Into the Grey Zone Episode 8 This episode looks at the invasion of Crimea as Russian-backed forces took control of airports and parliament, then rushed through a referendum to orchestrate the biggest land-grab since WW2 without a shot being fired. But when they tried the same thing in Ukraine, it didn’t work as 21century drones met with traditional tanks and military machinery. In Grey Zone war, it’s not just missiles; the effect of missiles and misinformation is amplified by social media and there is no need for territorial invasion because this is asymmetrical rather than conventional battle. The episode winds back the history of Crimea, going back to the 2014 Maidan revolution which turned violent against the protestors, followed by a succession of pro-European presidents (which Russia says were funded by the CIA). The Russians took over the media, then communications and announced a referendum about Crimea’s sovereignty in which 97% supposedly supported Russia’s action. However, the referendum gave no option for Crimea to remain part of Ukraine. Meanwhile the world was shocked at the Skipral poisoning in Salisbury which proved how easy it was for the GRU to smuggle poison into England.
The Rest is History. Episode 681: Brazil: The Emperor’s Anthem This time Dominic and Tom look at the Brazilian national anthem, which I had never heard before. Slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888, after 4-5 million African slaves had been brought into the country, with a life expectancy of 25 years. This anthem is not a reflection of a nationalistic story: instead, the fact that it had no lyrics for years is a reflection of the instability in the country. In 1807 Napoleon invaded Portugal, and the royal family fled to Brazil, where they ruled the Portuguese empire from exile. After Napoleon had been defeated and after Brazil had declared independence in 1822, Dom Pedro I stayed on in Brazil where he wrote his own anthem with 8-10 verses of bad lyrics. By 1831 there were riots in Rio and on 7 April 1831 Dom Pedro I abdicated in favour of his son Dom Pedro II. Francisco Manuel da Silva presented a new anthem that he had written with a new tune and his own bad anti-Portuguese lyrics. So bad that they decided to forego lyrics altogether and just have the music. An American musician and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk had a go and came up with two anthems. With the declaration of a republic in 1889 they had a competition which was won by Leopoldo Miguez, with lyrics by Medeiros e Albuquerque. but they decided to stick with the old lyric-less one. By the 1920s the need for an anthem was highlighted by hosting the World Expo and they finally came up with some pretty generic lyrics (a nod to Dom Pedro, the Southern Cross and the Brazilian flag etc. etc.)
The Rest is PoliticsThe Greatest Threat Humans Can’t Stomach with Yuval Noah Harari This was Part I of the discussion, and you have to be a TRIP member to get Part II. But I really enjoyed this discussion of how humans cannot stomach the idea of an alien intelligence- but I didn’t enjoy it enough to become a TRIP Plus member.
The Economist- Tocqueville Road Trip Episode 5 Hour of Strife (subscriber only). I guess it’s only human that you only take notice of what’s going on for other people when it affects you. Toqueville predicted that the question of who gets to call themselves an American would have a long and troubled future, and he always feared federal overreach and soft despotism. Donna Hughes-Brown never thought that question would apply to her, until ICE showed up. She had been born in Ireland and had never taken up citizenship because she never felt the need to. She generally supported Trump’s policies. But on returning from a trip to Ireland, she was arrested at Chicago airport and found herself sent to Kentucky under ICE detention. Because she was white, articulate and had access to lawyers etc. she was able to get out after some time, and now she works for other detainees who don’t have her advantages.
This movie is about the Arab Uprising between 1936-1939, as increasing numbers of Jewish ‘settlers’ were moving onto Palestinian land. With my shaky grasp on Palestinian history (to my shame), I wondered if this was the Nakbah, but that’s a different thing, which occurred when the state of Israel was declared. I was surprised that the BBC and British Film Institute were involved with this because the Brits certainly don’t come out covered in glory. I liked the way that they used old photographs and colourized newsreel footage then blended it in with CGI and current-day-filming. It was excellent
It seems that every TV report of a shooting or murder in a suburban area has a neighbour standing on the nature strip, shaking their head and saying “But it’s such a quiet area. Nothing like this ever happens here” (although clearly, it has.). That’s very much the feeling that Matthew and Rachelle Brettler felt when their 19 year old son’s body was found in the mudflats of the Thames, overlooked by a luxury high-rise apartment building. The CCTV footage of his last night showed him on the balcony moving from one end to the other, before launching off from the middle, catching his hip on the embankment wall on the way down. Was it suicide or a failed attempt to jump out and reach the water because he was in fear of his life? And what was he doing in that apartment anyway?
