish troops and their German-supplied artillery. Inland, however, Lawrence believed that the tribesmen’s mobility, small numbers and familiarity with “one of the most trying countries in the world for civilized warfare” made them “the most elusive enemy an army ever had.” Lawrence convinced Feisal to adopt an indirect strategy: disrupt and pin down the Turks by sabotaging the railroad line, then bypass and isolate the Turkish garrisons at Medina and the Red Sea ports and push northward to Syria.

In November 1917, Ottoman troops captured Lawrence, disguised as a peasant, as he spied out the railroad junction of Deraa. He was brutally beaten and raped by the Turkish governor and his men. The shame he felt after that episode was only multiplied at the end of the war: After he entered Damascus on Oct. 1, 1918, in a Rolls Royce, he had to watch as the British commander Edmund Allenby informed Feisal that Britain and France did not intend to honor McMahon’s promises of a unified Arab kingdom.

Damaged by his experiences in Arabia and disenchanted by the political aftermath, Lawrence became a celebrity when “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” appeared in 1926, then did his best to disappear, enlisting in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name. He died in a motorbike accident in 1935.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Lawrence is in the second row on the right below

From Publishing Perspectives:

As we work to recoup some of the relevant material released to the news media near the end of our publication year, we look now at two significant research reports from Elsevier, one on research evaluation and the other on real-world impact—both increasingly pressing interests in the world of academic publication.

In the 30-page report “Back to Earth: Landing Real-World Impact in Research Evaluation,” the program carried out a survey of 400 academic leaders, funders, and researchers in seven countries about real-world impact as part of academic evaluation. Key findings include:

• Sixty-six percent of respondents say academia has a moral responsibility to incorporate real-world impact into standard research evaluation​
• Seventy percent say they are passionate about research that has a positive real-world impact
• Fifty-three percent say a more holistic approach to evaluation would improve research cost-effectiveness.\
• Fifty-one percent of respondents identified at least one serious problem with current methods of research evaluation
• In terms of barriers to change, 56 percent of those surveyed said the “lack of common frameworks or methodologies” while 48 percent said “lack of consensus on what constitutes impact”

In this report, it’s interesting to note some of the differences, culture-to-culture in the question of how important it is for research “to aim for real-world impact.” Particularly in the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, there could hardly have been a time when it was so obvious, the need that the world-at-large has for the most sophisticated, committed, and efficient research.

Nevertheless, this graphic indicates that surveyed personnel on this point came in on the affirmative side (yes, research should aim for real-world impact) at rates up to 93 percent in the United Kingdom and a low of 64 percent in the Elsevier report’s home, the Netherlands.

Another very interesting point in this report compares the view of funders and those of researchers.

While funders surveyed seem to agree with researchers that more holistic approaches are important, the funders did say that they were more in agreement with the researchers that the current system creates vested interests.

And it’s the researchers who said they were more passionate than the funders about having “real-world impact as researchers and academic leaders.”

Topping the list of barriers offered by funders to a more holistic form of research assessment was lack of resources at 53 percent, on a 53-percent par with lack of consensus on what actually constitutes impact.

Also running heavily were the lack of a common framework or methodology in holistic method of assessing research’s impact, at 49 percent. But another tie came in next, with 38 percent each of respondents saying that two more barriers are “achieving sufficient alignment between different actors” and “complexity.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives