Jan Morris, Trieste (and the Meaning of Nowhere) (2002).

GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.98 by 116 litizens. 

Genre: Travel

Verdict: languid and insightful.

Morris first set eyes on Trieste in 1946 as a soldier in the British Army, then near to fifty years later Morris returned.    

When Trieste had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire for nearly a century it was the port of Venice at a time when the Hapsburgs, at the height of their powers, developed maritime ambitions in the Adriatic.  To link it to the capital, all-weather roads and railways were built over the mountains while the harbour was dredged, and made modern.  Vienna was the seat of a vast empire and home of a royal house that had once extended from the Carpathian mountains to the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It was rivalled only to London and Paris as a world capital at its peak, and Trieste was its nautical doorway for those years.   

Trieste only became Italian by dint of others, and like its neighbour, Venice, it has never felt itself to be Italian, but rather a world of its own with its own language, mōres, and manners.  And that is what it was in 1946 when a callow Morris arrived with the 2nd New Zealand Division, to a Free City under the aegis of the United Nations, while national borders were resolved in the jig-saw puzzle of the post-war Balkans.  Both Italy and Yugoslavia advanced claims for it, both for the same reason: as a buffer against the other, i.e., neither wanted it for itself. While those tensions played out the city was divided and occupied as Vienna was for a time.  In Trieste it was Kiwis on one side and Jugs on the other for a time in an uneasy fait accompli

Berlin was divided and occupied and so important no one would yield a centimetre thereby spawning a vast culture of art and literature about that long-divided city.  Vienna was divided and occupied for a time and Graham Greene immortalised it in ‘The Third Man.’ Trieste was divided and occupied and no one noticed, not even many Triestinos.  

Today Trieste is in if not of Italy, but the city lies within a few kilometres from the successors of Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia, once the hinterlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  As the guns of August unlimbered in 1914, it was through the port of Trieste that the remains of the slain Archduke passed on the way to Vienna.   

But to revert, at the end of World War I Italy got title to Trieste as a spoil of war for being on the winning side after the blood bath at nearby Caporetto with the result that the city lost its raison d’état for it was then shorn of its hinterland and the capital it had been developed to serve, namely Vienna.  No longer glowing in the reflected glory of Viennese art, culture, literature, music, power, or commerce, Trieste fell into the torpor of a melancholy lassitude where it was content to remain far from any beaten path.

Proof of its irrelevance is that it was all but untouched in World War II, not being important enough for anyone to bomb it to smithereens, and when Italy changed sides in August 1943 neither partisans nor fascists bothered much with Trieste, since it had offered no material, strategic, or symbolic advantage.  Ergo there was no rush to get there and fight over it.  However it bears scars of that war in another way, as the locale of a Nazi charnel house at San Sabba.  

In the parade of names of Triestinos only Italo Svevo meant anything to me and that was very little, as the author of ‘The Conscience of Zeno.’  By the way ‘Italo Svevo’ is a pseudonym for Aron Schmitz. 

Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal) served as French Consul there. While his most famous novel is Le Rouge and le Noir, for my money far more interesting is the one set in Italy, namely La Chartreuse de Parme.  Though he preferred cosmopolitan Milano to the backwater of Trieste.     

James Joyce spent much time there pencilling his incomprehensible Ulysses, which Morris by-passes ever so delicately.     

Illy coffee stems from here where the family remains. We have been loyal imbibers of Illy for many a year in its red, blue, and pink banners.  

Much of the book is Morris musing on life, and it is so well done that I, curmudgeon first class that I am, have no complaints.  Indeed I hope to read more of Morris’s books in due course for sheer pleasure of the effortless prose. 

Effortless to read, but no doubt it takes quite an effort to achieve that. 

There is a story of an aspiring young writer visiting Anatole France, famed for his elegant yet simple prose in many novels.  The ingenue was shown into the master’s study where France was at work surrounded by a mass of pages, doodles, crumpled-up balls of paper, pages of cross-out done with such vigour as to tear the paper, and more discarded pages overflowing the bin.  Seeing the eyes of the would-be acolyte noting the mess, France said, ‘this writing, it is not so easy as it looks when it is done.’  

We spent four nights in Trieste in 2019 and enjoyed it.  I noticed several posters called for a Free State of Trieste.  

Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman.

Good Reads meta-data is 624 pages, rated 4.1 by 81,342 litizens.

