Short Book Reviews #2

Or a Cornish-Indonesian story of handcuffs and economics, in four volumes

This is a collection of shorter book reviews, because I often have a few thoughts on books I’ve read without having enough to say about them to merit a full review. Some of these are about books I read recently, while others have been sitting in my Google Drive for a while.

Between Nine and Nine, Leo Perutz

This short book is a translation of the German original and doesn’t seem to be particularly popular, but enough people have read it for it both to have a Wikipedia page and be in my university library. Unfortunately, it’s not very good. The plot unfolds in a bit of a strange fashion because much of the story is seen through the perspective of secondary characters, so I’m going to summarize things as they actually occur rather than the order they take place in in the book. This means that there are spoilers ahead, which I’m fine with because I wouldn’t actually recommend you to read this book.

Stanislaus Demba is a Polish tutor working in Vienna, Austria, some time around the beginning of the 20th century. He wants to take his possible girlfriend, Sonja, on a trip so she won’t date Georg Weiner, his rival for her affections. To get the money to do this, he needs to sell a stolen book, but the sale goes wrong and he ends up being arrested. He escapes, but is handcuffed, meaning that the remainder of the plot is devoted to him trying to get the handcuffs off while also having something kind of like a panic attack because he doesn’t want to be arrested. Various misadventures, none of which are remotely interesting to the reader, ensue.

Most of the book is just Perutz trying to show you how clever he is in coming up with situations in which Demba must hide the fact that he is handcuffed, and the rest of the book seems like it’s supposed to be a comic portrayal of Viennese society but is only rarely actually funny. Some mystery writers can get away with having plots that just let them do clever tricks, but Perutz is not a good enough writer to make that readable. Luckily, it’s a breezy read so I finished it, but it was a complete disappointment. He apparently also wrote a book about ergotism, Saint Peter’s Snow, which seems like a more interesting plot but the lack of quality in this book doesn’t make me try to seek it out.

Triumph of the City, Ed Glaeser

I’m not always impressed by books on economics for a popular audience, but this one is very good. Glaeser manages to convey some important points about cities: they help generate innovation, they can be environmentally efficient, and they’re an important site of global development. It includes a lot of history of cities and examples, and then throws in some summaries of economics research to help tie it all together. The history is very interesting, and Glaeser clearly knows his stuff well. However, my preference is generally for popular books to try to break down a few important arguments and then spend more time walking the reader through those to get them to understand, rather than mostly asserting things with a few anecdotes. Still, it’s a good summary of an interesting area of economics for a lay audience.

Dark, Salt, Clear, Lamorna Ash

I was hoping I’d be able to find Ash’s newest book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, at the library after reading a glowing review of it from Amos Wollen , but alas, it wasn’t there, so I had to settle for her first book, which is about the life and times of a Cornish fishing town. She goes back to Cornwall, where her mother’s family is from, and takes up residence in the town of Newlyn, interviewing a wide swathe of the town about their relationship with the sea. Twice, she goes out on boats for significant spans of time; much of the book is devoted to her trip with the all-male crew of the Filadelfia.

Reading it, I was expecting it to at some point go beyond this fishing town, to become a book about fish or Brexit or something bigger than this one community. It never does, and it is better for it. Ash isn’t going to learn the answers to big questions — is pescatarianism ethical? Is Brexit helping Britain? — from just studying Newlyn, and I admire her humility in not pretending she’s learned the answers; certain authors could do well to learn from this.

As such, I don’t really have any neat takeaways to package up for my audience, but I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Besides the intriguing subject matter, Ash is a phenomenally talented prose stylist and it moves along quite zippily. My only quibble is that it’s spangled with literary references that I didn’t think added much to the text. I’m now even more eager to get ahold of her newer work.

Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan

I’m willing to believe that this book has some objective measure of quality, but this is about as bad as a book can get and have me still finish it. It’s a sprawling intergenerational narrative of magical realism about a town in Indonesia named Halimunda from shortly before World War II to some time in the later part of the 20th century. Most of the story focuses around a part-Dutch, part-Indonesian prostitute named Dewi Ayu, her children, and their various husbands. On paper, it seems like the kind of thing I might like.

The issue is that most of the plot consists of a) incest, b) rape, and c) sex work, some of which is basically rape. Dewi Ayu is herself the product of incest, before spending much of the novel either getting raped or charging people to have sex with her. Her eldest daughter also is either raped or almost raped by her husband (who forced her to marry him) numerous times, and then one of her grandchildren commits incestuous rape against one of her other grandchildren.

I have absolutely no clue why there is so much sex (and fighting and pooping) going on in this book, besides that it’s vaguely provocative and modern-seeming. I guess it’s vaguely connected to the violence of colonialism, but it reveals more about Kurniawan’s interests than it does about the plot. There are definitely well-regarded authors who also lard their books with unnecessary and often violent sex, but it’s not really to my taste. Maybe in the future Kurniawan will be one of those, but for now I’d recommend skipping it.