Books I Read This Month: June 2023
Ben Smith • Olga Ravn • Miroslav Krleža • David Graeber and David Wengrow • Miguel Ángel Asturias
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral (Ben Smith)
It’s tempting to refer to Traffic, media reporter Ben Smith’s new book about Web 2.0, as a tragedy, but in classical drama a story is tragic only if a fallen hero learns something significant, always in the aftermath of being brought to ruin by a personal failing. Very few lessons, however, seemed to have been learned by the central figure in the book, Jonah Peretti, Smith’s former boss at BuzzFeed, who’s probably one of the more outwardly amiable personalities to have made a deep impression during the rise of the Social Internet. Before he was an online prankster, Peretti was a dyslexic NoCal child whose mother’s inheritance money and close guidance kept him from missing out on developing his talents the way many less fortunate children do. Instead he graduated from good schools and nabbed a spot at the MIT Media Lab, gaining notice a few years before the dotcom bubble burst by playing online practical jokes that went viral before anyone was using the word “viral.” It was then that he realized social media was providing, in his words, “exciting opportunities for participation.” He thought it would be fun if lots of people could be drawn to the same message, forming a sort of virtual tribe around a piece of information. If only he’d read Marshall McLuhan closely while conducting his research at MIT. I know there are some copies of his books available at the Hayden Library. The Canadian theorist, who in the 1960s coined the term “Global Village,” was terrified of its realization, believing that so many people being able to connect so readily via media would lead to sectarianism, chaos, destabilization and the end of privacy.
Peretti is continually described as a “genius” in these pages, and there’s no doubt he’s very intelligent and offbeat, but something vital was missing in him from the beginning of his experimentation with memes. He pursued the wrong goals from the start not because he intended to do harm, but because he treated the Internet and the news it spread as a game without consequence. No one with any common sense would have done so. As Smith matter-of-factly describes Peretti’s aim: “He wasn’t concerned with taste or quality or brand or consistency. He just wanted to know what would get traffic. When something did, he wanted to do more of it.” No, the story, while very depressing, isn’t a tragedy because despite making a mess in various ways, it’s difficult to say Peretti’s really been brought to ruin; he’s an incredibly wealthy man who’ll be just fine, even if much of the impact he’s had on media has been malign. It’s also not clear he’s absorbed many lessons, continuing to move on to the next cheap gimmick to try to game the system, most recently utilizing AI to write SEO-bait articles for BuzzFeed after shutting down its news division due to financial losses and an underwater stock.
As Smith recalls, before BuzzFeed, Peretti was one of the Silicon Alley founders of the Huffington Post, a website that has done scant serious reportage in its entire history. It was a loud and early cheerleader for Barack Obama in the aughts, an avaricious aggregator that siphoned traffic from far better publications, the publisher of unpaid, uninspired opinion pieces by John Cusack and Larry David and whatever other boldface names were stored in Arianna Huffington’s Rolodex, and a disseminator of click-bait flotsam that Peretti and his minions dredged up to make a splash. Thanks to his ceaseless efforts to build traffic by remorselessly chasing the lowest common denominator, a practice that continued even after he cashed out, no major news organization more distinguished itself in the area of sideboob journalism. In one month in 2012, the site’s readers were treated to these articles: “Mischa Barton Side Boob On Display At Harper’s Bazaar Event,” “Gwyneth Shows Off Some Sideboob In Sheer Dress,” “Miley Cyrus Flashes Side Boob, Talks Sex Scenes & Losing Her Virginity,” “Kristen Stewart Sideboob Makes An Appearance At Cosmopolis,” “Christina Aguilera Nip Slip Comes Sooo Close On The Voice.” I mean, "Sideboob” was an actual keyword on the site! Peretti was aware that the Huffington Post needed to wrangle page views with tantalizing nonsense, as well as by constantly manipulating Google search results via keywords, because no one came for the so-called “important work.” Apart from brief periods where the company funded a few significant investigative pieces, it was mostly built on sleavage and such.
To Peretti, a “traffic guru,” it was all just a cool social experiment, a way to test out his theories about how he could make information go viral without regard for the real-life ramifications. By those lax standards, he achieved success. Huffington managed to sell her steaming garbage pile in 2011 for $315 million to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who was very excited by her ability to wheedle people to write for free—fuck you, Tim—oblivious that the inane celebrity op-eds scored almost no traffic. Peretti departed a wealthy man, deciding to lavish his energies full-time on BuzzFeed, his side project during his Huffington days.
Peretti realized in that moment that social, not search, was the way forward to score huge traffic and he exploited that knowledge. “My current obsession at BuzzFeed is taking informational content and packaging it with emotion and wit,” he said at the time, intent on spreading vapid, time-killing nonsense via social networks, especially Facebook. Listicles were the coin of the realm, and to this day their spirit permeates the mainstream press. Two stories which contain BuzzFeed’s DNA that were published in the New York Times in the past month: “20 Looks That Did the Most at Cannes,” and “5 Takeaways From Ron DeSantis’s First Campaign Trip.” You can decide for yourself if that’s an improvement. There were also inane BuzzFeed videos in which rubber bands were stretched around a watermelon one after another until it exploded. Oh, the traffic! Peretti, as much as anyone, taught the news business that the naked pursuit of clicks via the scale of social media platforms was of paramount importance, ignoring that it was a model with some crucial vulnerabilities, and that a lot of vitally important stories are ignored initially and would be buried if traffic measurement was all that mattered. It was all incredibly myopic, essentially just feeding candy to diabetics until they’re comatose.
You needn’t fight by the Marquess of Queensberry rules, some antiquated standards of journalism, when squaring off with a wanna-be despot, but you still do have to seek the truth, not just dump unproven allegations into a social media cesspool.
A business partner convinced Peretti the site needed more heft and Politico reporter Ben Smith was hired to establish BuzzFeed News, the division up and running in time to cover the 2012 U.S. Presidential election. It was a lively, aggressive group that delivered scoops and established itself as a player. For a while there was chatter that it would replace the major legacy news organizations, including the New York Times, which really made little sense when you consider the infrastructure, experience and funding needed to run a truly global news organization. The Times was then a lumbering legacy media dinosaur in a perilous position in the Internet Age after its terrain was thwacked by something like an asteroid. The company could have gone under if it had failed to modernize—Sulzberger family member David Perpich emerges in these pages as a quiet hero in the successful evolution—but BuzzFeed News would have been a paltry substitute, even if it’s completely understandable that there was a call for something fresh after the so-called liberals at the Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and other establishment publications suddenly found a gun in their pants as they urged us into the disastrous Iraq War.