Genre: Poetry

Verdict: Exhilarating!

To say that Whitman’s poetry is exhilarating is just a start.  It zips, it dips, it soars, it flies, it ponders, it races in a cascade of verse.  About 400 poems are combined in this book, which began as a collection of twelve, and became his life’s work as he revised, edited, amended, and augmented it.  

It also departed from the conventions of poetry in its celebration of the immediate, material world and the human body in contrast to the mannered abstraction that prevailed at the time.  The verse is blank, by the way, and rhymes are few and far between, and that also made it odd.  For its time it was also explicit about sex, and implicit about homosexuality.  

No one in the literary establishment would touch it in 1855, as a consequence he printed it himself in the 95-page first edition.  (One sold in 2014 for $US 305,000.)  

The narrative voice is without a doubt Whitman himself (and sometimes that is explicit in the verse) as he surveys man, woman, child, beast, and nature.  He sees himself in all the others and they in himself.  When he sings of himself he includes one and all, slave and free, male and female, living and dead, victorious and vanquished, owner and drudge, lilac and rose, dog and cat, vegetable and mineral, high and low, black, white and red, yellow and black, urban and rural, owner and labourer, prostitute and lady, believer and atheist.  The tone is ever affirmative, though the later entries, forty years after the first edition, and after his years as an ambulance driver in the Civil War, and after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, shade into melancholia.  One of his duties as a driver was carting and burying amputated limbs. 

It was denounced from the pulpit, banned in Boston, and burned as obscene. That free publicity increased sales. When reviewers tore into his work, he published these reviews in the following editions of ‘Leaves of Grass.‘  At one point a thousand copies were sold a week for months on end. New printings were invariably new editions as he included more poems and more hostile reviews, and they sold out in a day. 

By 1919 it had become a part of the American literary canon though quite how that came about it is a mystery in the vigorously contested Wikipedia entry. Who championed it passes in silence in this wordy but vague entry.  But more than one reader puts Whitman in the pantheon with Shakespeare and Dante. Well, this reader does. 

These days PhDs earn tenure by finding fault with the poems, with Whitman, with the air he breathed. There are a few sips of this bile in the Wikipedia entry.  Confident this reader is that Whitman’s verse will outlive all the spite and spittle of these pygmies.  

Quoting lines and passages do not do it justice.  It was meant to heard and I listened to it in Audible edition that is superb.  Robin Field’s voice is not distracting, the diction follows the cadence of the prose, and brims with energy, as it should.  

Below is a list of some of the individual poems: 

By Blue Ontario’s Shore

O Captain! My Captain! 

Dalliance with Eagles

Faces

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

I Sing the Body Electric

Native Moments

The Open Road

The Sleepers

Song got Myself

Spontaneous Me

Song of the Open Road

To a Common Prostitute

The Untold Want, and 

A Woman Waits for Me.

During World War II it was one of fifty books distributed freely to members of the US Armed Forces and auxiliaries as exemplars of Americana.  What would be distributed today? Surely not books, but videos to reflect one hundred and fifty years of free public education in which literacy has declined. Perhaps it would be episodes of ‘Say Yes to the Dress?’  Or a collection of garbled tweets from a twit. 

Whitman was fired from his day job by his boss who read a few pages and found it filthy.  The grass of the title by the way is in the hand of a child which the narrator says is the handkerchief of the Lord.  

Some of the entries on Good Reads reach a new low of self-indulgence, even for that forum, when a one-star rater admits to not reading such filth.  Others offer anagrams of the title that reflect their scatological personality. Fatuous as these entries are the authors took the time and trouble to post them. As usual most of the comments are about the commenter and not the alleged subject.  

Letter to a Hostage (1944) by Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Goodreads meta-data is 39 pages, rated 3.93 by 594 litizens.

Genre: Musing.

Verdict: A period piece. 

Though it celebrates the grit of his comrades in facing the Nazi juggernaut of 1940, the pamphlet was banned in Vichy France because it was dedicated to St Ex’s very good friend and the captain whom he admired, Léon Werth, a Jew.  St Ex got out but Werth did not.  It takes the form of an extended letter, musing on life that does go on.  Ironically St Ex did not survive the war but Werth did.  Slight though it may be, St Ex has as always an uncanny knack for finding the le mot just each and every time, some lyrical, and some mournful.  

