Category: books

Another idea newly influential in analytic circles at this time originated with Brian Jenkins, an expert at the Rand Corporation in California, who had studied art history and was steeped in the radical artistic production of the 1960s. He argued that the use of violence in terrorism was not ‘mindless’ but carefully designed to communicate a message to specific audiences: terrorism as theatre.

THE REVOLUTIONISTS is an immense, deeply researched and sourced work about extremists. The sort of people we now call “terrorists,” but Burke has a position on that, and uses “extremists” for reasons. His view of the phenomenon starts post-war, gets going in the 1960s, and ends in the mid-Eighties with the radicalization of Osama bin Laden. It is exhaustive, whipping from squats in Germany to tape cassettes of Ayatollah Khomeini circulating rural Iran as audio samizdat, from the “snow murders” in Japan to a Swedish spy almost getting wiped out by Israeli jets. And, over and over again, a chubby-faced Venezuelan failson and borderline incompetent by the name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez who loved money, sex and killing people, soon to be known as Carlos the Jackal.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine codenamed him Carlos. The Guardian, of all newspapers, called him The Jackal. The press during the period were about as helpful as the London newspapers during Jack the Ripper’s run.

All tended to portray Ramírez as possessed of near-superhuman powers. Many of the Western accounts should have stretched credulity. Journalists, politicians and other commentators routinely claimed that ‘Carlos the Jackal’ had participated in more or less every terrorist attack that had occurred in the previous decade, including the Munich Olympics attack of 1972, the hijacking that led to the Entebbe raid and the wave of violence in the summer of 1977. Ramírez was supposed to have masterminded the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, organised the fatal shooting of Nicaragua’s former dictator Anastasio Somoza in Paraguay a year later and led a team of Libyan assassins from Mexico across the Rio Grande into the US. An Italian magazine reported that Ramírez had links variously to the Italian Red Brigades, ‘neo-Fascists’, the Palestinians and a network of Freemasons. In one of the more spectacularly irresponsible reports of this sort, the weekly magazine New York, recently bought by the up-and-coming Australian businessman Rupert Murdoch, described in detail what might happen if ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ used a small nuclear bomb against an American city. Meanwhile, a series of cinematic blockbusters depicted an often thinly disguised version of Ramírez as an omnipotent mastermind of violence, as did books with names like The Carlos Complex or Brothers in Blood. Some accounts declared Ramírez dead; others said he was a master of disguise and very much alive. All placed him at the heart of an international terrorist network.

Which he really wasn’t.

For another example: the Baader-Meinhof Gang or just Baader-Meinhof were actually called the Red Army Faction, and the most effective member was not the idiot Andreas Baader nor the brilliant but slightly mad Ulrike Meinhof (who opted to join the group a good while after they started operating, and whom the group later turned on), but Gudrun Ensslin. Baader-Meinhof just sounded better to the media.

‘Ulrike Meinhof speaks, turning her sharp mind mercilessly against herself,’ one wrote. ‘A self-made martyr, a self-elected Joan of Arc of proletarian internationalism, with no army behind her but the people who call themselves the RAF, a spectral image in her poor clever head.’

I found this whole book compulsively readable, and relatively easy to keep track of during all the location changes and shifts in focus. Of which there are a lot, because this is a global book. I could go on, but I won’t: it’s a fantastic piece of history writing, detailed without being overwhelming, sharp and clever and unsparing.

THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)

After all, one did not write a book for other people. Any more than one wrote it for an already existing self. One wrote it, in fact, to renew one’s own self in the process of writing, and creatively go beyond its previous limits. Or in other words: to transcend oneself. Thus it is not for others that each person transcends himself; one writes books and invents machines that were demanded nowhere.

I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I will read fewer books this year, because the ones in my stack are generally long and difficult. It took me several weeks to get through THE VISIONARIES by Wolfram Eilenberger, which is not as well-written as the other book by him I’ve read, TIME OF THE MAGICIANS, and since both books have the same translator, the busted sentences, tangled syntaxes and wild tonal inconsistencies are all on Eilenberger and his original editor.

It is, despite that, full of good stuff.

It follows the lives of four female philosophers – Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil – in the period 1933-1943, showing their intellectual emergence and comparing and contrasting their lives. They didn’t really know each other: de Beauvoir and Weil met once, and de Beauvoir records that meeting:

I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,” she snapped. Our relations ended right there.

Its biggest problem is tonal – it veers between warmly autobiographical, admiring and accepting, critical and faintly shitty (especially in de Beauvoir’s case). But it does, remarkably, make you want to root for the young Ayn Rand. And when he stops reifying Weil’s hallucinations and frowning on de Beauvoir’s love life, he surfaces a ton of wonderful and useful things, and it’s worth the money just for that.

But in Weil’s view the human being is not small enough. Because in comparison with the transcendent infinity with which Dasein faces God, the infinity of the social is only a secondary and derivative substitute, earthbound and hence practically diabolical. Weil joins with Plato in describing this sphere of the social and of social pressure as “the Great Beast”: “Obedience to the Great Beast: that is wherein the social virtues lie.”

