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War With the Newts by Karel Čapek – still relevant, alas.
War With the Newts by Karel Čapek (1935) French title: La guerre des salamandres. Translated by Claudia Ancelot.
War With the Newts by Karel Čapek is our Book Club choice for December.
Written in 1935, it’s a dystopian fiction where Čapek imagines a world where a huge population of newts grows and lives under the sea. It sounds bucolic said like this but War of the Newts is more a humorous but serious declaration against the pitfall of wild capitalism.
When the book opens, Captain Jan Van Toch is a sailor who does trade in the Indonesian waters and he barely makes ends meet. One day, he hears about Devil’s Island, a place that the locals avoid because it’s populated by devils. Van Toch goes there anyway and discovers that the so-called devils are actually salamanders. Better than that, if he trades knives with them, they can fish oysters and help him find pearls. Van Toch likes the newts and strikes an agreement with them: he provides knives to help them fend off their enemies, they fish oysters for his pearl business. Van Toch is like a character by André Malraux, an adventurer.
Van Toch goes into business with G.H. Bondy, a tradesman who accepts this weird pearls/salamander business. Van Toch handles the newts on the field, GH Bondy manages the pearl trade back in Europe. It’s mutually beneficial.
Progressively, the territory of the newts expands, humans discover that they can learn how to speak and how to use tools. Scientists study the salamanders and name the species Andrias Scheuchzeri. (Knowing Čapek, I wonder if there’s a pun under that name.) The salamander become underwater workers. They are not paid but fed and armed. They work well in hydraulic jobs and their workforce is much appreciated.
The first book closes with Van Toch’s death. As soon as he dies, his legacy is trampled by triumphant capitalism, ie GH Bondy. The newts are not profitable enough, there are too many pearls on the market and their price dropped. And a new company is created to develop the salamander business as docile and efficient underwater workers.
The second book shows the expansion of the salamander phenomenon. They reproduce quickly, their predator is at bay and the collaboration with the humans means that they work against knives, steel, food. They colonize the waters of the whole globe.
A whole economy develops on this trade. Through articles from newspapers, Čapek shows us how the salamander issue impacts a lot of aspects of human life. They are shows with performing salamanders and scientific studies. All aspects of their presence beside humans raises questions: do they have a soul? Is it slavery? Are they citizen? Can they be enrolled as soldiers? Which language should they learn? What rights should they have?
A lady organizes the first schools for newts in Nice. Unions say nothing because protesting against the development of the salamanders would jeopardize the human jobs linked to the businesses with the newt colonies.
Čapek imagines the reaction of several countries and I laughed out loud.
France is the first country to impose strict social laws in favor of the newts. When the newts start stealing apples in orchards in Normandy, the farmers protest, resulting in the destruction of a police station and a tax office. Demonstrations were organized in favor of the newts and their outcome was a strike in Brest and Marseille and confrontations with the police. So, my dear foreign readers, if you hear anything about events like this in contemporary France, don’t worry for us, it’s part of our folklore.
The reaction of the British government to the newts settling in their fishing waters was priceless. Any likeness to recent events is fortuitous and demonstrates how much Čapek knew of the various European mindsets.
Intellectuals try to warn the world, especially the Houllebecq look-alike prophet of doom and gloom, Mr. Wolf Meynert.
There is a lot to say about War With the Newts and it’s still so relevant that it’s almost scary.
Reading this today, you could interpret the path taken with the salamanders as a metaphor of our destruction of nature, the inexorable climate change and how we fail to change of direction because the economy prevails.
Čapek shows how small-scale operations with a balanced relationship –ie the partnership between Van Toch and the newts – become destructive when mass capitalism and politics come to the playing field.
The minutes of the board meeting of G.H. Bondy’s company are edifying. Anything to cut the costs and increase the profitability. Anything to distribute dividends to the shareholders. Anything to have the biggest colony of newts and be stronger than the neighboring country. The 21st century is not even original.
And then there’s the underlying question of slavery, racism and colonization.
And then you have Mr Povondra, the one with a conscience.
