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One good thing to be said about three day weekends with what the media calls “dangerous” wind chills? A wonderful opportunity to gather around the fireplace and read. In fact, even with all but one daughter home, there’s been little television and mostly reading (my only trips being to the library and to a hockey game, of course). Thus, a few odds and ends:
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street
Just as in my last review, here’s another book that makes me reconsider my rule of thumb that my books of the year are limited to books published that year. Had I read it two weeks before I did, Dorothea Dieckmann’s short novel, Guantanamo, would have easily made, if not topped, my 2007 list. In fact, I’m going to pull out some tired old war horses here: It grabs you from the first page. It is masterfully written. It is a “must read.” Most important, it is important.
Guantanamo does what excellent fiction should do — transport us to places we can’t go. Here, that place is inside the mind of a prisoner at the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Rashid is a 20-year old nonpracticing Muslim born and raised in Germany. He is half Indian and half German. He travels to Dehli to meet his grandmother and eventually befriends a young Afghan who takes him to Pakistan. Rashid gets caught up in the midst of an anti-American demonstration, is arrested and ends up at Gitmo.
Those are the “facts” (or are they?) of how Rashid ended up being a prisoner of the U.S. military. While the facts (or Rashid’s memory) may occasionally blur, Dieckmann’s exploration of the mind is as clear and expressive as you can find. Guantanamo, first published in Germany in 2004 and translated by Tim Mohr for last year’s U.S. edition, takes us inside Rashid’s thoughts, memories and emotions. The physical effects of his arrest, treatment, imprisonment and interrogations are certainly part and parcel of this — and described in haunting detail. But this is as much an investigation of the psyche, one that is equally as haunting. Dieckmann’s concise yet eloquent prose takes us on a harrowing journey that at times borders on a fever dream. She relies on public descriptions of the base and conditions there for the story’s framework but, as she notes, “As regards the inner details, only imagination can provide those[.]”
Dieckmann’s imagination — and her attention to detail — are stunning given all she packs into merely 150 pages. Some will simply view Guantanamo as a condemnation of U.S. policy and practices. In that regard, it is somewhat disheartening that it takes a German novelist to address those issues in such impressive fashion. Yet it would be unfair — and flat wrong — to view the work as a political tract. Just as one of the book’s two epigrams is the motto of the Joint Military Task Force Guantanamo (“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”), the other is Franz Kafka’s short prose piece, “At Night.” Guantanamo goes beyond exploring the political questions that may surround the former into a Kafkaesque realm that explores the limits of the body and psyche of an ordinary human being.
Dieckmann’s writing style cinches it all. She writes with such clarity and power that Guantanamo could, and perhaps should, serve as an exemplar for writing classes. She takes us inside Rashid’s thoughts and experiences in such a compelling way that I frequently found myself stopping to marvel not only at what she conveyed as the few words she used to do so. In fact, for the first time in months, I found myself compelled to underline passages in a book I was reading for pleasure. (Meaning it’s a good thing I didn’t get it from the library.) Guantanamo‘s effectiveness and much of its feeling stems in part from Dieckmann’s command and the power of succinct expression.
Sometimes the words used to describe books become shopworn because they are tossed around too easily. To call Guantanamo stunning, compelling and exquisitely written is to give those terms the weight and meaning they deserve.
Memories are dangerous. They bring time into the cage, and the cage is too small for that.
Dorothea Dieckmann, Guantanamo
Global warming is a focus of a new South Dakota Supreme Court decision. In it, the Court unanimously upholds the permitting of a new coal-fired electric generating plant in northeast South Dakota. While the Court acknowledges the potential threat of global warming, it says decisions in this area rest with the executive and legislative branches of government.
The decision stems from a variety of environmental organizations groups appealing the Public Utilities Commission’s decision to grant a permit for a proposed 600 megawatt (MW) coal-fired electric generating plant in Grant County. The plant is projected to produce 4.6 million MW hours of electricity each year, providing energy for consumers in South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana, and Wisconsin. In doing so, though, it is estimated to emit approximately 4.7 million tons of carbon dioxide each year and more than 225 million tons over its expected life.
Still, an environmental impact statement determined the plant would produce about 18 percent less carbon dioxide than existing coal-fired plants because of proposed used of more efficient technology. As a result, the statement concluded overall air quality impacts would not “exceed significance criteria.” In contesting the permit, the environmental groups contended the carbon dioxide emissions present a threat of serious injury by contributing to global warming. An industry expert said the evidence was insufficient to conclude the emissions would cause a “costly adverse impact on the environment.”