All of this was bewildering to his parents, both the children of Holocaust survivors, who lived a middle-class existence in an apartment in Maida Vale. His mother was a journalist and his father was a financial services manager. Zac had been their second son, who had felt second-rate when he failed to get into University College School, the academic private school that his older brother Joe attended. Instead, he attended Mill Hill School, a private school with less exacting academic standards where he mixed with the scions of wealthy expatriates, especially those of post-Soviet Russia and the Middle East. Here he was free to reinvent himself, lying about his parents’ jobs and covering his chest with fake Russian mafia tattoos. After school, he boasted of Kazakh and Nigerian business contacts, began wearing a sharp suit and became involved in cryptocurrency and other dubious business enterprises. He reinvented Zac Brettler as “Zac Ismailov”, affected a slight Russian accent,and concocted a backstory of a immense wealth from his Russian oligarch father who was looking for investment opportunities. He was drawn into the social circle of Akbar Shamji, an older, wealthy businessman whose wife was a fashion designer, and through him to Verinder Sharma, an underworld enforcer known also as Indian Dave. It was at Sharma’s apartment that he met his death, although both Sharma and Shamji denied involvement in his so-called ‘suicide’.
No-one is who they say they are here- except Matthew and Rachelle, who are bewildered by this whole other world so separate from the middle-class lives that they lived. People have multiple names, multiple identities. Sharma had several names, and disappeared regularly to Europe when things got too ‘hot’ in London. Akbar Shamji’s father had insinuated himself into the circle surrounding Margaret Thatcher purporting to be a wealthy oligarch, but his fortune was built on unsecured loans. But, as the Brettlers learn, invented lives and secrets are part of many families. Rachelle’s own father, a much-loved Rabbi, had lied about attending Cambridge University and fathered a secret child with a woman in his congregation.
I’ve only just recently finished watching the Netflix series of ‘Say Nothing’, based on Keefe’s book of the same name about the IRA. He brings his same journalistic and investigative skills to this book as well, drawing on interviews predominantly with Rachelle and Matthew Brettler over a two-year period. There are other interviews as well, both on and off the record, and he draws on the work of other journalists and investigators have been investigating Zac’s death and international crime in London .
This is a family story, of parents struggling to find out what happened to their son, who had become embroiled in a fantasy life in a milieu completely foreign to them. But it’s also the story of London, and its slide into its own mudflats of sleaze and oligarchical money, abetted by successive governments which wanted to attract and capture the easy money from disreputable men from disreputable regimes. Reading of the easy acquiescence of police and coroners in attributing highly suspicious deaths as suicides, especially among people with Russian connections, suggests that the corruption has spread throughout police and political realms, which have their own reasons for moving into the ‘Grey Zone’ of multinational crime and politics. It’s this juxtaposition of the familial and intimate everyday life of a middle-class family, and the monied ruthlessness of international crime and corruption that gives this book its power.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I was impressed with the ‘Say Nothing’ series on Netflix.
When I saw the Book Group selection for this month, I was a bit disappointed because I thought that I had read it before. However, I had confused Tóibín’s The Master (about Henry James) with The Magician, although looking at my pre-blog Reading Journal for The Master, my comments for the two book could be interchangeable.
Both of these books by Tóibín deal with a writer and his repressed/hinted at homosexuality in ‘fictionalized biography’ form. The Magician is a fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann, who was much spoken-of in my undergraduate English studies back in the 1970s but the only work of his that I have read is Death in Venice. I am a bit uneasy about fictionalized biography- which bits are fiction? which bits are biography?- and so I decided to read the Wikipedia entry for him before embarking on the book, and I’m glad that I did. I would have been able to follow it without any pre-reading, but I felt on more secure ground while reading it.