…in the Notebooks Weil’s critique of “the great We” goes far beyond this commonplace, and quite fundamentally takes aim against the sphere of the social as the ultimate object of moral action (in whichever form). Even Ayn Rand could not have put it in such extreme terms: “Man is a social animal, and the social element represents evil.”

THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)

He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.

This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.

A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.

When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.

This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s – and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.

“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”

da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.

There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)

CONNECTED:

• THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, Guiliano da Empoli

He heard air-raid sirens wailing in the cities – those human fiends made a worse racket than the devil himself – but now they would get a taste of some real doomsday music.

Well, that was just fucking strange.

It’s hard to describe without blowing the experience for someone else. It’s about myths and legends, about mythologising, about fairytales and bedtime stories. The structure is a take on the Golem story, beginning during the Second World War, as an apparent alchemist is smuggled across Europe towards Iceland, carrying the raw clay of the thing that will change the world. And what a world. Time is murdered. Ghosts hang out on street corners and show you their death wounds.

the man in the bed gave the impression of being a half-mad skeleton who’d wrapped himself in skin for the sake of appearances

It’s a funny book, I have to say. Which is a useful anchor in what is otherwise a mad kaleidoscope of a thing, a spin of lies and grief and insanity and the supernatural. The third section massively reframes the first two parts and you find out what the book is really (mostly, kind of) about, and it’s both desperately sad and wonderfully soaring.

It is, as much as anything, a performance – Sjon showing what he can do when he tosses the rulebook and mixes styles and text formats and literary antecedents in an attempt to gather up Story (or perhaps fairy story) as a whole, and in fact to gather his own life as a whole, reaching across sixty years (or millennia) to snatch up every last scrap and stuff it in.

I thought it was amazing, and it held me to the end.

(One caveat: a quarter of the way in, there’s a short rape scene that threw me out of the book for a few days.)

CODEX 1962, Sjon (UK) (US+)

CONNECTED:

• THE WHISPERING MUSE, Sjon
• NOSFERATU (2024)

Somewhere a window smashes; I hear the laughter of the larger shards and the sniggering of the splinters.

Rilke’s only novel, and you can kind of see why he was never troubled for another one. The first half is electric:

The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.

It’s the kind of fragmentary writing I love, presented as the entries in two notebooks of a man living in Paris at the turn of the 20th Century, town becoming city, mechanisation obliterating the past, people living closer together in greater numbers than ever before. Not a place for a sensitive young man from foreign countryside.

There is a creature that is perfectly harmless if you set eyes on it; you hardly notice it and instantly forget it. Should it somehow get into your ears unseen, however, it begins to evolve, and hatches, as it were; there have been cases where it made its way into the brain and flourished there, with devastating effect, like the pneumococci in dogs that enter by the nose. This creature is your neighbour.

He hates it. He is poor, lonely and becoming mentally ill. The prose lurches between beauty and disgust on a Baudelairean scale:

the laughter oozed from their mouths like pus from open wounds.

It’s inventive, peculiar, beautifully observed and reported. And then, around halfway through, the book shifts to recollection of his past, reaches for something strange and numinous, doesn’t quite grasp it, and descends into dull childhood reminiscence – nobody finds childhood that interesting except you -and a sort of “pale boy on fainting couch” whimper.

But that first half – fantastic stuff.

Here was the dark myth he left void, prepared against his death.

THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, Rainer Maria Rilke (UK) (US+).

I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They’ll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers.

As noted previously, I use the winter to fill in the gaps in my reading, of which there are many because I am an uneducated oik. And so, THE FALL by Albert Camus, which was more entertaining than I expected.

In the internal monologue, ‘please accept my sympathy’ comes right before ‘now let’s get on with something else’. It’s the emotion felt by a prime minister or company chairman: you get it cheap after some disaster.

A tourist in Amsterdam makes the acquaintance of Clemence, once a Parisian lawyer, now in the self-selected job of “judge-penitent” in the seedy bars. Over several days, Clemence tells the tourist his life story, in order to reveal what “judge-penitent” really means. Over the course of these monologues, Clemence gleefully shows himself as an emotional monster, a serial killer of hope and joy, a cheerfully sociopathic mindfucker. One might imagine Bret Easton Ellis read it in the years before he conceived AMERICAN PSYCHO.

It’s rather brilliant and a fun, chilling read, if somewhat quaint and mannered. I wonder if even at the time it must have seemed somewhat genteel next to, say, Simenon’s romans durs.

(though it also occurs to me that it can also be read as a final middle finger to Sartre)

At least, you must have heard of the spitting cell that one nation thought up recently to prove that it was the greatest on earth? A brick box in which the prisoner is standing upright, but cannot move. The solid door that seals him into his cement shell stops at the level of his chin, so all that can be seen is his face, on which each warder spits copiously. The prisoner, cramped in his cell, cannot wipe himself, even though he is allowed to shut his eyes. Well, that, my good fellow, is an invention of man. They did not need God to dream up that little masterpiece.

THE FALL, Albert Camus (UK) (US+)