Based in part on the newer technology the plant would use, the PUC determined the plant would “not contribute materially” to increased production of human-caused carbon dioxide, increasing U.S. emissions by only approximately seven-hundredths of one percent. It concluded the plant “will not pose a threat of serious injury to the environment or to the social and economic conditions of the inhabitants or expected inhabitants in the siting area.”
In upholding the PUC, the Supreme Court recognized the scientific community sees global warming as a critical problem but said it was not one to be resolved by the judiciary. “The social, economic, and environmental consequences of global warming implicate policy decisions constitutionally reserved for the executive and legislative branches. …. No matter how grave our concerns on global warming, we cannot allow personal views to impair our role under the Constitution.” Thus, the nature of any threat posed by this facility and the acceptability of such a threat is left to the PUC applying existing state law. “Resolving what is acceptable for the people of South Dakota is not for this Court. The Legislature and Congress must balance the competing interests of economic development and protection of our environment.”
The decision is also influenced by the (boring to lay people) legal standards that apply to PUC decisions and the Court’s review of them. Yet those matters also undergird a decision that is among the kinds of cases that lead people to demonize the courts. For example, environmental groups could point to it as an abdication of the Court’s duties or that it takes too narrow a focus by looking only at “what is acceptable for the people of South Dakota,” not the synergistic effect for the nation or the world. A decision the other way likely would have become another arrow in the quiver of those who love to complain about so-called “judicial activism.” Even parts of the current ruling may lead some to chirp about activism.
In the course of the decision, the Court recognized that global warming and carbon dioxide emissions are considered harmful by the scientific community. I find it interesting first that even South Dakota has become a forum for battles over global warming — a battleground that likely is going to be revisited more broadly with the proposed Hyperion oil refinery. But it also says a lot for how far concerns and discussions about global warming have come in our individual and political consciousness when a state Supreme Court recognizes it is a legitimate area of concern.
Global warming presents a momentous and complex threat to our planet.
In the Matter of Otter Tail Power, 2008 SD 5 (Jan. 16, 2008)
If there was any doubt I am enthralled with foreign fiction, it is totally erased. The first four books I’ve read this year are translated works. There’s not a single weak one among them and Out Stealing Horses is among the strongest. It is yet one more reason why I need to quit limiting my books of the year to books published the year I read them.
Comparison is always dangerous but Norwegian novelist Per Petterson’s approach and story kept bringing to mind both Philip Roth’s Everyman and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, two of my favorite books of the last several years. (If you’re not familiar with either of those works, do yourself a favor and read them.) True, throwing an author in with Robinson and Roth is high praise. Petterson deserves it.
First published in the U.S. in 2007 by a small, St. Paul-based publishing house, Out Stealing Horses won the 2003 Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Award. Its narrator, Trond Sander, has retired to a small cabin in rural Norway. While Trond intends to live the remainder of his life there alone, at an unhurried pace and in peace, he can’t help but contemplate his life so far. In particular, he thinks of the summer of 1948, which he spent with his father in a similar cabin near the Swedish border. That summer forever affected his life and that of his family and a neighboring family.
Translated by Anne Born, the book moves almost flawlessly between the present and 1948. Petterson’s sentence structure, frequently run ons, makes us feel as if we are listening in on Sander’s inner conversations, whether his present-day thought process or the flow of memory. In addition to slowly unfolding the tale as Robinson does in Gilead, the book also shares with that work and Everyman the core theme of exploring how we’ve lived our lives and certain events, including the seemingly routine, brought us to where we are today. You can’t help but think that in many of his ideas and feelings Trond, too, is an everyman, even if those ideas have never quite taken full shape in our own mind. It also looks at the public persona and the private person.
People like it when you tell them things, in suitable proportions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to.
The events of 1948 are big and small. Most of Trond’s current life borders on or is mundane. But that is part of everyone’s story, how both personally momentous events and seemingly insignificant decisions put us on the path of our lives and off other paths that would have kept us from being where and who we are today. As such, perhaps I shouldn’t label this foreign fiction. Like much excellent writing, this is universal fiction.
I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility.
Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
I cast my votes 10 days ago for nominees for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. (The phrase “cast my votes” must be liberally construed. Here’s how the nominees are actually selected.) Anyway, the finalists were announced Saturday and while I did better than last year, I either don’t read the same books as or don’t agree with those who really decide the nominees.
Two books I voted for made the finalist list — both in the category of criticism. They are Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream and Ben Ratiliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (brief review here), which I voted for in the biography category even though I wondered about putting it under criticism. Not only did none of my picks in fiction, nonfiction and biography not make it anywhere, I haven’t read any of the finalists in those categories.
Ah, the life of an illiterati.
[C]ritics and reviewers … cannot give what the author, the artist so foolishly looks for — imaginative and original judgment.
Doris Lessing, Introduction, The Golden Notebook
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