Nearly a decade after BuzzFeed News started publishing, after Smith himself had decamped for a job at, guess where, the New York Times, the division scored a Pulitzer Prize for cleverly utilizing satellite imagery to prove the Chinese government was enforcing a mass detention of Muslim citizens. It was Peretti’s best moment at adulting, but storm clouds were gathering: The division lost gobs of money—turns out the news industry is difficult even for celebrated wunderkinds, especially those who’d built riches on dodgy schemes—and made some egregious mistakes it should have easily avoided. (One error that’s been talked about quite a bit in relation to Smith’s book was Peretti turning down big money from Disney to sell BuzzFeed in 2013, but a lousy business decision seems the least of it.)
Smith, another main character in this story of his own telling, uses the book as an opportunity to relitigate the most controversial decisions of his tenure, offering a mix of apology and apologia on topics including naively hiring protofascist plagiarist Benny Johnson, and publishing the Steele Dossier. Johnson, a veteran of foul publications run by Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck, was part of a wave of 2010s far-right ideologues who learned from people like Peretti how to spread (mis)information, the difference being that these trolls cared dearly about the bigoted and irresponsible messages they were disseminating. Smith somehow failed to notice all the red flags waving and viewed Johnson as a harmless, center-right rascal who just wanted to have a laugh and draw traffic with goofy memes. The “journalist” was eventually fired for lazily stealing other people’s writing in 41 instances, but BuzzFeed platforming the creep gave him the oxygen that’s helped enable him to thrive to this day as a podcasting provocateur. In summing up the atrocious hire, Smith offers this jaw-dropping statement: “I felt burned and realized that I’d missed something, though I didn’t quite know what it was.” This is perhaps the most perplexing admission in the entire book, since Smith seems to this day to not completely comprehend that this era has proven to us time and again that there are not necessarily very fine people on both sides. Smith is one of those media figures so dedicated to bothsidesism that he still doesn’t get why he was steamrolled by an ascendant strain of fascism, and that going out of your way to invite monsters into the mainstream doesn’t make you virtuous. In addition to Johnson, the video arm of the company also employed, for a time, Anthime Joseph Gionet, the online troll known as “Baked Alaska,” who was a mixture of Jackass and jackboot. “His politics had been guided by platform metrics” is how his toxicity is explained in this volume, but it’s far more likely that he’s just sort of a fascist, that it was no mere accident of algorithms that drove Gionet’s politics further and further into gutter-level nationalism. He was recently sentenced to 60 days in prison for his role in the violent January 6, 2021 coup attempt at the Capitol.
“I remain defensive of our decision,” Smith asserts about his contentious choice to publish the Steele Dossier, information which purported that Donald Trump was deeply involved with the Kremlin and could be blackmailed by Russia, particularly because of the existence of what became known as the “pee tape,” a video FSB agents allegedly made in a hotel of the aspiring autocrat enjoying water sports performed by a pair of full-bladder prostitutes. “We didn’t know whether everything in the Steele Dossier was true when we published it,” Smith acknowledges, while defending his actions. His argument is that the information was floating around and it was better to let everyone see it (with a disclaimer at the introduction) and decide for themselves even if it wasn’t corroborated—even before he and his reporters had spent any significant time trying to corroborate the claims. Of course, social media was soon polluted with wild speculation via this unconfirmed report, the most titillating aspects sucking up all the oxygen. A child could have told you what would happen, and it still staggers the mind that it’s necessary to point out to Smith or anyone else that his judgment was poor. You can hate Trump with the heat of a billion suns—oh, how I do!—and you needn’t fight by the Marquess of Queensberry rules, some antiquated standards of journalism, when squaring off with a wanna-be despot, but you still do have to seek the truth, not just dump unproven allegations into a social media cesspool. The unverified disclosures expanded the miasma around Trump’s very real wrongdoings, even those in regards to Russia, which Bannon and Trump worked tirelessly to obfuscate. Their goal was to overwhelm the news cycle with the unproven, to degrade truth—“flood the zone with shit” has long been Bannon’s mantra. Confusion was their friend, and Smith handed them a ball of it, instead of working first to verify the intel and release each piece that his department could prove worthy of daylight. When he says that following his publication of the dossier that Democrats started to “build their own powerful narratives on social media that were sometimes more resonant than factual,” I mean, my dude, what exactly did you do but not care very much about what was factual.
Part of Smith wanted to publish the info because of a misguided notion about absolute transparency he’d internalized from stanning Gawker, but a very big part of him, even he acknowledges, just wanted ginormous traffic. Smith wanted his very own exploding watermelon. Somehow he was surprised that lascivious material dumped into a highly partisan fishbowl poisoned the waters. “Perhaps I should have thought a little more about WikiLeaks and anticipated that people might share the document free of any context,” he concedes. Yes, perhaps. Oh, and if Smith really is so drawn to letting the people decide for themselves about unproven charges, he might have put an asterisk next to names of numerous male media figures mentioned in this book, including one he refers to by nickname, who were either listed on the uncorroborated Shitty Men in Media spreadsheet or were otherwise accused of being sex pests.
Another of the key figures of the era Smith considers is former Gawker kingpin Nick Denton, a then-vicious and capricious Machiavelli who realized too late he’d gone too far. Denton emerged on the NYC scene at the beginning of the aughts, his goal being to direct the rage of NYC’s creative underclass at legacy media while building an independent blogging empire. The British-born entrepreneur was absolutely right in two of his core beliefs: the elitism of the East Coast media world was—and is—gross, and the idea that Silicon Valley founders were visionaries deserving lavish praise was asinine. These “heroes” were only too happy to profit from sweatshop labor, from child labor, while using images of Gandhi to peddle aggressively marked-up consumer electronics. Their ruse worked so well that during the heat of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park in 2011, the anti-capitalist protesters observed a moment of silence when Steve Jobs died.
Dick pics and sex tapes were Daulerio’s pure id answer to the infectiousness of LOLCats and Top 27 Lists, and while he didn’t pioneer this invasive, X-rated gimmick at Gawker, he came to own it the way Nixon came to own the Vietnam War.
Per Denton’s instructions, Gawker was a profane menace to media figures, celebrities and politicos, cruel to bad people who deserved brickbats and far too often needlessly so to people who should have been left the hell alone. If it didn’t always comfort the afflicted, it certainly afflicted the comfortable. Suddenly there was a fearless outlet for employees who’d been abused by the powers-that-be in the media. Some of it was great, but part of the “show” was Denton hiring bloggers who were exhibitionists lacking filters, sometimes further loosened up by drugs, who exposed their wounds for all to see, self-destructing in public for clicks and giggles. It was closer to Warhol’s blasé indifference to people shooting up or getting slapped in his low-budget films than the semi-rehearsed “honesty” of most of today’s Reality TV, but it sadly foresaw a lot of the drama that’s played out online with Try Guys, TikTokers and YouTubers. It was scandal for sale. Jezebel, Gawker’s revolutionary feminist site edited by Anna Holmes which changed the face and spine of women’s magazines in many positive ways, also made a habit of going viral via shame spiral. It was often too painful to watch and neither those bleeding out or those, you know, gawking at the spectacle, were richer for the experience.