The first draft was to be the preface to Werth’s novel, Trente-trois Jours, about the Defeat and the flight of refugees.  But when Werth went into hiding in the Jura, and St Ex escaped to Lisbon where he revised it into a more general reflection on time and place and recast Werth a symbol of all of France.

That is why the Vichy authorities banned it. Treating a Jew as French was bad.  Explicitly admiring this Jew for his patriotism was worse.  But making him a symbol of FRANCE was intolerable.  

As always with St Ex the sky is there, and so is the sand of the Sahara.  

Yet even here idiocy is to be found.  One reviewer on Amazon says that St Ex ‘fought valiantly to keep France from becoming Socialist at the hands of Charles De Gaulle, and it probably cost him his life.’ Yep. Was that a Tweet from the Twit in Chief?  There is no point in trying correct this nonsense, best just to savour it.   

Peter Singer ‘Writings on an Ethical Life’ (2000).

On the bridge of the starship Enterprise all eyes bored into the captain, who was locked in the most difficult negotiations of his career in space. Once again the Enterprise had found new life. The bald captain, determined to establish peaceful relations with it, bent all efforts to the task. Everything was on the table. At that very moment he had agreed to decommission all vacuum cleaners in the Alpha Quadrant! Why? Because the dust mites he was bargaining with had demanded it. That point conceded, the captain took a break and ordered a cup of tea from the wall, ‘Earl Grey, hot.’
Peter Singer belongs on the Enterprise. Members of its crew treat microbes with respect and eat energy, not matter. They have eradicated poverty by converting energy into matter in replicators from whence the tea came. This is the world Peter Singer wants.
For more click on the linked file:
Download file

‘Pictures from an Institution’ (1954) by Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

Good Reads meta-data is 286 pages, rated 3.59 by 393 litizens.
Genre: Novel set in the academy, so an academic novel
Pictures Institution.jpg
Verdict: Malice aforethought.

A series of picture post cards of the people and their activities in a progressive women’s college in the uplands. Benton College is populated by administrators, professors, spouses, children, and even some students who in the conscientious and self-conscious spirit of the times improve each other. All are observed by Gertrude, a neurotic and vitriolic New York City novelist, spending a semester as writer in residence (while collecting material for her next unsuccessful sarcastic study of the human condition), while she herself is observed by the narrator.

There is no plot and nothing happens as the academic year passes from the faculty reception in the fall and yet I kept reading. The incidents and types are so familiar, from the earnest college President who spends all his time raising money with a beneficent smile, encouraging everyone to call him by his first name, Dwight. Then there is his South African-born Boer wife who seem his antithesis: dislikes anyone and everyone and communicates that by looks, silences, and now and then word.

Some professors have attained their high position because no one has ever understood anything they have said, such is the thickness of the Viennese accents. Others are such relentless do-gooders that it surpasses belief. All peaked at the PhD which left them depleted and fit only for this backwater in the eyes of the aforementioned novelist. Well, one had published a review in ‘Dial’ in 1929.

Then there are the obligatory dinner parties among faculty members who revile each other but affect bonhomie to grease the wheels of life. No sooner have the guests arrived than everyone wishes they could leave but they cannot. There is no ‘Who is afraid of Virginia Wolfe’ drama, only a well rehearsed dance of words that pass the time slowly.

The haughty novelist is a stand-in for Mary McCarthy who had published ‘The Groves of Academe’ (1952) after being a writer in residence at Sarah Lawrence College. I have read it long ago without recollection.
What follows are some examples of Jarrell’s prose filleting. Since she is the centre of attention, we start with Gertrude:

She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn’t a Winesap at all. Page 9

For her mankind existed to be put in its place. Page 13

She looked at me the way you’d look at a chessman if it made its own move. Page 36

“That beige snake,” “that—that soulless woman,” as her two last best friends had called her. Page 74

Her mien was one of impatient astonishment at the stupidity of the world. Page 95

Malice lived in Gertrude as though in nutrient broth. Page 133

The Viennese music teacher’s speech’ was a pilgrimage toward some lingua franca of the far future.’ Page 13.

But he is given many bons mots, e.g., ‘De devil soldt me his soul.’ Page 136. Said to explain the ease with which he composed tunes for all occasions.