He used to be G.H. Bondy’s doorman and he made the decision to open the door to Van Toch and was thus instrumental to their meeting. This tiny decision had huge consequences.
Like the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, like the inventor of the internet or the early programmer of Facebook, Mr Povondra wonders if he made the right decision that day. His action has results he couldn’t have predicted but he’s still regretful.
War With the Newts wasn’t always an easy read because of its form.
The first part is rather straightforward, the second part is a patchwork of articles and speeches coming from Mr Povondra’s collection of all things salamanders. The last part was the consequence of the two firsts. I struggled at the beginning of part II but it was worth continuing.
I am in awe of Čapek’s ability to dissect human patterns, denounce capitalism through this fable.
He shows a very astute analysis of the economy, its mechanism and of politics and geopolitics. He lives in a dangerous world at the time. The 1930s. The aftermath of WWI, the Great Depression and the rise of dictatorships. The War of the Newts is a warning against human propensity to choose a path of destruction, ignore relevant warnings and renounce to profits for the common wellbeing.
We’re doomed, guys.
As often, I’ve played the book cover game and downloaded covers in different languages: French, Czech, English, Russian, German, Spanish and Swedish. They are very different and don’t give the same idea of the book. In the French and Swedish editions, the salamanders seem harmless. The Swedish newts look like Casimir, from a children show. The German cover transforms the newts into Goldorak and on the Spanish one, the newts are really hostile. The others are more symbolic. Now, you need to read the book to see which publishers are closest to the book. 🙂
Quais du polar #3: Mindreader by Iain Levison
Mindreader by Iain Levison (2015) French title: Ils savent tout de vous. Translated by Fanchita Gonzales Batlle.
This one was a total disappointment on two levels. The first one is on me. I’d already read A Working Stiff’s Manifesto by Iain Levison, a novel based on his experience as a poor worker in America and I heard his interview on France Inter about Mindreader whose French title is Ils savent tout de vous (They know everything about you) My previous read of a Levison book, his interview on France Inter and the French title of the novel led me into expecting a novel about internet and social media. Something in the line of Andrew Blackman’s Virtual Love. Had I known the English title, I wouldn’t have been surprised by the main idea of the book: what if the FBI had some chosen individuals operated to have them become mindreaders? What an asset they would be in international negotiations, in interrogations of terrorists, etc.
Jared Snowe is one of them. He’s a deputy in the Kearns police force in Massachusetts and he start hearing the thoughts of other people. He’s just exploring his new power when agent Terry Dyers finds out that he’s “awaken”. She was operated too, but the other way round: her mind is unreadable to mindreaders. She protects the secrets of the program and she can meet with the mindreaders.
Now she has another mission to attend to. She needs to transfer Brooks Denny from a prison in Oklahoma to participate to negotiations at the UN building in New York. He’s also a mindreader. Problem is: Denny ended up in prison because he killed a policeman. He’s in the death row. Getting him out of here won’t be easy.
Terry and her boss Emmanuel puts things in motion though and everything goes according to plan until Denny’s ward gets nosy and goes through Terry’s things. He understands that Denny will be killed after his job, he’s happy that this cop killer will die. He thinks about it in Denny’s presence, Denny hears it and decides to take the French leave.
Who can go after a mindreader? Another mindreader. That’s where Snowe comes into the mix…
So we have two mindreaders on the loose and one FBI team who needs them back under their control but must keep things under wraps about their program. Who will win the chase?
Mindreading and the angst that go with it. No offense, Iain Levison, but Stephenie Meyer beat you to it in Twilight. Her vampire hears other people’s thoughts, except Bella’s and we know how crowded his head is from all the wandering thoughts around him.
Mindreader has nothing to do with social media and all the IT traces we leave in our everyday lives with our phones, computers, cars and so on. One evening, my work Iphone informed that if I left the office right now, it would take me 34min to get home. This is my work phone. I have no personal data in it. I guess it just tracked where I spend my days and where I spend my nights and assumed these locations where work and home. It kind of freaked me out. This topic is a tremendous playing field for dystopian fiction. (or not so dystopian, btw) Here, this path isn’t explored, except slightly through a member of the FBI team, Jerry, who has mad competences with internet tracking. It seems such a waste of good plot material and from what I heard of his interview, Iain Levison could do better on the political and social exploration of the theme. So it was a disappointment.