By the time massive venture capital was flowing into BuzzFeed and other competitors in the 2010s, Denton, an astute observer of the scene, thought the end might be near for his bundle of blogs. You have to assume he was distracted because why else would any sensible person hand their palace keys to A.J. Daulerio, who certainly drew traffic but seemed less trustworthy than your average dorm-room drug dealer. I still remember a video interview in which he gleefully told a host at the Huffington Post how much he loved finding out about fucked-up, grisly and awful things. He was clearly not well. Daulerio has since stated that a recovered memory made him aware he’d suffered childhood sex abuse which fueled his aberrant behavior and cocaine addiction, and you can only hope he’s in a better place after undergoing therapy and rehab.
Dick pics and sex tapes were Daulerio’s pure id answer to the infectiousness of LOLCats and Top 27 Lists, and while he didn’t pioneer this invasive, X-rated gimmick at Gawker, he came to own it the way Nixon came to own the Vietnam War. (One very funny Daulerio anecdote which Smith shares is that in the wake of the Gawker envelope-pusher publishing a photo of Brett Favre’s penis at Deadspin, the blogger was befriended by sportscaster Joe Buck, which means the preening starfucker Buck cozied up to someone who’s claim to fame was leaking tapes of stars actually fucking. Just perfect.) While running the mother ship at Gawker, Daulerio posted one graphic minute of a Hulk Hogan sex tape, which was made without the wrestler’s knowledge and had absolutely zero news value. Reporting on the racist remarks Hogan made on the same video would have been useful, but not showing the aged steroid abuser boning some Howard Stern manqué’s wife. It was something Gawker had done before, but this time the evil libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, a fascist misery who despises democracy, was quietly bankrolling the lawsuit, hoping to drive Gawker to extinction. Unfortunately, that’s what happened.
For all the misgivings you may have about Denton of that era—and if you worked for him you probably have more than the average person—he comes across as one of the more coherent, even principled, figures on the scene, chiefly because he really did love content that could leave a mark, usually a bruise, and he loathed listicles and the Upworthy bullshit he knew to be insipid trickery. Gawker was needlessly cruel in ways that can’t be forgiven, but it also did genuinely meaningful muckraking, skewering the odious in the spirit of Mencken and Nast, attempting to level the playing field. It wasn’t fooled by the blooming right-wing menace, and its slew of sites graduated a plethora of talented people into the media ecosystem.
Vice Media, a significant company from the era, now in bankruptcy, oddly gets short shrift in Smith’s story, but one other important figure receives particularly close attention: sad-sack Andrew Breitbart, who died the year after he’d spoken effusively of his dream 2012 GOP Presidential ticket of Allen West and Michele Bachmann, and was one of the founders of the Huffington Post, a stint he wedged in between irresponsible, far-right pseudo-journalism. The self-described “Matt Drudge’s bitch,” who played the whipping boy to Drudge’s Marquis de Sade personality while toiling away for his boss’ eponymous site, possessed ugly, ultraconservative reactionary instincts but wasn’t deemed aberrant by Peretti, Huffington and other liberals at the publication, despite a preponderance of evidence. They viewed him as being on their side in a fight against the old-guard media companies, completely ignorant of how much he valued his noxious politics. It was a forerunner to the way BuzzFeed subsequently fucked up royally by employing Benny Johnson and Baked Alaska. Completely misunderstanding obviously twisted people as “interesting” or “ironic” is a leitmotif of Smith’s story, something he himself has pleaded guilty to, so you have to wonder why this failing kept repeating itself. My theory is that these tech-literate descendants of the Tea Party were true believers whereas their center and left counterparts didn’t really possess any serious politics and were mostly in it for the adrenaline high, attention and potential riches, unable to understand that anyone else could be sincere. It’s the old poem about the best lacking all conviction, the worst being full of passionate intensity.
The algorithms did not make us smarter or happier or kinder, and those who viewed the Internet as merely a casino, a house to be brought down, as Peretti did, and not an engine that could imperil society, didn’t do us any favors.
All I could think about when reading this book was how a bunch of bright people who could have been doing something important instead mostly wasted their time and talents “attracting eyeballs.” The best part of this book, which Smith describes as a “humbling exercise in what I missed,” is his admission at the conclusion that he came to understand that the Breitbarts and Baked Alaskas in his orbit and Peretti’s weren’t bit players in their narrative but that it had always been the other way around. Here he doesn’t push back as he does with the Steele Dossier, realizing that the sweep of history has knocked him upside the head. And, at least for now, it’s easy to say that the right-wing trolls have won the day, that chaos has reigned. (In case Smith is still stubbornly clinging to bothsidesism, that evil energy was clearly released from the right and any equivalency is false.) Smith asserts that “by 2023 it seemed clear that the power of this new social energy had been to destroy any institution, from the media to the political establishment, that it touched.” True, though classified ads migrating from newsprint to Craigslist, and advertising money, more generally, being bifurcated between print and online, were destroying traditional media even before social was a major force. It’s an apt ending for his book, though, even I don’t know if it’s the end of the story, as Smith seems to believe. Whether it’s the Arab Spring or MAGA or Brexit, social media has played a surprising role. These tools are useful to some degree in both toppling dictators and undoing democracy. But the story is still in flux, with many more shocks to the system to come.
Smith is certainly a gifted writer and his presentation of this complicated drama with many players is exceptionally lucid. While it’s a niche subject—the only people who care about media books are media people—subcultures can tell us a great deal about society in the macro. Yes, Smith lives really deep inside the bubble and can sometimes be perplexingly out of step with reality (“Andrew Yang Could Win This Thing”), but while being so close to a subject—being one of the subjects—can be detrimental for a writer, he generally makes it work to his advantage in Traffic, revealing moments that any reporter who wasn’t also on the scene would have been hard-pressed to uncover. Even if Smith doesn’t seem to fully grasp the reasons for what just happened to him, and to us, how the Far Right commandeered the movement, the moment, winding up the recent winners in the race for attention, you’ll come away from this book with greater clarity about our perplexing, hyperconnected reality.
The new media and the dicey schemes behind the pursuit of traffic upended the economic security of traditional publications while creating no sustainable path forward for online reportage. Smith is navigating in this uneasy climate with his current venture, the process-journalism platform, Semafor. While he and his staff were endeavoring to do really good reporting, some early seed money went up in smoke after investor Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas for crypto-related fraud. The company has been criticized for accepting investment funds from a Chinese think tank with close ties to the Communist Party, and its other backers include Chevron, a profligate polluter, and a network founded by Dark Money kingpin Charles Koch. In the media hellscape that listicles helped create, beggars can’t be choosers if they hope to stay afloat.
