ecology – findingtimetowrite

February 2025 Summary

I’d forgotten just how short the month of February is, so I don’t think I’ll have a chance to read or write any more reviews for #FrenchFebruary. Nor have I done as much of #ReadIndies as I’d have liked. I think with just two days of the month left, I’d better do my wrap-up post now.

You might be forgive for thinking that this was more of a Korean month than a French one, because I read two books by Korean authors and one about Koreans in Japan written by a Korean American, while I only read two French books, one very contemporary which attracted me with its title and one by an old favourite of mine.

Nine out of the twelve books I read were in translation (or other languages) – well, technically eight, but I’ll get to that in a minute – and one book was a collection of essays about translation. So I suppose I walk the talk with what I said in my previous post.

As far as #ReadIndies goes, I’ve not read quite as many as I hoped that fit into that category, although Violent Phenomena (Tilted Axis), The Empusium (Fitzcarraldo), Son (Orenda Books) and Yi Sang (Wave Books in the US) should be included there. I also wrote a post about our own lesser-known Corylus titles.

So that’s as far as it goes for reading challenges. As far as quality goes, I was impressed by Han Kang, Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, Yi Sang’s poetry and prose, The Empusium and Sun City. I’m afraid I abandoned Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel. Although I found the initial pages on procrastination and writer’s block quite amusing, it just went on and on for too long; besides, displayed some of the macho elements of Latin cultures that I find troublesome. Here are some brief thoughts on the other books that I didn’t review:

Ilija Trojanow: The Lamentations of Zeno, transl. Philip Boehm (source: randomly picked up from a ‘Reduced’ shelf outside Bookmarks bookshop in London) The author is of Bulgarian origin but left the country as a child with his parents and grew up largely in Kenya, Germany and later India. This has been touted as an ecological novel, but there is a lot of midlife crisis angst going on, as Zeno Hintermeier, a scientist fascinated by glaciers, is working as a sort of guide/lecturer for rich passengers on a cruise ship touring Antarctica. Upset by the indifference of most people to climate change and the death of glaciers, he decides to act in a manner designed to shock them out of complacency. His actions are gradually revealed in a sort of freerange style at the end of each chapter, which is trying harder than warranted to sound impressionistic and experimental. However, some passages are quite witty, dripping with sarcasm, for example, Zeno giving one of his lectures aboard the ship:

Anyone who claims bever to have mixed up Arctic and Antarctic is a boldfaced liar, but there a mnemonic device that can come to your aid, actually two devices, a bear and a penguin… Of course, if polar bears become extinct, the name ‘Arctic’ will no longer apply and we’ll need something else, I’m happy to take suggestions beginning today and for the rest of our journey. But have no fear, even if the Arctic should cease to exist (something all of you sitting in this room will live to see if you keep taking your blood thinners and beta blockers – I don’t speak this last thought aloud), the Antarctic will remain as an antipode for as long as humans inhabit the Earth.

Johana Gustawsson & Thomas Enger: Son, Orenda, 2025 – this one is coming out later this year, but Karen Sullivan from Orenda was kind enough to send me a digital ARC after we chatted about it at Newcastle Noir. That’s where I heard the two authors, one French, one Norwegian, both of whom I really like individually, discuss how they co-wrote this book in a tongue that is not native to either of them but the only one they have in common (English). It sounded like a fascinating though challenging process and the book promises to be the first in a series (so they must have enjoyed the process or else be true masochists). It’s a tightly written police procedural with a good dose of body language psychology (I’m a bit of a sceptic about that, as I think people can game it just as much as psychometric tests), all taking place in a fairly small community on the outskirts of Oslo. Read it in two big gulps, because it’s hard to put down once you get started. Also, rather harrowing for parents, be warned!

Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang – Needless to say, I loved this one, seeing many familiar names as authors. Some of the essays refer to specific texts and draw some conclusions based on that, which is a bit more difficult to relate to if you don’t know those texts, but I made so many notes on the more generic essays (and could relate so well to them), some of which I’d heard of or read in earlier versions before, such as Anton Hur’s Mythical English Reader or Mona Kareem’s Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations, or Khariani Barokka’s Right to Access, Right of Refusal and Madhu Kaza’s Not a Good Fit. A book I will certainly be going back to and quoting over and over again.