The book starts in Lübeck in 1891, when Thomas is a schoolboy in a wealthy provincial family. His father was a senator and Protestant businessman who had, rather out of character, married the impetuous Julia da Silva-Bruhns from Brazil. Thomas was one of five children, with his older brother Heinrich, sisters Lula and Carla and younger brother Viktor. When his father died, the will required the sale of the family firm, and Thomas’ mother and children moved to Munich. Thomas was sent to be an office clerk at a Fire Insurance Company even though, like his older brother Heinrich, he had aspirations to be a writer. Always attracted to young men, he married Katia Pringsheim in 1905, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. They had six children, but she was always aware of his homosexual yearnings, and even facilitated them. His two eldest children Erika and Klaus were also homosexual and thoroughly embroiled in the Weimar Republic nightclub and intellectual scene. Another son came out later in life. His first novel Buddenbrooks was published in 1901, a thinly disguised history of his own family, and it launched his literary career which culminated in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. It was the money from his publications, especially the American dollars from the translations of his work, which shielded him from the economic madness of Weimar Germany and enabled him to build several houses and live a comfortable lifestyle. His books, while not autobiographical, reflected his own interests: the decline of the old Hanseatic bourgeoisie, the attraction between an older man and young boys, music, and a conservative, anti-modernist politics that championed German intellectual literature.
Although there is much about his writing (very little of which I have read), what interested me particularly, in today’s political world, was the gradual encroachment of Nazism, which Thomas at first discounted as an aberration that would pass. However, after being encouraged to go to Switzerland as the political climate hardened:
Thomas began to lose hope that the regime might fail in Germany. The Nazis, he realized, were not like the poets of the Munich Revolution. They were street fighters who had taken power without losing their sway over the streets. They managed to be both government and opposition. They thrived on the idea of enemies, including enemies within. They did not fear bad publicity- rather, they actually wanted the worst of their actions to become widely known, all the better to make everyone, even those loyal to them, afraid (p. 200)
His brother Heinrich and children Erika and Klaus were more politically vocal than he was, and unable to believe that Hitler could usurp the strong German intellectualism that Mann so prized, and paralysed by fear for Katia’s Jewish parents (and perhaps conscious of his book sales) he took a long time to actually voice his opposition to Nazism, even though he had been on the National-Socialists’ radar for some time. It was only once he had managed to get to the United States- in itself a close-run thing, in spite of his contacts in high places- that he felt confident to openly express his anti-Nazi sentiments. However, he found that his status as a Nobel Prize winning author became a tool to be wielded by governments for their own purposes. The United States government wanted him to publicly warn of the dangers of Nazism, but remain silent on America’s own involvement in the war. After the war, the US government pressured him not to go to East Germany, which as a believer in the unity of the German spirit, he wanted to do. The FBI questioned him several times about the Communist leanings of his friends, and expressed their dissatisfaction with his East German visit. In the end, he left America and moved to Switzerland, where he died.
Much of this book is about Mann’s relationship with his family, which is certainly a strange one. The narrative perspective is entirely Thomas’, and he is probably the least interesting of them all. The whole basis of his marriage to Katia was off-kilter from the start, and it is hard to know what she made of his infatuations and constant appraisals of the men he met. Three of his children were homosexual: I don’t know quite what that says. He was in a constant intellectual competition with his older brother, who at times seemed to hate him, and his children were all rude to him- and he to them, in spite of supporting them financially. His demand for silent working time in his office set him apart from his family, and dominated family life. His two daughters committed suicide; a son died of an overdose. As is often the case with parents with a fraught relationship with their children, he gained more pleasure from his grandchildren than he ever did from his own children. His son Michael wrote:
I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side…It hardly bothers you, most likely, that these feelings of adulation are not shared by any of your children. (p.394)
Not a letter that any parent would want to receive from their child.