Beyond capsizing a system that supported serious journalism for more than a century, these new tools and the way we’ve used them have produced, at best, a mixed blessing. The ridiculous raft of books published this century by technology fanboys insisting that the Internet would vastly improve our lives—the future is going to be, wow, so awesome!—turned out to be the lies many of us thought they were. The algorithms did not make us smarter or happier or kinder, and those who viewed the Internet as merely a casino, a house to be brought down, as Peretti did, and not an engine that could imperil society, didn’t do us any favors. Ultimately, they made noise, not progress. Sometimes creative destruction works, but one thing often true about rules is that you can’t understand why they were there until they’re gone.•
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (Olga Ravn)
“My name is Janice and Sonia,” says a worker aboard a spacecraft exploring the planet called New Discovery at the far end of the universe. “I’m not one, but two.” Janice and Sonia, among other employees, some human and some humanoid, have been asked to file reports about their experiences on the job in order to allow corporate management to better comprehend unrest that’s arisen on the Six Thousand Ship during its long reconnaissance mission. Mutiny, terrorism, even civil war between those born the old-fashioned way and those biomanufactured may be on the horizon.
That’s the premise of Danish writer Olga Ravn’s very short and wonderfully strange 2020 novel about a crew of Earth-born humans and lab-grown humanoids working uneasily alongside one another on a spaceship a century or so from now. It’s an environment of biological heterogeneity when identities become multifarious, with life as we know it far more fecund, able to be remixed and enhanced by science. The story’s told in fragments, via staff reports, which serve as short chapters, some only a sentence long. The employee interviews incrementally portray a milieu both foreign and familiar, one that does not exactly compute, as humans who’ve become more like machines and machines who’ve become more like humans, fail to form a link. Maybe that’s not because they’re so different but because they’ve become so much more like each other but not exactly like each other? Perhaps they’re repulsed by the Uncanny Valley of it all? It’s a clever corporate satire, a minimalist space opera, and, most movingly, a love letter to the end of Homo sapiens. “I exist in this new combination of melancholy and joy,” says one human employee, realizing the intermittent sweetness of our species as it approaches its twilight, a gloaming occurring not only aboard the ship but most likely everywhere else as well.
“I heard Dr. Lund made one exactly like a child. But apparently its development went wrong, it killed a lot of chickens and smeared the blood all over its face.”
The first-generation humanoid workers were made not of fiberglass but of flesh, blooming like lilacs from purple pods made of biological material, injected with hormones, fed breast milk, and spoken to sweetly by nurturing humans during gestation. They look just like us but they are still Other. They were to be updated whenever they malfunctioned or went rogue, returned to the cooperative colleagues they were designed to be, but lately the humanoids have been disengaging from the updates. As one shares in a report, “I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.” Is that due to the ghosts that are in all advanced machines no matter how careful we are, or because their creator, Dr. Lund, has been secretly developing a second-generation version of these employees, stealthily introducing them into the workforce? It’s tough to say because outré gossip, otherworldly water cooler talk, is everywhere, and anything suggested is no stranger than the reality aboard the craft, with, for instance, its draperies made from biotissue rather than chiffon. “I heard Dr. Lund made one exactly like a child,” offers a humanoid about the scientist’s work. “But apparently its development went wrong, it killed a lot of chickens and smeared the blood all over its face.” Whatever the truth is, communication between the human and non-human workers has broken down, and the former fear the latter plan to murder them, which may not be mere paranoia.
The mostly depressed human staff members are further plagued by being in an outer-space environment completely unsuited to them, emotionally or physically, longing for the familiarity of home, and vulnerable to the smallest pinhole in their spacesuits when they dock and explore. “What have I got left other than a few recollections of a lost earth?” asks one of the unmoored workers when interviewed for a report. They’re given holograms of loved ones they left behind when they signed their contracts for the mission, but it’s of little solace. Easing things somewhat for them is that New Discovery is surprisingly found to have a valley that’s lush and living, with grass, trees, flowers, even ducks. It’s a reminder of the abandoned world they crave, and it somewhat mitigates their febrile sense of nostalgia. The planet’s greatest attraction, however, is a group of differently shaped and sized objects discovered in the valley which seem somehow alive, inorganic and organic all at once, oozing, pulsating and throbbing, even sort of communicating despite not talking. These objects are collected and brought on to the spacecraft, where they become the fixation of the human workers, who fetishize them and interact with them in ways that are most definitely sexual. The intercourse reads like extraterrestrial erotica, with fragrant liquid flowing from grooves, humans caressing the moist objects, placing them in their mouths. Sometimes the objects end up soaking wet or ejaculating resin. It’s kinky and funny and charming in its own way.
“You can’t cry. You’re not programmed to cry.”
“To us, the objects are like an artificial postcard from earth,” shrewdly observes one of the humans, naming the nature of these close encounters. But what’s been left behind remains palpable, even more so because these people have had to adapt their nature in order to keep up with their humanoid cohorts. They’ve been supplemented with “add-ons,” technological enhancements necessary in the modern workplace. (None of these supplementary parts are specifically described.) Humanoids meanwhile begin to take on human qualities, even ones that seem suspiciously out of place. “You can’t cry,” one is told. “You’re not programmed to cry.” Yet tears fall. The tension between the two groups is further exacerbated by the humans being mortal and the humanoids immortal, as they continually have their systems uploaded. It’s an uneven dynamic if there ever was one.
The humanoids are a mixed bunch, just like humans are. Some are vengeful and possess violent tendencies, hoping for the opportunity to kill their creators, their controllers, while others have empathy for those who made them. There are enough seeking revenge, however, and after an obliquely referenced terrorist attack occurs in the canteen, in which a handful of humans are murdered, it becomes clear that the corporation may need to terminate the mission. That will mean death for all the humans aboard, and you can imagine similar scenarios playing out on other missions, and on Earth itself. Time is running out, at least for us human animals.
The poet wrote that “the opposite of death is desire,” but sometimes desire is the very feeling that can lead to death, even death on an existential scale. How clever we are with the machines we build: cars that cough carbon into the atmosphere, weapons of mass destruction, AI systems that may decide to scrub Homo sapiens, even if they never gain consciousness. On one level Ravn’s novel is a specific story about life in its many forms aboard one spaceship, but it’s also a microcosm of a much larger tale about our species, a reminder that being too clever can feel very satisfying and can also get you killed.•
On the Edge of Reason (Miroslav Krleža)
At the heart of Miroslav Krleža’s haunting first-person 1938 novel is one of literature’s most memorable antiheroes, a rigidly stubborn lawyer in a backwater Yugoslavian burg who tells the brazen truth in an almost accidental aside at a boozy party, a bitter remark which insults his powerful boss, and then refuses to withdraw the slight even after his liquid courage dries up. The unnamed narrator, a bourgeois “top-hatted man” as he disgustedly calls his ilk, has played the same game as everyone else in his corrupt society while advising “pointless” firms selling chamber pots and fountain pens to Persia and other points on the map, suddenly is willing to become the ultimate pariah, to suffer scorn, trials, imprisonments, to cling to the one sincere thing he’s said in his life, that one thing that’s freed him from a lifetime of complicity. Then, in the aftermath, he begins aiming additional inconvenient truths at other sacred cows and all but seals his fate. If you have even a smidgen of nihilism in your heart—and every decent person does—you’ll be drawn viscerally to his catastrophic, self-inflicted free-fall from the comfortable class to the squalid subbasement.
