Tag Archives: literature

Staying connected to reality via literature

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Decorative image of a painting by Sarah EvansFor most of this year, I have not been a frequent visitor to bookshops so I am not suffering from tsundoku [see ‘Tsundoku’ on May 24th, 2017].  Instead, I have been unable to resist borrowing books from people when visiting them for weekends [see ‘Fictional planetary emergencies’ on June 4th, 2025].  This has allowed me to enjoy Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, Fen by Daisy Johnson, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel.  The last one describes the experiences of the narrator living in a Middle Eastern country while her husband works as civil engineer on a lucrative employment contract.  It is a thriller but the cultural differences between life in a Middle Eastern kingdom and the West for a professional woman are shocking and perhaps should be a ‘must-read’ for anyone tempted by lucrative job offers in the Middle East.  A month or so later, I borrowed from the same bookshelf Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami and The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby.  ‘Hope’ describes a boat journey across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain by migrants and the back stories of the migrants that induced them to take the extraordinary risks of paying a people trafficker for the crossing in an overcrowded small boat.  The ‘Optician’ is a first person account of someone who, when cruising in their boat with a group of friends, rescued dozens of migrants from the Mediterranean Sea after their boat sank.  However, the rescue was too late for hundreds of men, women and children.  The book deals with the grief of the rescuers and their shock at the response of the Italian authorities.  In a world in which many people are becoming increasingly tribal and insular, within their own bubble [see ‘You’re all weird!’ on February 8th, 2017], it is crucial that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) people stay connected with the realities created by our addiction to fossil fuels and the deep inequalities of wealth – literature can help us connect, especially literature based on real-life experience.

References:

Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water, Penguin Books, 2022.

Daisy Johnson, Fen, Penguin Books, 2017.

Emma Jane Kirby,  The Optician of Lampedusa, 2017.

Hilary Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Harper Collins Publishers, 2004.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Penguin Books, 2025.

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Algonquin Books, New York.

Image: Painting by Sarah Evans owned by the author.

Is the autonomous individual ceasing to exist?

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Society consists of a series of bubbles.  A century or so ago, your bubble was largely defined by where you lived, your village or neighbourhood, because few people travelled any significant distance and you probably knew everyone living around you.  A decade or so ago, your bubble was probably defined by the newspaper you read or the radio/TV channels you preferred [see ‘You’re all weird!’ on February 8th, 2017]. Today social media defines bubbles that are geographically widely-dispersed.  This both fractures local communities and gives a global reach to influencers on social media.  Some social media ‘dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life’.  The quote is from George Orwell’s 1941 essay, Literature and Totalitarianism.  He goes on ‘And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.’  Of course, he is writing about totalitarianism not social media but his words seem sinisterly appropriate to the apparent intention of some social media influencers and platforms that promote alternative narratives which are not consistent with reality.  Orwell suggested that if totalitarianism becomes world-wide and permanent then literature, the truthful expression of what one person thinks and feels, could not survive.  Despite Orwell’s fear that he was living ‘in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist’, totalitarianism did not abolish freedom of thought in the 1940s.  Now in the 2020s, we have to ensure that social media does not become a modern instrument of totalitarianism, suffocating freedom of thought, isolating large sections of society from reality, dictating ideology and governing emotional life. We need to think for ourselves and encourage others to do the same.  In their book, ‘Radical Uncertainty – Decision-making for an Unknowable Future‘, John Kay and Mervyn King repeatedly ask ‘What is going on here?’ as a device for thinking about and reviewing the evidence before reaching a conclusion.  It is a simple device that we could all usefully deploy in 2025. Happy New Year!

Sources:

George Orwell, Literature and Totalitarianism, 1941 available at https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/64/1006/LiteratureAndTotalitarianism.html

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, The feeling of freedom, FT Weekend, 7th & 8th December 2024.

John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty – Decision-making for an Unknowable Future, Little Brown Book Group, 2020.

In touch with another spirit

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I have written before about the process of writing, both in general and in this blog in particular. While I do not claim to write literature; nevertheless I felt some empathy with a couple of statements in Michel Houllebecq‘s novel ‘Submission‘. The first was ‘…only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, exciting or repugnant.’ And the second was ‘Even in our deepest most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.’ I know a few people who read this blog but they are a tiny minority of the readers so essentially I am addressing a reader I do not know when I write a post. However, my posts sometimes lead to a conversation that is more open than would have happened without the post. Inevitably, these conversations occur with the small number of readers with whom I am in direct contact. However, I suspect that I reveal my limitations and obsessions to all of my readers, I hope I avoid my pettinesses while enthusing you with what I find moving or exciting, such as Michel Houellebecq’s novel this week or Olga Tokarczuk’s last week.

Source: Michel Houellebecq, Submission, Vintage, 2016.

Image: Barbara Hepworth sculpture in the garden of Hepworth Museum, St Ives

Separating yourself from existence

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The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has written of the power of literature to separate yourself from your existence. It is something that I experience when reading an absorbing novel or occasionally when reading an outstanding scientific paper on a subject that interests me. However, it happens more often when I am writing and perhaps is a reason why I write regularly and frequently. Houellebecq has also written that ‘only literature can give you the sensation of contact with another human mind’ [in Submission, 2015]. Is it only literature that can produce this sensation? Or, does it occur when you listen to an in-depth interview or even when you read posts regularly from a blogger? Perhaps after 500 posts [see ‘500th post‘ on February 2nd, 2022] you have a sensation of contact with some part of my mind.

Source: Jonathan Derbyshire, France’s ‘enfant misérable’.  FT Weekend, 29/30 January 2022.