Running alongside this ‘respectable’ family man is his lifelong attraction to men, particularly young men. Age does not seem to weary him: right into his 70s he is still attracted to, and flirts with, young men. He wrote about his desires, including those involving his own son, in diaries which he feared falling into the wrong hands (well, any hands really) after he had to flee Germany.
There were two men that he did not become and he might make a book from them if he could conjure up their spirits properly. One was himself without his talent, without his ambition, but with the same sensibility. Someone fully at ease in a German democracy. A man who liked chamber music, lyric poetry, domestic quietness, gradual reform. A man, all conscience, who would have stayed in Germany even as Germany became barbaric, living a fearful life as an internal exile.
The other man who someone who did not know caution, whose imagination was as fiery and uncompromising as his sexual appetite, a man who destroyed those who loved him, who sought to make an art that was austere and contemptuous of all tradition, an art as dangerous as the world coming into shape. A man who had been brushed by demons, whose talent was the result of a pact with demons. (p. 332)
Then, interwoven with all this, is the presence of many other public figures: W. H. Auden (who married his daughter in a marriage of convenience as a cover for their homosexuality), Christopher Isherwood, Stefan Zweig, the Rooseveldts, Arthur Schoenberg, Mahler and the Washington Post owners, Agnes and Eugene Meyer.
Tóibín captures both these elements in this book. I found myself wondering what having it as a ‘fictionalized biography’ added to the book. The invented conversation and inner dialogue of fiction allowed him to flesh out these two aspects of his personality beyond a mere recitation of events, but the biographical aspect and the need to confine himself within actual events constrain the author from exploring his character as fully as he could have. Toibin’s Thomas Mann remains a rather bloodless man, and the members of his family even more so. With no footnotes, I had to just trust him as a biographer, and I don’t know whether my trust is justified or not. Mann remains an enigmatic and not particularly likeable character, but I suspect that Tóibín intended that from the start.
Russian is the first language of millions of Ukrainians, including many of the country’s frontline troops. But it is also the language of their enemy. Its public use is increasingly restricted by law, with ever more measures to enforce communication in Ukrainian. Ukrainians are allowed to speak Russian in private conversations. But they can be fined for playing a Russian language song in the street, if the singer or composer is a Russian citizen. The state says Russian must be policed because Russia uses the language as a weapon to spread its influence. But in primarily Russian-speaking places such as Odesa, Ukraine’s third-largest city, many are unhappy about the language laws. Tim Whewell reports on the arguments dividing a city under constant Russian bombardment, as one side calls the Russian language a colonial hangover, while the other says cultural diversity is what Ukraine should be fighting for.
I’d forgotten that President Zelensky’s first language is Russian, so he’s an example of the complex issue of language, nationalism and nationality. Language is such an intimate, identity-defining thing, and the idea of policing language like this is abhorrent to me, while I can understand the fear of Russian influence through language (although surely banning it isn’t the solution?) This episode is revealing, too, of just how incessant the Russian attacks are.
Tocqueville Road Trip Episode 4: Independence of Mind. In this episode, John Prideaux visits Harvard University, which was in existence when Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831. Harvard University has certainly been in Trump’s sights recently, but Prideaux finds that students, too, are censoring themselves as debate becomes more fraught. De Tocqueville spoke of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ as a threat to democracy, and as the world turns to the right, it does give me pause. This is an Economist subscriber-only podcast.
Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes focussing on Kenya. We hear about Muthoni Kirima, one of the last Mau Mau fighters to come out of hiding and lay down her arms. Caroline Elkins, Professor of History at Harvard University, discusses the brutality of the conflict between Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army, the British and Kenyan loyalists.Next, when Princess Elizabeth became queen while staying at the Treetops Hotel, a lodge in the Aberdare National Park.In 1997, scientists travelled to Kenya, in search of a cave believed to have been the den of the man-eating lions that terrorised railway workers in 1898. Plus, we hear how Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga signed an unprecedented power-sharing deal to end a wave of violence that left more than 1,200 people dead. And the heartwarming story of the friendship between a baby hippo and a 130-year-old giant tortoise.