Benton College and its progressive education gets the knife, too.
While the faculty members indulged the students to the Nth degree, there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Page 81

Education, to them (the teachers), was a psychiatric process. Page 82

The faculty at Benton longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren’t prejudiced towards moon men. Page 104

To get an A the student had to believe what her professors believed. They had to make up their own minds, true, but only when their own minds matched those of the professors were they educated. If they thought they had made up their own minds and it diverged from the Benton way, then they were in for more more study conferences, more careful and patient understanding, more mutual improvement, until that Day of Grace came. Page 105-6.

These stabs and others are brilliant, however, there is much dross as the book goes on and on and on. I did flick Kindle pages to the end, a tribute to dedication.

Jarrell made a name as a poet and a critic, and was famed for his barbed aperçus such are on display above. ‘Display’ is the right word because this a demonstration more than a novel. It demonstrates his many talents to make a cloud of words out of nothing at all. In this way it is rather like the pastiche of a middling Woody Allen film. There is much verbiage signifying nothing; it ends on page 236 because he stopped typing, not because of any conclusion. His poetry is spare and terse, but not this garrulous prose.
Randall_Jarrell.jpg
Jarrell’s most famous poem is the five-line ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.’ Jarrell had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Many of his poems concerns army life and the fears and hopes of draftees, like ‘Eighth Air Force,’ ‘Gunner,’ ‘Mail Call,’ ‘Hope,’ ‘Losses,’ and more. He himself had volunteered. He survived the war to be killed in a car accident crossing the street.

‘Flight to Arras’ (1942)

‘Pilote de guerre’ (1942), translated as ’Flight to Arras’ (1942) by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Good Reads meta-data is 168 pages, rated 3.9 by 1852 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction
pilote_guerre_saint_ex.jpg
Verdict: ‘Like glasses of water thrown onto a raging forrest fire,’ that is St X’s description of the futile and pointless actions of his Reconnaissance Group II/33 in May and June 1940 when half of the planes (seventeen in all) and crew (more than fifty men) were sacrificed in meaningless and often fatal efforts to stem the blaze that erupted from the impassable Ardenne.
Somehow St X and the other half of Group II/33 survived. He flew at least six combat missions at five hundred feet, well within range of small arms fire, to say nothing of anti-aircraft cannons. There is a remarkable description of a plane surrounded by a basilica of light with yellow candle flames rising to meet it. It is, of course, caught in search lights and the tracers of gunfire assail it.
Bloch 174.jpg He flew a Bloch 174. The navigator, photographer sat in the glass nose cone, while the pilot and the rear-facing gunner sat in the upper glass bubble.
The book is replete with his descriptions of flight, musings on life, and observations on death which he found a constant companion. He also emphasis the dutiful way in which members of his Group II/33 went about the business with neither histrionics, panegyrics, excuses, or delays. When it was one’s turn to fly, one flew, no matter how suicidal it seemed and sometimes was. St X took his turn and his chances along with the the others. It compares in the desiccated tone to Marc Bloch’s ‘Strange Defeat’ (1944).
As he sits in the cockpit warming the engines, he muses on his childhood bicycle rides through oak forests which he likens to clouds. As always his prose is elegant and elegiac. Then comes the harrowing moment in flight when the rudder will not respond and the tricks to free it do not work as the Messerschmitt 109s approach. Then at the last minute the Germans diverted to a better target.
That straight forward account of courage and grace under withering fire found a ready audience, and though the book was banned in Vichy France and worse in Occupied France, clandestine copies circulated widely. It was banned not because it portrayed the war against the Occupier so much as because in it St X praised a Jew who led by example, noted the thanked the dedicated communists in the ground crew who overcame impossible problems, and complained about the generals who orchestrated the chaos from a safe distance many of whom later found a billet with Vichy.
He wrote it, while in the States to explain, to justify the French after the Defeat by showing that many Frenchmen did their best in an impossible situation, leaving almost 100,000 of them dead. (Leaving aside of course the fact that the impossible situation had been made by a good many Frenchmen over several years, a lot more than just a few generals brewed the soup, and that St X himself never had any interest in the broader society until it impinged on him in Group II/33.
St X rejoined II/33 in Corsica in 1944 from when he flew into legend, perhaps landing on Asteroid 325 also known as Asteroid B-612.