If it wasn’t meant to be that serious, then it didn’t go overboard enough. A few billets ago, I answered the questions of the Book FanCarroting Award and one of the questions was: Which book would you like to see re-written by your favorite writer? I have a new answer to this question now. I want Mindreader re-written by Duane Swierczynski. What a blast it would be.
Bread, Education, Freedom by Petros Markaris
Bread, Education, Freedom by Petros Markaris (2012). French title: Pain, éducation, liberté. Translated from the Greek by Michel Volkovitch.
J’ai envie de monter les escaliers quatre à quatre. Mais l’immeuble a un ascenseur. Et le Grec moyen prend toujours l’ascenseur. A la réflexion, ce qui nous a démolis, c’est un ascenseur trop rapide. |
I want to leap up the stairs. But the building has a lift. And the average Greek always uses the lift. On second thought, an exceedingly swift lift is what destroyed us. |
Someone lent me this crime fiction novel by Petros Markaris just as the last big crisis between Greece and the EU took place.
Bread, Education, Freedom was written in 2012 and it opens on 2013 New Year’s Eve. On January 1st, 2014, Greece will come back to the Drachma, leaving the Euro behind. Markaris describes the changes it does to people. Of course, that’s dystopian fiction and this has not happened.
Superintendant Kostas Charitos has just learnt that he won’t get any wages during the next three months. The Greek State cannot pay them anymore. Everybody is still present at the station, doing their job, though.
As the head of the crime squad in Athens, he’s called to the scene when Yerassismos Demertzis is murdered. When the police arrive on the premises, a construction site near the Olympic Games stadium, they start investigating. A phone set on the victim’s body rings and a recorded message says the slogan “Bread, education, freedom”.
This is the slogan used by the students who fought in the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in November 1973. This uprising was repressed by the Regime of the Colonels but the people supported the students and it eventually led to the end of the regime.
The victim was a key figure of this movement. When a second victim appears, following the same modus operandi and also an important participant of the uprising, Charitos wonders who is trying to kill heroes from the Greek revolution.
Petros Markaris was born in 1937; he was an adult during the dictatoship of the Colonels and witnessed the birth of Greece’s new democracy in 1974. The plot of this novel is straightforward. Don’t expect sophisticated twists and turns. It’s still a fascinating read because it gives you a picture and an analysis of today’s Greece on several aspects.
First there’s a glimpse in Charitos’s private life and Markaris describes how the Greek society lives with the massive economic crisis.
And then, there’s the in-depth analysis of the reasons of the crisis. Bread, Education, Freedom is the last volume of a trilogy about the economic crisis in Greece. This one focuses on the generation who instigated the fall of the Colonels. According to Markaris, their aura is so great that they are untouchable. They trusted powerful positions in the country, becoming entrepreneurs, deans and heads of unions. They took the power and created networks of clients by granting positions and favors. Their revolutionary past is such that they cannot be criticized. Their ideology is the leading voice of the country and there’s no credible opposition, as the right wing is suspect of complicity the the old regime.
Markaris describes something close to what Khadra says about Algeria in Dead Man’s Share. The leaders of the fight against the colonizer or the dictator that ruled their country earned so much prestige in that battle that they can do whatever they want. They took advantage of their past to cash in public works contracts or influential positions in the administration or the unions. The power was confiscated by people whose competences were assessed through their record during the fight for democracy. They made a dictatorship fall to replace it by an oligarchy based on credentials during the uprising and not based on actual competences.
They got drunk on power and the country’s got a bloody hangover.
