Reviews and Comments

In a moment of synchronicity, Cormac McCarthy died two days before I finished this book. It was strange to see him in the headlines because I had been talking about him since I opened N Scott Momaday's masterpiece House Made of Dawn. I don't like to give equivalences when describing books, but in this case it's an obvious one. This book was a clear influence on McCarthy, either directly or indirectly. And it is powerful.

The story is about Abel, a longhair indigenous American, set between 1945 and 1952. He has grown up on a reservation in New Mexico. He suffers the indignity of this experience, and many other slights and insults to tradition and life, like a thousand small cuts.

The story is of this experience of slow erasure, of violent intolerance. I is incredible to think that this book is over 50 years old. Each section has a different voice but all are captivating. Each skips between memory and story, presenting a microcosm of an experience suffered by so many. And each is beautiful and devastating.

Monica Gagliano has written a unique book. It is a memoir of a kind describing her experience of learning from the voices of various plants: Socoba (Bellaco-caspi), Tobacco, Corn, Ayahuasca and others. The voices tell stories and help direct her scientific research.

The first half of the book is brilliant. It is fluid and calm, poetic and playful. Despite Gagliano's blinkered view of her own privilege (she writes as if everyone has the freedom to travel freely around the world and work in universities), it reads wonderfully and creatively and she constructs a philosophy that is like an intersection between Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, although not calling on either. Instead she calls on various plants, supported in her conversations by humans who understand their world. The plants suggest experiments that she should follow, and she listens. This theory and process is magnificent, adventurous and wild, and very brave.

However, when the experiments begin, they are not particularly nuanced and we only see the ones that support the claims she is making. While the ideas are terrific and the results are exciting, there is a lack of scientific rigour. For example, an experiment works on peas in isolation, showing how they can be trained to respond to stimuli like Pavolv's dogs, but there is no follow-on to see if this might work in other conditions. It probably would, and I would love to believe it, but claiming success in such experiments only repeats the mistakes that Gagliano criticises in science, where there is a blindness to other results, particularly those you do not want to see. Further to this, there is a lot of anger against the academic world on the later pages (sometimes justified, at other times harsh) and repeated claims to have 'discovered' truths that have already been presented by many theorists and artists over the past few hundred years (and likely much longer).

In the end, the plants speak, and Gagliano listens, but it feels like if she had listened to some more humans she might have an even broader story to tell. Maybe someone else will take on this mantle, and hopefully will be inspired by some of the wonderful work that is presented here.

The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.

While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes many satirical shots at nationalism and nationhood, employing as a punchline the fictional island nation of Mingheria at a time when nation states were becoming a way of politically understanding territory in many parts of the world.