‘Mr Campion’s War’ (2018) by Mike Ripley

Good Reads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 4.0 by 40 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Campions War.jpg
Verdict: Albert, shut up!
While Albert Campion never shuts up, he says very little, and he has never said word one about what he did during the War 1939-1945. He talks and talks, sometimes even in English, but there is little sense in it. Rather it is adolescent wit, word games, bon mots, Latin tags, fragments of misremembered poetry, and so on. To say he is loquacious is just the beginning.
In these pages he is full flight on his seventieth birthday in the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane in London surrounded by admirers and acolytes, well, family and acquaintances whose tolerance is high. They all know each other, having endured Albert in different configurations over the years. There is Plod from the Yard, too. Lugg the man mountain and bounded retainer is also there to be make a nuisance of himself, and he does.
But among all these Britishers there are, there in England, in 1970, there are….foreigners. They are the Spanish Vidals, mother and daughter, a glacial French woman, a wall flower Frenchman who is quickly forgotten, and an avuncular German, and among them the talk turns to the War. Have these foreigners come all this way to wish Albert a happy birthday? Well, maybe… ‘Ha!’ That’s a laugh. They have come for their foreigner purposes. Or have they?
We have a parallel progression. Albert spills his tale from 1942 in every second chapter, while in the next the guests at the party mix and (mis)match. It takes a scorecard to keep track of everyone at the party, and it turns out that most of them are blue herrings, but not all. The two stories merge when the very large, very sharp knife for cutting the cake disappears, only to reappear in the German.
Quibbles I have a few. No one seems to take much notice of the disappearance of the very sharp knife early in the piece. C’mon, haven’t they read any krimis? This the beginning of an opportunistic crime for sure. Course if they had investigated the case of the missing knife, the story would have ended with that.
Nor does anyone seem much interested in the German once he has been stabbed.
Supernumerary Lugg ambles about being rude and crude, and that’s it. He serves no purpose. His speciality it seems is serving no purpose, but he (dis)attracts a lot of the reader’s attention.
Because the three foreign women have different, married names in 1970 than those in the 1942 telling this reader was never quite who was what and why. Ripley does not emphasise them because he is holding them for the denouement, that much I could see, but still…. Nonetheless I felt cheated.
As usual I found Campion all too much like one of my college roommates who loved the sound of his own voice twenty-four hours at a time. Does Campion ever breathe one might ask, such is the lava flow of words. And it is that bright young thing sort of tosh favoured in the 1920s by insouciant young men who had a right to such absurd irreverence, having survived the trenches. Albert has no such warrant.
What I liked was the representation of life in Vichy France around Mentone and Nice where the story started, though the scene shifted all too soon to Marseille and that big city is like other big cities, whereas Mentone and Nice are different, as much Italian as French with the Alps on one side and the sea on the other. (Plus I have been to both Mentone and Nice.)
The insularity of the British of a certain age and outlook is also nicely done. Well, overdone, but still, shades of Captain Hastings, it is tasty.
The plot about the book-keeper stuck me as farfetched but that is what fiction is.
Nothing competes with J. Robert Janes accounts of life under Vichy in his numerous books, but the key one in this context is ‘Flykiller’ (2002).
Many Krimiologist will remember Margery Allingham well. She penned about twenty novels featuring the supercilious and verbose Albert Campion, who seemingly never got to the point but did somehow. These were set mostly between the Wars, as used to be said. (Readers who do not know which wars are invited at this point to click away, and stay …. away.) As with Agatha Christie and others, her character — the annoying but somehow tolerable Albert Campion — has outlived her. By the legerdemain of a literary executor, since Allingham’s death, he has had further adventures written by Phillip Carter (Allingham’s widower) and he in turn brought the talented Mr Ripley into the fold. This is the fifth title from the Ripley keyboard. The novel is well written and has a nice premise in Vichy. But Campion can be taken only in small doses. Might try one of Ripley’s other krimis. Did so. No sale.
Allingham also wrote ‘The Oaken Heart‘ (1941) when a German invasion was expected any day on the Essex coast and she and her neighbours would be on the front line.
Allingham M.jpg Here she is at home about that time.
That will be on my reading list.