I enjoyed this collection of episodes dealing with Kenya. The female Mau Mau fighter stayed in the jungle for years after the Mau Mau rebellion had been quashed, and Carolyn Elkin’s segment is good about the concerted cover-up of atrocities by the British Government. I was particularly fascinated by the analysis of the 2007-2008 post-election violence and the solution of power-sharing between the two competing politicians. Apparently it led to a decline in corruption because each side was watching the other. I wonder if that would work elsewhere, or whether the two sides have to exhaust themselves with fighting and violence first.
Journey Through Time Episode 38: The Man Behind Big Brother: Why We’re Hooked on Reality TV In this episode Sarah Churchwell and David Olusoga are joined by Sir Peter Bazalgette, acclaimed television producer behind UK Big Brother. (Incidentally he’s the great-great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette who designed the London sewer system that got rid of the Big Stink. Is there a connection there?) He points out that Big Brother revealed the curated nature of reality TV and heightened our media literacy because the public could see the rushes that were then editted down to a 30 minute episode. Although Big Brother was already screening in the Netherlands, the participants in the first season were oblivious to the furore erupting ‘outside’, whereas later participants were well aware of the celebrity status and backlash that could arise from appearing on Big Brother.
I’ve been thinking recently about societies in collapse, and how they recover. Maggie O’Farrell’s Land is set in Ireland in 1865, some fifteen years after the Irish Famine (or as O’Farrell calls it, The Great Hunger) which caused the collapse of the predominantly (but not exclusively) Catholic Irish peasant economy, particularly in southern and western Ireland. Although it did not disturb the landlord and Ascendancy class particularly, it was disastrous for tenant farmers and small landholders, leading to the deaths of perhaps one million, and the emigration of a further million people (see fascinating Great Irish Famine Online site)
The book opens in 1865 with Tomás, a tenant farmer who was the sole survivor of the famine in his family. He is working as a surveyor with the British government on the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, which is redrawing its maps in the wake of the eviction and emigration which followed the famine. He hates the British government, but it is a form of income to eke out the meagre yield of his tenant farm. He has with him his young son Liam, who is assisting him with holding the surveying chains as they work their way across the countryside, asking the remaining farmers about the families who had lived in what are now ruins. Liam wanders off into a densely wooded copse which has somehow survived the timber-felling avarice of the landlord, and he and then his father come across a deep, sacred pool which seems to hold the history of Ireland over millenia and the stirring of Celtic mythology within its waters. Somehow Tomás has been deeply affected by what he saw in that pool and it triggers a restlessness and other-worldliness in him that affects his whole family. His mapmaking becomes an act of subversion by establishing as fact what has been obliterated.
The book traces the lives of this family as his wife Phina, whom he met as a child in an orphanage after her family had died or emigrated, and his four children Enda, Liam, Rose and Eugene. He moves the family from their city tenement room to a disused cottage on the peninsula where he encountered the pool, only to have the family disintegrate anew through death, emigration and capture by the Catholic Church that Tomás hated so much.
The book moves chronologically, shifting from one character to another, told in the present tense. The tone is reminiscent, as you might expect, of O’Farrell’s book Hamnet (my review here) and Instructions for a Heatwave (my review here). There is a lot of description, and relatively little dialogue. She introduces major plot developments abruptly, which I prefer as being the way things happen, instead of heavy foreshadowing. I liked that she leaves the ending open, and I did find myself caring about the characters. I’m surprised that it wasn’t longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize as many predicted: she doesn’t seem to do very well with the Booker, having never been longlisted. However, I’ve never lost my ambivalence about O’Farrell’s writing which seems to reach for, but not attain, the complexity and elan of, say, Hilary Mantel’s work.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I thought I’d try to get ahead of the Booker Prize Longlist 2026, but it didn’t make it. It wouldn’t have been a bad inclusion for the longlist, but I don’t see it as a shortlist nomination.