If someone who’s totally clueless about the importance of literature asks you “What’s the use of literature?”, lend them this novel. Sure, it’s not the greatest piece of literature from a stylistic point of view. It’s not innovative in that sense but it fulfills another purpose. Markaris helps you understand his country and gives you another vision of the crisis that shatters Greece than the one you hear about in the media. For some reason, I can’t read non-fiction. I’ll never read a lengthy essay about Greece’s economical collapse and the reasons why it happened. So I’m glad that writers like Markaris are up to the challenge and decide to use crime fiction to make us see the situation through different lenses.
Bread, education, freedom enlightened and entertained me. It left me a bit desperate for the Greeks and firmly decided to read the two other novels of the trilogy to learn more about the two other reasons why Greece has reached this terrible cul-de-sac. Markaris sees hope in the younger generation and believes that hard times feed creativity and will force Greek’s youth to start again on the right footing. Let’s hope so.
How do they sleep while their books are burning?
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Read by Thierry Blanc.
When I saw Fahrenheit 451 in the audio book section at the library, I thought “Why not? I only knew the book by name and that it was science fiction. I knew nothing about the author or about the time it was published and I did not search for answers before starting it. I like blind dates with books, films or plays. I enjoy opening a new book without expecting anything or sitting in the dark and discovering a movie or a play, open-minded and ready to accept it as it comes without preconceived ideas.
Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, during the Cold War, which I guessed while hearing the novel. The story takes place in America in an unspecified future time. Guy Montag is a fireman, whose job is no more to protect people and extinguish fires, but be the armed arm of a dictatorial government who forbids people from reading. Reading is thinking, and thinking would lead people want more than being distracted. Therefore books are forbidden and firemen burn them.
The country is run as an apparent democracy (elections take place) but is in fact a dictatorship. The society is organized to keep people busy and happy. Happiness means being entertained all day long and turning one’s brain off. Happiness is not a right anymore, it is an obligation. And like the verb “to read”, “to be happy” does not bear the imperative form.
Life changes for Montag when he bumps into his new neighbour Clarisse McClellan a night after work. She starts talking to him and makes him see things in a different light. She enjoys walking on the streets, observing the moonlight and chatting. In my head, Clarisse sounded like Astrolabe from A Winter Journey written by Amélie Nothomb and physically looked like Amélie Nothomb herself. I can’t explain why.
She sows the seeds of doubt in Montag’s head and helps him realize what he confusedly already feels: that his life is meaningless and that he is lonely, although he is married.
Already doubting, he is sent to burn a house in which books were hidden. The owner of the house would rather be burnt with her books than live. That someone could die for books deeply disturbs Montag and makes him cross the bridge from doubt to rebellion.
The society Bradbury describes is by some ways not fictional anymore. Montag and his wife Milly hardly speak to each other because the walls of their house are covered with huge screens which broadcast silly TV shows. The screens customize the speeches and directly address to the person in the house. Milly calls them “the family”. I don’t know if Ray Bradury had imagined Secret Story or Big Brother or any of those brainless TV shows but he was close. There is no better way to stop people talking to each other than putting huge screens with a constant flow of images. See what happens when there is such a screen in a café or in a restaurant, your eyes are always tempted to turn toward the screen and give up the conversation. Montag and Milly cannot recall where they first met or how their relationship started. Bradbury shows by this how brainwashed they have been, because it is something spouses usually do not forget.
Milly can only sleep with pills and thanks to a constant flow of music and words in her ear. (Premonitory iPod?) When Montag takes the train, commercials are endlessly repeated, to a point that he cannot concentrate on his thoughts. People are never alone but do not care about each other, they get killed by fast cars and nobody protests. They do not elect the president who has the best political ideas but the one who is good-looking. They are shallow in every aspect of their lives.
It seems we’re here already. But even if Bradbury was dead right on some aspects of our contemporary society, I don’t want to be so pessimistic. Yes, consumer society is a soft dictatorship and mass marketing is its best ally. Yes, we need to be watchful. But books still exist, despite all the other – and easier – ways one can spend time. Some books may not be of high literary quality, but as long as people do not give up the whole institution, I have hope. And blogs prove we can also use technology to our best advantage and create human conversations which wouldn’t otherwise exist.
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