‘The Foundation Trilogy’ (Audible) by Isaac Asimov

Asimov began publishing the stories that comprise this work in 1942, leading to the original three volumes: ‘Foundation’ (1951), ‘Foundation and Empire’ (1952), and ‘Second Foundation’ (1953). Each has about 250 pages. In this rendering they are Readers-Digest condensed and dramatised with a cast of superb players including Maurice Denham, Julian Glover, Dinsdale Landon, Angela Pleasence, and Prunella Scales. It was broadcast on the BBC in 1973.
foundationtrilogy.jpg
All in all it is well done. Indeed I was sorry when we got (back) to Star’s End.
It all begins with Professor Dr Hari Seldon on planet Trantor doing macro-mathematical modelling. Using the vast body of data accumulated over the thousands of years of the Empire, he devised a way to predict the future – psychohistory. There in his study, meeting his KPIs, engaging in 360-degree reviews, refereeing papers, submitting to peer review, attending training courses, being tutored for the latest management fad, sitting on selection, tenure, and promotion committees, figuring out how to log into Publons, making endless applications for ever smaller grants, mindful always to keep his door open when female students enter no matter how confidential the discussion may be, complying with Occupational Health and Safety standards in the work place for the data assistants, writing a stream of letters of recommendation for colleagues re-applying for the jobs they have been doing well for years, meeting the fathomless demands of the Ethics Office, he foresees catastrophe.
No one wants to hear bad news, least of all Mahogany Row at Streeling University where Hari ekes out his days as above. For his trouble he dies at his desk, with a funding application incomplete. He failed to meet the last KPI.
Wait! Seldon had long given up on the authorities, educational, political, and religious, and made his own plans. The catastrophe was certain and unavoidable, the Empire would fall into corruption and a period of barbarism — promoted by Pox News and led by President Tiny — would follow. The knowledge of climate change, vaccines, idiocy eradication, and more, that would be lost in a few hundred years would take many thousands to develop anew. It stays dark a long time in a Dark Age, leaving aside, far aside, the scholarly quibbles about the definition of ‘Dark.’
While the collapse was certain, the period of subsequent barbarism might be abridged, and this abridgement became Hari’s purpose, one well concealed since it did not meet his KPIs which were focussed exclusively on next year’s grant round. He created sub rosa a Foundation on the mud heap of Terminus with the purpose of creating a Galactic Encyclopaedia that codified existing knowledge so that when the Empire collapsed there would be the technical and intellectual resources to begin re-building civilisation at a faster rate than otherwise would have been the case. Or maybe not.
He worked out the Seldon Plan (see the entry in Wikipedia) according to which the knowledge within the Encyclopaedia would be put to work. In projecting the future, Hari realised that there would be crises which would be turning points in the tree diagram when the felt tip whiteboard marker he was using run dry. These were Seldon Crises while he looked for another felt tip. He left time capsules with instruction to deal with five of these.
Sure enough, the Empire collapsed, imperial over-reach and too much McKinsey mis-management. Chaos, anarchy, confusion, all the hallmarks of a Republican administration appeared. In dark times one ray of hope was the rumour of the Foundation. Some want to destroy it so that the GOP can reign supreme on the way to Hell. Others look to it for salvation on the way to Heaven.
The Foundation used its store of technical knowledge to conceal itself, defend itself, and to assert itself to restore order. But was the Foundation immune to the idiocy that destroyed the Empire. Did Seldon foresee that, too.
Rumours circulate that there is Sequel Foundation; Second Foundation to give its prosaic name.
This vaporous Second Foundation is located at Star’s End, or is that Stars’ End, or even Stars End? Tricky. And what does it have, if not technical knowledge? Cookie recipes?
The master narrative is free will versus determinism. The Seldon Plan maps the future, but for that map to become reality individuals have to act. Can idiographic events derail the nomothetic path that Seldon laid out? Huh? Well, can unpredictable events upset the plan? The Seldon Plan operates at the highest level of social abstraction of whole worlds and interstellar cultures, not single events, like a jealous husband slaying the emperor, or the mutant Mule arising. Or President Tiny making sense for once. (Still waiting for that last one.)
The future is a script with many blank pages, said the Brazilian political scientist Robert Unger, making so much more sense in one line than Anthony Giddens made in a dozen books on the same subject, or was that one book re-utterated eleven times.
Hence most of Hari’s holographic time capsules are pep talks about doing the job.
Hari_Seldon.jpg
If Asimov had heard McKinsey speak he would be made the most of it. Much can be said in it and nothing said at all at the same time. See any Dilbert cartoon for illustrations.
Isaac_Asimov-200-84399626592146c540cf6a04236704c1.jpg Asimov in the 1940s before the sideburns took over.
The story has the strengths and weakness of any Asimov fiction. The sweep of events and action are fine, the science is sound, but the characterisations are cardboard, despite the efforts of the actors. They have no inner being.
Liberties were taken to cut the 756 pages of three books combined into seven hours of broadcast. These abridgements have infuriated some who have commented on the Audible page. The compensation, which escaped most of these leg biters, is the acting. Though that, too, is derided by some who must have been in dental chairs when they listened.
There is one thing we all agree on —‘It’s time for lunch,’ cried the fraternity brothers! — no. The transitions from one scene to another are far too loud, too long, too annoying, too distracting, too loud, and too loud, worse than commercials on television. For once I agree with something a whinger wrote on the Audible comments page. Circle this day on the calendar because it is not likely to happen again.