I confess that I haven’t read The Odyssey. So, I don’t know how true to the literary work this film is, or why Emily Wilson, the translator of the version that inspired Christopher Nolan, distanced herself so much from this film. I have to take it just as I found it. I didn’t notice the 3-hour length of the movie at all, so I must have been engaged pretty much the whole way through. I had heard that the film was very loud, but there was only one part where I blocked my ears because it was too noisy. However, I didn’t really like the 21st century ruminations on civilizational collapse and survival at the end (although I gather than Homer’s Odyssey tends to fizzle out at the end as well). I would have loved to have seen this at an IMAX cinema but it’s pretty heavily booked out. I enjoyed it
My mother died with Alzheimers. One day, when I wasn’t quite sure whether she knew who I was or not, she became quite agitated and said “It’s getting late. My mummy will be worried about me”. It was poignant: her mother had died when she was about 7, and I had never once in my life heard her refer to her “mummy”.
You Must Remember This is written from experience of child with a parent with Alzheimers- you can tell. The chapters are not in chronological order, with the book starting with Chapter 10 as Grace is heading along a busy road at night. This prompts her daughter Liz to put her into aged care, where she is bewildered by the presence of strangers, including her daughter. Memories come fleetingly, before she can put them into words.
As she struggles to find a firm footing for her memories, she goes back to her childhood with her alcoholic parents. Her father had been in the war and her mother worked as a nurse, but with such an alcohol problem you wonder how she held down a job. She met her husband Howard when she was working in an office although she didn’t remember that he had since died. She loved him all her life. These chapters are interspersed between the present day chapters, in no particular order.
The book is set in Western Australia and it ‘feels’ Australian. Wilson has a lovely turn of phrase: he describes an old man as having “cheeks like billiard balls” (p. 33) and when someone coughs, they make a sound “like an empty spray can” (p. 78).
This is only a small book – at 169 pages it’s a novella really- but it rings with authenticity. It was short-listed for the Miles Franklin but I don’t know if it has the heft to be a winner (and it didn’t). But it is sad, tender and you just know that it’s absolutely true.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 680 The Netherlands: The Revolt that made the Modern World This is Part 4 of their series on National Anthems and here they deal with the 15-verse National Anthem of the Netherlands. It was adopted in 1932 but it has the longest history of any of the national anthems. The tune came from 1568 and the lyrics from 1572 and rather amazingly, the first verse starts off, which is written in the voice of William of Nassau announcing that “To the king of Spain I’ve granted A lifelong loyalty”. It was written at the start of the Dutch Revolt, where William was appointed Stadtholder by the Spanish Hapsburg king Phillip II but he turned against him in the face of increasing resentment of the influence of the Spanish crown. The first letters of the fifteen verses form an acrostic of William of Nassau’s name. He ended up being assassinated and is seen as the founding father of the Netherlands. This episode is really interesting- I knew nothing about it. Dutch Republican’s didn’t like it much because of the profession of loyalty in the first verse (which is pretty weird- your national song pledging loyalty to another country but during WW2 the Nazi’s really didn’t like the song, so it was taken up by and inspired the Dutch Resistance. It’s the oldest coherent song to become a national anthem.
In Our Time The Colombian Exchange I haven’t listened to In Our Time since Melvin Bragg retired, and I must say that the new host Misha Glenny sounds more with-it than poor old Melvin. This episode features Rebecca Earle Professor of History at the University of Warwick; John Lindo Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and Mark Maslin Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. The “Colombian Exchange” refers to the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. When Columbus reached the Bahamas, Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, arguably, syphilis in its most virulent form; the Americas had no cattle, bananas, sugar cane or smallpox. One of the male historians (can’t remember which) challenged the whole concept of a “Colombian Exchange”, preferring the term “The Great Dying” which seems apt given that 90% of the American population in 1492 had died within ten years. In 1492, Europe, Asia and the Americans had similar sized populations. There was already TB and syphilis in the Americas, but different strains (the syphilis was transmitted by skin contact rather than sex). The death rate through smallpox, measles and influenza (as well as killings) led to the abandonment of farming, and the resulting reforestation did change the carbon dioxide levels and may have contributed to the Little Ice Age. The explorers left breeding pairs of sheep so that they would have a food source when they returned, and slavery was introduced because of the number of deaths as a result of contact. The importation of food into Europe led to great wealth, which in turn was put into science.