One evening our 52-year-old lawyer is seated at a soiree hosted by his superior, the Director-General Domaćinski, one of many similar festivities he’s attended or thrown during his decades-long career. Everybody laughs at unfunny jokes and no one points out anyone else’s embezzlement or fraud or adultery. It is, as we’re told by our narrator, a “social game played according to fixed rules.” As the son-in-law of a quack doctor who grew rich selling a dubious “digestive tea,” the lawyer is familiar with the routine, and he’s gone along to get along like all his peers. But there’s something festering inside of him, a latent rebelliousness which he discovers in real time. It turns out he’s a bothersome man.
The Director-General, a redoubtable grandee of the region’s financial and civic matters, is entertaining the guests in his vineyard for the umpteenth time with his fondest anecdote, the one about how two decades earlier he shot to death four revolutionaries/suspected thieves on his property, how he’d killed them like dogs. How happy it makes him to remember this episode. The lawyer almost inadvertently emerges from the sheepfold when he declares in a nonchalant remark, which he practically whispers, that Domaćinski’s actions were “a crime, a bloody thing, a moral insanity.”
“There are moments in everybody’s life when it is possible to hear the wheel’s of one’s own fate squeaking.”
The accusation might have been missed altogether, spoken as it was in a barely audible tone, and life could have continued unaltered, but just as the lawyer was offhandedly murmuring the charge, the Director-General had coincidentally taken a pause in his raucous regaling and what was expressed was clear to all at the table. Domaćinski is flabbergasted and every member of his claque stunned. The Director-General demands clarification and the lawyer repeats his accusation. Screams, curses and recriminations are exchanged. Domaćinski angrily contends that he was acting in self-defense when he killed the intruders, threatens to shoot the lawyer, and when the narrator reaches into his pocket for a cigarette lighter, Domaćinski pulls out a revolver. The lawyer overturns a table of food and drinks to create a diversion and escape.
When it comes to escaping his trouble in the larger sense in the wake of his outspokenness, however, the narrator refuses all overtures, rejecting several entreaties to retract his statement and lower the temperature. You would expect that a lifelong coward would backpedal after his reflexive insolence, that a clearer head would prevail, but he won’t recant his “heresy.” Instead he doubles down. “There are moments in everybody’s life when it is possible to hear the wheels of one’s own fate squeaking,” the lawyer tells us, and this is just such a moment. It is the such a moment in his life. Our narrator decides to set on fire the careful facade he’s spent his life fashioning, to burn down the whole thing. Further complicating matters is the rampant gossip in the small town, which has greatly exaggerated his offenses and labeled him mentally ill, a murderous man fit for a straitjacket. It’s innuendo gone viral, and it provokes the lawyer into a string of screaming matches and fistfights with those who’ve mischaracterized him, which further feeds the trash talk about him.
It’s perhaps a surfeit of ego as much as a yearning for honesty that leads to the extreme downturn in his fortunes, the exhaustion of playing subordinate to powerful buffoons, but the truth, whatever the vehicle that brings it to our doorstep, is still the truth. There’s something of Thomas Mann’s tone in the novel, and the lawyer is kin with the matter-of-fact thief Felix Krull, but what he’s stolen isn’t money or jewelry, but unearned honor from one of society’s pillars. In doing so, he’s also sworn at society itself, kicked at its very foundations.
In a sick society, the hero is generally viewed as a sociopath. He or she often *is* somewhat of a sociopath, which is the very thing that allows them to revolt.
Citizens in any country will make many allowances to maintain some semblance of stability, helping the center to hold. A failed society is no mere game. So, it doesn’t matter that during the subsequent trial over the so-called slander—such insults were punishable by prison at that time in that country—the lawyer, representing himself, reveals that the Director-General was likely a traitor to his country during an earlier period of his life, was discharged from the military due to financial crimes, and shot all four of the interlopers in the back, suggesting he was in no imminent danger. He’s really masterful, but he’s really in trouble. Discrediting the popular narrative is abhorrent; it’s simply not done. The narrator also manages to get on the bad side of the very biased judge presiding over his case when he points out that he recently rejected the jurist’s overture when he requested his daughter’s hand in marriage.
His family, friends and colleagues abandon the now-disgraced lawyer after the impolitic remarks. His few confidantes in his new world are others who’ve been tossed aside by society: a prostitute who was scorned by her village at an early age after a boy wooing her committed suicide, and a cellmate who stole a watch when young and was never able to land another honest job. These are people who’ve been thrown away by others, while our narrator has willingly tossed himself headlong into the same pit. For all the trials and privations endures, he’s triumphed. He’s the loser with the capital “L” and he never has to make nice again.
In a sick society, the hero is generally viewed as a sociopath. He or she often is somewhat of a sociopath, which is the very thing that allows them to revolt. There’s a rich tradition of such recalcitrant figures in literature, a long list of the children of Ahab, too many to name them all. Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas had to be compensated for his losses. Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist took his disappearing act too far. Herman Melville’s other inflexible infidel, Bartleby, the Scrivener, preferred not to. Terence Rattigan’s Arthur Winslow had to clear his son’s good name regardless of the cost of the Pyrrhic victory. You can even hear very strong echoes of the voice of Krleža’s lawyer in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, particularly in the early pages when Coleman Silk is explaining how he went from respected man to being laid low, also after a comment that caused an uproar. Roth revered and championed many overlooked Twentieth Century Eastern and Central European writers—he even served as the General Editor of the Writers From the Other Europe imprint that was established in 1976—so while I have no proof he read On the Edge of Reason, I would not be at all surprised.