Stefan Zweig, ‘Chess Story’ (‘The Royal Game’) (1941)

Genre: Fiction, a novella
GoodReads meta-data is 104 pages, rated 4.3 by 47798 litizens
Zweig chess.jpg
Verdict: Bleak
On a passenger ship from Europe the world chess Champion struts. After being offered a cash inducement, he agrees to play a group of passengers co-operating as a single opponent. They have nothing in common but an interest in the game and bragging rights about being beaten by the Champion. He treats them and the games they play with contempt.
Then one day in the game room for the daily humiliation, while they argue over a move, a passer-by makes a suggestion, and then another, and another. This Stranger seems to see far ahead in the game and a stalemate ensues. All are amazed, especially Champion, who however pretends to have let them draw when in fact after the Stranger’s intervention he had no way to win.
Observer questions Stranger and finds he was a victim of the Naziis who kept such sanity as he had by playing mental chess against himself for years of confinement.
Champion knows nothing but chess and is presented as some kind of idiot savant, while Stranger is an obsessive who is consuming himself. Neither is a recommendation for the game.
As is to be expected the novel starts with endgame, and moves back through opening and mid-game. There is a lot of K B-7 in it.
We saw a performance of his play ‘Beware of Pity’ and that together with our putative trip to Vienna led me to read this novella. Zweig was living in exile in Brazil when he wrote it and committed suicide shortly after this was published. Were the reviews that bad? Or was the Viennese fetish for suicide in the gene pool.
I am not inclined to seek out more Zweig. Too bleak for this good time boy.

Barbara Pym, ‘Crampton Hodnet’ (1940)

Genre: fiction
Goodreads meta-data is 216 pages rated 4.01 by 1542 litizens.
CramptonHodnet.jpg
Verdict: Nothing happens and it is fascinating.
In North Oxford Miss Doggett rules the house with an iron fist in an iron glove. Her paid, but not very much, companion Miss Morrow observes life with a quiet inner smile, having learned well how to steer around Miss Doggett who does not pay her to smile.
Miss Doggett invites the new bachelor curate to lodge with them, and makes a fuss over him, expecting in return to be fussed over, too, but no. Strangely he finds the enigmatic, grey, mousy Miss Morrow of more interest. Quietly infuriated, Doggett casts around for the means to bring the curate to his senses, dimly aware that Morrow is the problem. While amused by the curate’s attention, Morrow wisely knows it will go nowhere, which it does, slowly.
Meanwhile Francis Cleveland, an irascible scholar at Randolph College in mighty Oxford University contemplates an affair with one of his students who looks at him adoringly when he recites poetry. She is flattered by his attention, until she realises his intentions! Such thoughts provide yet another in a long list of excuses for Cleveland not to do any work, and he doesn’t. In the great tradition of the English novel, including C.P. Snow, Oxbridge dons do nothing and do it very pompously. Bring on the Research Quality Framework!
There are comings and goings involving these two pairs of near-paramours, and the gossip that sightings of them kindle takes fire. Miss Doggett is there with kerosine to make sure that rectitude is rectified.
In one of the standard tropes of the era, several of the characters go off to Paris and return, chastened, once more to their routines. The curate finds a more fitting object of his desire. It is low key but so very human and humane in its delineation of character.
Pym wrote the manuscript very early in her career and it seems to have got shelved by the events of World War II and remained unpublished until 1985.
While the GoodReads rating is, for once, something that chimes with me, the summary is mistaken.