Louise Penny: A World of Curiosities – the 18th Gamache and Three Pines novel, and perhaps it is trying to cram too much in – the moment when Gamache first met Beauvoir, an abused pair of siblings and their later fate, murders in two timelines, the return of an arch-nemesis of Gamache, the mass shooting of women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989 and I suppose the concepts of forgiving, forgetting or getting revenge. I think Penny has upped the stakes so much in some of her previous books, that it is getting really difficult to top that, and it shows in her more recent ones. Yet it’s the atmosphere of Three Pines that I keep returning for, the quirky characters that have become family, the loving descriptions of village life in all seasons.

Lee Min Jin: Pachinko – I know a lot of people loved this one, and I wanted to compare it to The End of August, which covers part of the same period and topics. This one is clearly far fewer literary pretentions, and is far more of a rollicking family saga, with lots of sex, suffering, hard work and complicated relationships. A full cast of characters, some of whom disappear quite suddenly, as the book tends to skip a few years from chapter to chapter, particularly in the second half. It was a quick and easy read, despite its 536 pages, but did feel a bit like a predigested way of presenting a chapter of history that few people in the Western world might know. On the whole, I think I prefer the more challenging book by Yu Miri, although that too has its flaws.

Still, six memorable books out of the twelve I read this month is a good proportion. Next month I’ll be spending mostly with the International Booker longlist, which has just been announced. Sourcing the books will be my first challenge, as, aside from the expense of buying them (libraries are not likely to have them, as none of them are big names), the last thing I need right now is yet more books on my shelves, just as I’ve started packing away my library. Furthermore, some of them have not been published in the UK yet, so I’m not sure how we’re supposed to get hold of them. I’ve only read two from the list: Solenoid (while I feel some national pride about it, it’s not necessarily my favourite book of the past couple of years, nor ‘Cărtărescu’s best, but we’ll take whatever we can get) and Hunchback, which is certainly not one of Japan’s most important novels of the 21st century. So a lot to catch up on!

Friday Fun: Evia as it used to be…

Before the massive destructive wildfires last week, few people outside Greece had heard of the island of Evia. It is not really a tourist destination for British tourists (although it attracts a small proportion of German or French hikers or ecologists), despite the fact that it’s the second-largest island and quite close to Athens. For many Athenians, including my ex-in-laws, it is where their home village lies, so it is the place where my children have spent nearly all of their summer holidays, although the local beach was nothing to get excited about. I have to admit that I struggle with the very arid landscapes of most Greek islands in summer, but Evia is – or was, until recently – different: full of forests and pines growing all the way up the mountains, which reminded me of Romania. Sadly, that is the very reason why the fires spread so quickly, and why the northern part of the island has been damaged beyond recognition. So, this is less of a Friday Fun, more of a tribute to this beautiful island.

Vegetation practically reaching the sea, from CEOWorld.

Hard to believe this is Greece, with all the greenery. From Dreamstime.

But the inland is beautiful too, with lots of hiking trails among the woods. From Unsplash, photo credit Omar Ky.

Evia is famous for its honey, which was largely in the northern part of the island, so most of the hives have been destroyed. From Pinterest.

Evia is also famous for its walnut trees and this walnut tree orchard was for sale recently. (I also had to do my share of walnut gathering for the family harvest a decade or so ago.)

If you can bear to look at the state of it now, I highly recommend this photographic journal by Thodoris Nikolaou, who is a Chalkida, Evia local.

#1956Club: Romain Gary

When I first started reading Romain Gary (on the recommendations of the Gary fan and expert Emma), I thought that The Roots of Heaven (Les Racines du ciel) was only tangentially and metaphorically about elephants. Which is ironic, because that is the trap into which most of the characters in the book fall. Or do they deliberately choose to misrepresent things, to pursue their own selfish aims?

This novel is one of the best-known by Romain Gary. It appeared in 1956 and won the Prix Goncourt, it was rapidly translated into English and it was made into a film directed by John Huston before the US audience had a chance to read it in translation. It has also been called one of the first explicitly ecological novels. It certainly is that, but it’s also about the human race itself, and saving what is best about humanity. Gary himself resisted interpreting the novel as an allegory, but then threw a spanner in the works: ‘The elephants are flesh and blood – just like human rights are.’