Written when it was, just on the cusp of World War II, this novel was also in dialogue with the disaster that was forming on the global stage, as a cancerous nationalism had overtaken Germany, Italy and Japan, a dynamic that would bring about world war, concentration camps, relentless attempts at genocide. Vile choices were made. Some people spoke up, but they were condemned by the ruthless throng as traitors who should have kept quiet.•
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (David Graeber and David Wengrow)
Most readers learn discernment the hard way when it pertains to popular history books with grand, sweeping theories that attempt to explain so much about humans and the world. Some of these volumes are written exceedingly well and make a convincing case, offering alluringly neat answers to thorny questions, which should always be viewed as a tell. They’re often aimed at smart people who maybe aren’t as smart as they think they are, and make contrarian arguments, the perplexing Gladwellian type, promising to turn conventional wisdom on its head. They’re the kind of books that let readers emerge feeling superior, like they’re in possession of a secret that’s escaped the rubes. Almost always, though, these pop histories are wrong—or at least more wrong than right—and their beguiling theories are usually subsequently debunked, but not before the easy answers have spread widely. Like the present and the future, the past is a mess, and gaining true knowledge of it isn’t so simple.
Big History volumes should especially be questioned. When you try to tuck into one book everything from the Big Bang to the Baby Boom, you likely reduce to a tidy paragraph or two, for instance, American slavery, the Nazi Holocaust, and Rwandan genocide. Inhumanity becomes almost inconsequential. You need to go long on some subjects or you probably shouldn’t go there at all. It’s like the scene in Carol Reed’s The Third Man when the shadowy reprobate Harry Lime, framed in a Dutch angle while riding a Ferris wheel in postwar Vienna, points out the tiny people on the street below to his pulp writer friend Holly Martins. “Look down there,” he says. “Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” History at such a massive scale can obscure more readily than it illuminates, the devil and the details getting lost in the overwhelming weight of everything. So, it’s acceptable, even advisable, to be skeptical of nonfiction books with the word everything in the title. I mean, everything is a whole lot.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, isn’t a Big History book in the purest sense, not concerned with retreating all the way back to when the universe somehow first formed, but it is in pursuit of so much, from prehistory forward. The 2021 volume by the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which was published just over a year after his sad and surprising early death, and his cowriter, archaeologist David Wengrow, has everything in the title, but that isn’t the key word. Dawn is. Its raison d'être isn’t to explain everything ever but to demonstrate the origins of how human beings assemble and organize themselves. It’s also meant to be a bold corrective to the idea that we need in our time to live in top-down societies where we’re ruled by others, that we can opt for something more genially anarchic and playful if we so choose to reconsider the social order.
The Davids set out to prove risible the long-established parallel narratives of Rousseau and Hobbes, which are still sneakily influential.
Among Graeber’s gifts was his ability to frame big questions, to reimagine supposedly settled issues in an inviting way, and to preimagine future paths. He was the rare contemporary anthropologist who could popularize. It wasn’t just the sloganeering —the Occupy Wall Street rallying cry, “We Are The 99 Percent,” was mostly his—but his ability to zero in on received wisdom and calmly, playfully, ask why. He was also a lively and lucid writer, though one who wrote so much that he sometimes made serious factual mistakes in regards to the anecdotes he used in support of his large-scale theories. (The Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak contretemps that arose around Debt: The First 5000 Years is probably the most famous example of the author being too prolific for his own good.)
As is the case with any monumental anthropological study much of the material covered by Graeber and Wengrow is open to interpretation and there’s no doubt they deciphered some aspects wrongly, but this book has scholarship that’s leagues beyond what’s normally on display in the pop-history genre. The authors begin by pushing back against the twin megaliths of speculative prehistory. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s straight-out-of-Eden “Fall of Man” theory from the Eighteenth Century, which posited that humans were so-called “noble savages,” inherently peaceful, who existed in a state of grace in nature until they were corrupted by civilization. It is, unfortunately, one of the stickiest ideas ever, and it’s as ridiculous as it was romantic, but at least it got the ball rolling in terms of provoking popular discussion about how we arrived at our present condition. Equally facile was Thomas Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish, short” position which offered that those ultrawicked, hyperviolent humans had been chastened and constrained somewhat by the strictures brought about by modernity. If you’ve had the misfortune to encounter Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment-powered eyewash, he’s the leading modern pusher of the latter dose of “wisdom,” insisting that despite World Wars I and II, and an abundance of genocidal campaigns across the globe in recent memory, that it’s getting better, so much better, all the time. It’s certainly what the wealthiest technologists at Davos and the Aspen Institute want to hear and they pay top dollar for lectures, but it comes across as callously Panglossian. (This book aims to disrupt not only Pinker’s Hobbesian assertions but also the Rousseau-inspired work of Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari.)
To prove risible the long-established parallel narratives of Rousseau and Hobbes, which are still sneakily influential even if they’re no longer overtly embraced by scholars, the authors reinterpret research material already present—in some cases annals that appear to have been conveniently ignored because they don’t support orthodox theories—which prove that early human communities, be it hunter-gatherer tribes or villages or towns, from prehistory through the Early American era, were always more complex, varied and vibrant than we’ve been led to believe. “Human beings spent the last 40,000 years or so moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies and dismantling them,” the writers declare. It’s considered an anti-evolutionist stance, but even common sense will tell us that progress—or regress—doesn’t occur in an orderly procession. Climate and terrain and resources and natural disasters and human experimentation led to a variety of outcomes, as it wasn’t a straight line from small bands of foragers to long lines at food trucks. The Davids reject the notion that the invention of agriculture was what destroyed us or saved us, believing farming to be just another tool in the box rather than a deciding factor. These early communities they’ve studied didn’t always have or need governments or rulers, something the authors believe has been forgotten in academia and popular imagination. “Scholarship does not always advance,” they assert. “Sometimes it slips backwards.”
It wasn’t ignorance of European systems that made Native Americans live in looser cooperative groupings but rather because they’d made a conscious decision to be anti-authoritarian.
This assiduously researched tome is meant to be a corrective to the limited way they believe we look at history and the present possibilities for social organization. It certainly accomplishes that feat, though you may be left wondering throughout the book, which is supported by interpretation of incomplete data and artifacts but few statistics, about the scope of their findings. Yes, there were unsurprisingly examples of non-hierarchical communities anywhere people existed on the planet, places where impudence and individualism ruled and no chief or king or emperor could tell you to do anything, but the parade of examples can make it seem like this was the norm. I’m neither an anthropologist nor an archaeologist, but it seems like a case of the exception being held up as a rule, since to the best of my knowledge the majority of ancient societies did have powerful rulers. You may get the feeling that in some instances—or even in overall conclusion—the authors have placed their thumbs on the scale because of where their sympathies lie.
Graeber and Wengrow name three rules for identifying communities or states that offer genuine social liberty: 1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings, 2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others, and 3) the freedom to shape new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones. So where were these types of egalitarian settlements and cities that flouted the type of rigid structuring we find ourselves in today, mostly with formidable governments enforcing codified rules? They’re actually easy to find until recent history.