Short History Of… The Battle of Stalingrad Going back to February 2025 for this one, featuring Sir Antony Beevor, whose book on Stalingrad is on the shelf behind me, unread. Named for Stalin, Stalingrad was an urbanized and industrialized city, despite the starvation in the rest of Russia wrought by Stalin’s policies. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in 1942, he assumed that the Russians and Ukrainians who had suffered so much under Stalin would embrace the Germans with open arms. Not so. When Hitler absolved the German army of any crimes that they might commit against the Soviet soldiers, it quickly became very brutal. His intention was to starve the citizens into submission, then enslave them. In 1942 German turned its attention to the oilfields in the Caucasus, Stalin ordered no retreat, on pain of death (indeed 13,000 Soviet soldiers were to be executed for desertion). Hitler changed course and ordered instead the capture of Stalingrad. Stalin refused to allow the citizens to evacuate, so that the soldiers could be provisioned. New conscripts sent to Stalingrad counted their life-span in hours. When the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, the German troops were encircled, and so you had both Germans and Soviet troops battling it out in the city, while there were still 10,000 citizens in Stalingrad at the end of the 6 month siege in February 1943. It was the psychological turning point of the war, but Hitler refused to admit defeat, and so the war dragged on for another two years.
What a strange book. I picked it up because I had heard that it was a best seller in China, and I was curious to know why. To be honest, having finished it, I still don’t know why this memoir was such a runaway success there, and who its Chinese readers might be.
The story itself is quite simple. The author is a young college-graduate who moves from home to take up a series of poorly-paid unskilled positions over a twenty-year period. His jobs include working in a logistics firm unpacking and packing items, delivering parcels for several courier companies, working in a hotel restaurant, selling bicycles, doing computer-aided artwork on comics, working in a bakery and working in his own companies selling clothes in a shopping mall. As he shifts from province to province seeking work, his accommodation often consists of an apartment partitioned into 5 sq metre ‘rooms’ with only space for a bed and a desk with shared bathroom facilities and only sometimes kitchen facilities. Sometimes he sleeps at the workplace. When working at the bicycle shop, for a 72 hour week, his rent was 1500 yuan per month, leaving him 2000 yuan per month to live on. In some of his jobs, food was provided, although often it was food that was left over. In the logistics job, the work statistics are so harsh that there is no time for toilet breaks and the temperature is so high that he sweats continuously. The hours are punishingly long. The courier job has expectations of customer service while at the same time offering such a pittance that compliance with any customer request puts him out of pocket. Companies take advantage of a three-day unpaid trial period, sometimes there is medical insurance and sometimes not, and employers take any opportunity to ‘stiff’ their workers. Amongst his co-workers he witnesses theft and dishonesty, but says nothing because he has to work alongside them. As he says:
The moral of the this story: When disgruntled, the lowly among us only have each other to pick on, because going after the powerful will only cost us in the end. (p. 202)
I see that the author was born in 1979, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and at the start of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms that took China from a command economy to a market economy. He mentions a sister only once, but he does speak quite a bit about his parents. I found myself wondering how parents from such a starkly different type of economy would advise and equip their children to work in a new economy, unlike anything they had known (much like us as parents and grandparents parenting children who will work in an AI economy that is foreign to us).