Set in post-WW2 colonial Africa, the book focuses on an idealistic Frenchman, Morel, who has come to Chad, still under French rule in the 50s, to crusade against the hunting and poaching of elephants. He tries at first to get everyone to sign a petition, but when that fails, he takes matters into his own hands and establishes a vigilante group, punishing hunters and traders in elephant ‘wares’. He manages to win over a few people, each one damaged by the past, who perhaps recognise their own helplessness and suffering in the plight of the elephants. The German nightclub hostess Minna was raped by Soviet soldiers at the end of the war, while Forsythe is a disgraced former major in the US army who fought in the Korean war. Morel himself was part of the French resistance and interned in a German labour camp for two years and the thought of elephants roaming free on the savannah was one of the things that kept him going. There is also an elderly Danish zoologist, Qvist, famous for his stand against whaling, who is perhaps the only one who joins him for purely ecological reasons.

What is most interesting about the book is that for the first third of the book we don’t catch a single glimpse of Morel in action, and even for the remainder of the book, we tend to see him through the eyes of others, who all have wildly conflicting views about him. Some are puzzled by his activism on behalf of animals and cannot believe that there isn’t a political, anti-government motive behind it. Others want to ally themselves with him and use his popularity to fight for African independence. Quite a few are amused by his naive idealism and predict (or even conspire) that he’ll not come to a good end:

Morel can be used as long as he remains a legend… Don’t accuse me of cynicism, but in all revolutionary movements, you have the inspired and vapoury idealists in the vanguard… but the realists, the ones who do the actual construction work, come afterwards slowly, inexorably. I’m telling you this because it’s essential that he not be caught alive. I like him well enough, he’s an innocent, but it’s better for everyone if he disappears in his full glory, in his legendary status.

Many are jaded and cynical beyond belief, but Morel’s uncompromising stance makes them question their own beliefs. There is an English colonel who is starting to wonder if the world view that he was raised into and that he inherited is based on a false assumption of basic human decency – which the atrocities of the Second World War have severely undermined. There is a colonial administrator who wonders if the human soul is even capable of altruism and heroism, believing that those few drops of humanity and purity only come out if you squeeze them like toothpaste. The Jesuit missionary is left to ponder on the purity of his own religious beliefs and whether they are in fact ‘civilising’ the natives through conversion to Christianity.

When we do hear Morel speaking directly, he tries repeatedly to disillusion those who believe he represents them: for him, it’s only about the elephants. ‘I don’t trust ideologies – they’re too big, take up too much space, and when you have elephants alongside…’ He doesn’t even seem to care if the land remains a colony or becomes independent, as long as the elephants are looked after.

Nationalism for the sake of it, which is what we are seeing everywhere at this moment in time, nationalism which doesn’t give a damn about the elephants, that’s one of the biggest piles of shit that the humans have produced here… and they’ve produced plenty of those.

Think about the present-day and now national interests, insularity and obsession with economic growth are preventing a meaningful joint strategy to combat climate change and save natural resources – and suddenly the book seems extremely topical and not just narrowly focused on elephants (even though they are my favourite animals).

I was reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, of course, but Romain Gary can certainly not be accused of reductionism or of presenting an undifferentiated mass of indigenous people ‘the Africans’. Instead, we have a variety of individual and group portraits. Waitari is an MP who has given up his parliamentary role to focus on the independence movement in his native country. He is well-educated and better-spoken than most of the French adventurers we meet on the ground. He tries to make use of a younger, more impressionable freedom-fighter named Youssef, who begins to be won over by Morel. Dwala is a witch-doctor who colludes with the French administrator, Saint Denis. The Oulé people, on whose ancestral lands most of the action takes place, are not really sure about saving the elephant, because to them the grey giants represent both meat and ritual. In refusing to romanticise the native population, instead engaging openly with their concerns and ambitions, and the contradictions in their lives, Gary reminds me of Chinua Achebe (whose Things Fall Apart was published round about the same time, in 1958).

The film featured Trevor Howard as Morel, Erroll Flynn as Forsythe and Juliette Greco as Minna.

This is a fascinating combination of an adventure novel and a philosophical one. But the reason I’ve filled the book with little post-it flags is because there are so many short, snappy quotes I want to remember. Especially this immortal one uttered by Minna:

You can’t judge men by what they do when they take their trousers off. For the really wicked things they do, they tend to get dressed.

I read this book in French, which meant that it took me more than a week to read, so I won’t get the chance to review any other book for the #1956Club. But it was definitely worth it and, in terms of conservationism, the books still has a lot to say to present-day readers.

I gather the film was decidedly less successful. Filmed in the Belgian Congo and Chad, the cast and crew suffered from malaria and other illnesses. Romain Gary was hired to write the script, but Huston later said it was a bit of a disaster, because of his inexperience.