The examples from prehistory are numerous but they’re also somewhat conjectural because of how few records exist in any form. Sometimes it seems like authors are trying to piece together a ceramic ewer with just a broken-off handle. We can basically identify through the remnants, though, all sorts of arrangements from Neolithic societies forward, tribes with strong leaders and early towns with communal decision-making. Some of these societies came together when they hit upon an agreeable arrangement, and then rapidly emptied out when the good times were over. Then they started their pursuit all over again. The book holds special regard for those people and communities who thumbed their noses at authority while conducting their search.
The Dawn of Everything is on its surest footing, however, when examining the multitude of ways the more-recent indigenous tribes organized themselves in America, Canada, and Mexico, in no small part because of the extant copious ethnographic records and the many artifacts that were discovered and preserved. The French Jesuit priests who in the Seventeenth Century visited the expansive North American colonial territory they called “New France,” came expecting benighted peoples in need of some old-time religion. Instead they found natives with a sophisticated understanding of government and economy. It wasn’t ignorance of European systems that made Native Americans live in looser cooperative groupings but rather because they’d made a conscious decision to be anti-authoritarian, keenly aware of the possibilities and dangers of centralized power. They willfully placed the greatest emphasis on individual freedoms, mutual aid and political equality. In many tribes, the chief couldn’t order anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do, which is probably why European visitors were so impressed by the debating skills of the indigenous people: If you can’t compel someone through law or force to do something that needs doing, you’d better be able to persuade them through speech.
Some Native American collectives employed a hybrid system where there would be “theater states” that were basically an ad-hoc hierarchy to be obeyed during the crucial hunting or farming season, with the authority quickly dismantled once the work was complete. While these peoples had a more rudimentary material culture than their European counterparts, there was no homelessness or endless toil, and quite a few communities created elaborate earthworks that were informed by knowledge of advanced mathematics. You can hear Graeber perhaps most loudly of the two Davids in the book’s adoration for the tribes’ sense of mischief, especially when they participated in their seasonal carnivals, which were used to mock the idea of central power, with “kings” being crowned and dethroned as a sort of sport.
“What if instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
This is a rich and rewarding book, and everyone who reads it will emerge asking better questions, but there are some assertions made that you may not think credible. Bureaucracy was one of Graeber’s biggest bugbears, and this book agrees with the notion that the rise of such impersonal systems led to large-scale slavery, because it rendered all interactions transactional. This seems a major misunderstanding of human psychology as well as history, in its own way a Rousseauesque tale of virtuous humans being led astray by paperwork. Nazi Germany was a case of neighbors turning against neighbors they knew very well, nothing impersonal about it, as was Rwandan genocide. While the Nazis certainly aggressively employed bureaucracy to efficiently enable their horrors, it was only a weapon to achieve the end of their choosing. Other topics covered, like the massive home-building project taken up by the people of the ancient Teotihuacan society, an egalitarian act which provided handsome housing for almost all citizens, may leave you thinking about how relatively simple and affordable it would be to improve life in our own age, to end homelessness in America if we decided to do so like our forerunners on the continent did.
As you might have surmised, the book is equally about the future as it is the past, and the biggest question it puts forth is this one: “What if instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” In America, China and many other states large and small across the globe, despite being organized under different ideologies, we’ve allowed ourselves to be hemmed into intractable systems of financial inequality. The authors believe these systems remain in place merely because of a lack of imagination, but that seems like a tough sell.
It’s not likely an utter lack of ideas, but more the inability to do as much with them as is required. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and other recent U.S. social movements have made something of a mark, but progress is painfully slow, moving the weight of the world onerous. Occasionally dynamics beyond our control align the right way, as they did during the Sixties, and change can be more than incremental, but those are exceptional times. And things being torn down might not be the panacea this book seems to believe it would be. Even if we could decentralize society overnight and start anew, some of the reinventions would be absolutely heinous. In a world of David Graebers, it would be a fun thing to do, but that’s not the world we live in. Just think about the people who most want to dismantle America right now, who most despise the government and want it disassembled. Consider the MAGA zealots, think about the malignant forces that formed a tribe on social media replete with “fun” memes like racist frogs. They not only hate central governance but also equality and science and even basic truth. Is that reinvention you can root for? Does it seem like they’re playful?
Decentralization also brings with it the very real concern of abandoning security. What if America decided to “unilaterally disarm” when it comes to strong central governance? Is that realistic in a world of competing nations? Would that leave us and our allies prone to the very real dangers that exist? One argument against highly structured societies (in addition to ballooning inequality) is that they make it easier to create ever-more-elaborate material goods. While some of those products are able to extend lifespans, some are bombs that can murder millions in a moment, and others can gradually fill the atmosphere with enough carbon to be an existential threat. But until there’s a total collapse of the species these things are going to be with us, and we had better figure out a way to better care for the Earth, each other and ourselves. Yes, that will definitely require some sort of high-minded reinvention as the authors suggest. It’s important to remember, though, that just as civilization isn’t always so civil, anarchy isn’t guaranteed to be genial.•
Mr. President (Miguel Ángel Asturias)
The Latin American Dictator Novel that arguably pushed surrealism into magical realism several decades before Gabriel García Márquez and others popularized the literary device globally, Mr. President is Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias’ most famous work and one that will retain currency as long as there are humans, because provided there’s more than one of us on this planet the possibility of authoritarianism remains. It’s no mere political tract or protest literature, however, as the stylistic flourishes, vivid melodrama and its earthy quality make it a compellingly readable classic. The author began the 13-year process of writing his book in 1922 while living in exile in France during a period when surrealists were in vogue and you can certainly see the influence. The book wasn’t published, though, until the late 1940s because of his homeland’s censorship codes. Unfortunately other dictatorships had followed the one that inspired Asturias’ novel, that of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the totalitarian who reigned in Guatemala from 1898 to 1920.
“What an awful nightmare,” the character Miguel Angel Face remarks when awakening with a start from the horrors of the unconscious. “Luckily, reality is different.” In this novel though, nightmares and reality bleed into one another, as do inebriation and sobriety, humans and ghosts, even life and death. That’s because the cruel dictatorship of the unnamed President has birthed an arbitrary, discombobulating society, but also due to the novelist’s creation of a world where sensations and situations flow freely, unencumbered by strict categories and demarcations.
“Had it been a dream? The difference between dream and reality is purely rhetorical. Asleep or awake—which was it?”
The novel begins with a headlong, hallucinatory sprint through the privations of the homeless community of Guatemala City, in the neighborhood of Portal del Señor, which is inhabited by feral beggars left to scavenge and steal, walking like the dead, crawling like four-legged creatures. It’s a brutish, bravura opening, introducing us to an underworld in which there are no alms for the poor who are missing not only the basic sustenance of life, but often limbs and teeth and ears and eyeballs. In this scenario of vomiting dogs and alligator-shaped clouds, the impoverished street people are as cruel to one another as life has been to them. A blind woman living in this mess endures nightmares in which she’s been hanged and her flesh is besieged by flies. Far worse is what actually happens in waking life. Disease, hunger and random violence are ubiquitous, and there is little sleep, no peace, constant drunkenness. Saddest of all these unfortunate people is Pelele, a sickly mute man who’s tormented by all those around him about the grief he feels for his deceased mother. When he leaves the Portal del Señor one day for greener pastures, vultures aren’t content to wait for nature to take its course, attacking the ragged man, tearing off part of his upper lip.