My parents had only ever taught me to be kind to others. They failed to mention I also had to stick up for my own interests…Maybe because nobody had ever sat me known to talk it through before. My parents wouldn’t go near the topic. They had spent their whole lives in the same work units; the market economy was completely alien to them. …The thing was, my family was from out of town and had no relatives that lived nearby. My parents are unsociable folk, too. (p. 198)… I was starting to feel like my parents were to blame for all the rotten luck I had with people and work. They should have warned me. Their lessons on how to act had zero grounding in this world. They had said nothing about going after what I wanted, only that I should be frugal. What they told me was the wrong way to behave was exactly how everybody was behaving, and society wasn’t punishing them for it but rewarding the, and not just rewarding them, punishing me (p. 222)
Nonetheless, he did have his parents as a fall-back. Burnt out by the culture of exploitation and competitiveness, intimidated by the effort of having to interact with other people and yearning to have time to read and write, he returns to his parents’ home and in his own words, stays indoors for almost two years (p. 264). He later borrows money from them to set up one of his ultimately unsuccessful businesses. He does have a couple of girlfriends: indeed, it is because he wants to be with one of his girlfriends that he shifts from Guandong Province in 2018 to Beijing. He breaks up with another girlfriend when he is living and working in the store in Nanning, and she shifts overseas. He does not have friends, beyond his workmates and at work he is just as likely to make enemies as friends. I found myself wondering if his flight back to his parents’ home was an early example of tang ping, or lying flat culture, a rejection of societal pressure to over-work, a phenomenon in China particularly after COVID.
The structure of the book is unusual and rather hard to follow with a rather strange arrangement of chapters. The book sprang from a blog post written in 2020 (Chapter 2?) so perhaps that might explain why it is structured as it is. His story starts off in 2017 while he is working in Foshan as a package handler, but the chapter is written when he has been in Beijing for three years. The second chapter focuses on his time as a delivery worker in Beijing, followed his work in a convenience store, then in a neighbouring bike shop in Shanghai in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is headed ‘Other Jobs I’ve Had’ where he lists jobs 1-8 (1: waiter 2: clothing store assistant 3: gas station attendant 4: fast food chain delivery 5: popsicle wholesaler 6: 3D architectural renderings 7: comic book artist 8: graphic designer for a startup magazine about anime). Jobs 9-11 were:
9: copy shop attendant
10: return to the anime magazine
11: his own clothing store. He then has a lengthy section about writing and reading, complete with extracts from two pieces of his writing. He then continues with the job countdown-
12: (2011) online store
13: property management at a mall
14: bakery shop
15: deli stall
16: selling rear view car cameras and car fresheners
17: the logistics job described in Chapter 1 with D company
18: parcel delivery with S Company
19: parcel delivery with Pinjun Express, both described in Chapter 2.
In the closing pages of the book, as he loses his job with Pingun Express, he observes that he had alternated between two mutually exclusive states: working and writing. He tended to do either one or the other, spending half of his life free of work, and the other half consumed by it (p. 317). He considers the nature of “freedom”, which he considers a matter of consciousness, rather than of what you possess. He observes:
So, by freedom, I suppose I am referring to a personal pursuit of sorts, and self-realization through consciousness of our individual selves- the spiritual essence that differentiates one person from another. If more of us when after this kind of freedom, the world would be a more diverse, more inclusive, more equal and richer place. It would be all the more colorful. The pursuit of freedom is what shapes our individual trajectories, our personal goals, and stops us from having to vie for space on a single narrow path…Maybe it is something we can strive for but never quite attain, and maybe I will never reach it in my whole life, but that doesn’t matter. Because the pursuit is more precious than the attainment, and this holds true for every person and for the world as a whole- like our ideals and our convictions, it is the fulcrum of our lives, not their content (p. 315)
Is this valourization of freedom the appeal of the book to a Chinese audience, I wonder? I can’t even think of the word ‘freedom’ without hearing it come out of George W. Bush’s mouth, and it seems almost antithetical to the choreographed military displays in Tienanmen Square. Is the book’s popularity a somewhat subversive embrace of that? Or was the book a bestseller in China when the recipients of packages ordered online became curious about the lives of the people who delivered them to them? Or is the book popular with the tang ping generation, with him forging the way? At times the book reminded me of George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris but this is no dilettante’s or journalist’s curiosity. The jobs came first and the writing emerged later, and it seems that the author is still oscillating between the two, without the choice to leave it all behind as Orwell did.
Most of all, it made me realize how little I know about China.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I had read an article in the Guardian about it.