Into one of these infernal nights strides Colonel José Parrales Sonriente, the merciless military careerist known as the “Man with the Tiny Mule,” who conducts the murderous handiwork of the President, terrifying the citizenry into cowering. He happens upon Pelele and screams “Mother!” at him, unable to resist squashing someone who appears to him a bug. The ragged man snaps, summons whatever energy remains in his body, and kills the Colonel with his fists and knees. Word travels fast and the other beggars soon know what happened. When they’re rounded up by the police, though, the motley lot is beaten until they agree to testify that the murder was committed by the retired General Canales and his lawyer, Abel Carvajal. Just one of the homeless people, a legless former soldier named Mosco, refuses to go along with the frame job, and he’s hanged by his thumbs until he’s dead, his torso subsequently thrown into a trash cart. Completely innocent of the murder, Canales’ only “crime” had been to once remark during a speech that “Generals are the Princes of the Army,” an immodest comment that angered the President. It was an improvised flourish, a throwaway line, and it sealed his fate.
In a time and place so diabolical, lorded over by an imperious President, the “father and protector,” a man of whims and wickedness and weapons, this one improvident boast sets into motion a cascade of calamities, destroying lives. It’s a farce by design. In this grim world a handful win, most lose, and all are prone to the caprices of a tyrant. “It’s a crapshoot, my friend, just a crapshoot,” explains Old Fulgencio, who sells lottery tickets on the city streets, describing life in a mercurial society ruled by unpredictable impulses. “The only law in this country is the lot-lot-lottery.” Even if you’re one of the favored few, you can navigate the rampant absurdities for only so long. Eventually your “friends” betray you or a small slight is avenged with outsize retribution and you face a tribunal of drunken officers who don’t listen to your protestations of innocence. Then you face the firing squad or are kept prisoner until death in a deeply dug hole.
“Fate had it that a parrot pecked an eye and left her one-eyed. I ended up grilling that parrot—I would’ve gladly roasted two—and gave it to a stray dog who was stupid enough to eat it and get rabies.”
That’s the lesson learned in brutal fashion by Miguel Angel Face over the balance of the narrative. The “favorite confidant” of the President, Angel Face is described as being “like Satan, both good and evil,” a man capable of treachery or largesse, though he’s as close to the hero of the novel as we have. He’s assigned by his boss with the counterintuitive task of helping General Canales escape arrest, the dictator believing the accused taking flight will make him seem guilty to the public. Angel Face does as ordered, putting Canales on a perilous path toward making it across the border. At the urgent request of Canales, whom Angel Face knows to be an honorable man, he secretly accepts another mission, to safely ferry the General’s young daughter, Camila, to his brother’s home.
In exile across the border, the General becomes, in his dotage, a revolutionary who plans to return to his homeland and end the menacing rule of the President. Meanwhile, lawlessness in Guatemala continues apace. Camila has been stashed for the time being with a woman who runs a bar. Rogues hum around her and Angel Face, trying to profit by sharing intel about their doings. It’s not to be unexpected, as information is currency to be sold or traded in this paranoid place. Sex workers snitch on generals who speak out against the President when they’re drunk, and secret police lurk everywhere, listening for useful tidbits when not committing murders per their orders. Despite their jockeying, it will end badly for almost all of them, except maybe for one or two fortunate lottery winners.
In part because of his burgeoning love for Camila, Angel Face begins to grow vulnerable, one thing you don’t want to be in this country of sharp knives. Not one of her uncles will offer shelter to the young woman, abruptly disowning her because they fear angering the President. Angel Face continues to hide the girl, which is risky, but when he impulsively agrees to marry the girl in an attempt to save her life when she becomes ill with pneumonia—a scenario where something like magical realism comes into play—it’s considered an outrage. The President and the dictator’s “favorite” is soon a target for those who had been his friends the day before, even for those whose lives he’d saved in the not-so-distant past.
While I was writing this review, journalist José Rubén Zamora, who has long written about government corruption in Guatemala, was sentenced to six years in prison for the charge of money laundering, though it seems clear his critical reportage about President Alejandro Giammattei was his actual “crime.”
Asturias’ aesthetic, both intellectual and operatic, features descriptive writing that’s consistently spectacular. He writes that a prostitute “smelled of beef broth when she didn’t smell of hair spray.” When Angel Face fleetingly considers murdering the President, he imagines him as a “pile of frozen meat with the Presidential banner across the chest.” Executioners are described thusly: “Puppets made of gold or salted meat.” It’s a carnivore’s dream. In more surreal moments there are lines like these: “The red trouser men take off their heads, toss them into the air, and let them fall.” Some sequences go far beyond even those gems, offering up incredibly visual and unexpected writing. In a five-page span there are two descriptive passages that pop the eyes. The first is a description of a piano player at a brothel:
A man dressed like a woman played the piano. Both he and the piano were missing a few keys. “I’m ugly, buggy, and boring,” he answered when people asked him why he painted his face. Not to offend, he added, “My friends call me Pepe, the young men call me Violeta. I wear a low-cut blouse, not because I play tennis, but to show off my lovey-dovey breasts. A monocle to look chic, and a frock to distract. Face powder—how shocking!—and rouge hide the smallpox scars on my face, there they are, and there they’ll be, scattered like confetti. I don’t pay attention. I’m my own piper.”
And the brothel madame, known as Gold Tooth, among other sobriquets, reminiscing about her grandmother:
“Fate had it that a parrot pecked an eye and left her one-eyed. I ended up grilling that parrot—I would’ve gladly roasted two—and gave it to a stray dog who was stupid enough to eat it and get rabies.”
It’s not easy to combine magical realism with fascist brutality, the former can dull the spiked edges of atrocity. Here, though, it just amplifies the nightmarish quality of the horror. One of surrealism’s major goals is to express something that’s more real than real, and Asturias is overwhelmingly successful in this effort.
While I was writing this review, journalist José Rubén Zamora, who has long written about government corruption in Guatemala, was sentenced to six years in prison for the charge of money laundering, though it seems clear his critical reportage about President Alejandro Giammattei was his actual “crime.” Poverty, police brutality and human rights abuses are threats waiting around each corner in any place that has fallen before a fascist, including contemporary Guatemala, echoes of Mr. President one century after Asturias began composing his masterpiece. It’s a book that will always be with us because of its greatness and because of our lack of the same.•