Review: The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book would make a good introduction to Hemingway's writing style, as it's a relatively short read and a tad more accessible in comparison to say, The Old Man and the Sea, that other short Hemingway work that most people I've talked to apparently hated. (I didn't mind it so much, but I'll admit it wasn't that interesting to me either).

Hemingway is largely known for a writing style known as the Iceberg Theory, which pretty much boils down to the idea that the words written on the page only scratch the surface of what is actually happening, hence Iceberg. My memory of the other Hemingway novels I've read might be a bit fuzzy, but I felt like this concept was the most jarringly apparent here, as there was always this lingering sense of words being left unspoken by the narrator in just about every scene and circumstance. He drags you into this strange, foreign world of expatriates, where arbitrary social behaviors and outlandish lifestyles are taken for granted, and no one seems to give a care in the world for what's going on around them. You get the impression that there's something fundamentally wrong or broken about Jake and everyone else in this story at some level, and they're all just too helpless or indifferent to do anything about it, so they just go about doing whatever it is they're used to doing. It's not that glamorous of a lifestyle, when you really think about it- even though the exotic allure is still there.

Jake Barnes, the narrator himself, has a way of sounding blasé about situations that would probably rile up most other people- drunken brawls, a cheating lover, bull fights, anti-Semitism, and so on. He goes on and on about a lot of events and then nothing in particular, and then at the end of the day you still don't really have a sense of what he really thinks about all of this. Or maybe you could infer it from the subdued way he talks about certain people around him, or his actions, but it's not really all that clear afterwards and probably still debatable today.

This novel is fascinating, but at the same time I get this impression that I would never want to meet any of these people in real life; none of them are really all that likable from the way they talk and act, and I found myself questioning Jake's own intentions by the end of it all. Considering how autobiographical the narrative is in a sense, it makes me wonder how much I'd have liked Hemingway as a person, if I ever met him. But it might also just have been how the early period of his life was; I distinctly recall liking the characters in For Whom The Bell Tolls a lot more, and that's a completely different perspective on the life of the expatriate... and quite frankly, much more admirable in comparison.

Review: The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad

The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad by Robert W. Schaefer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So I hear that this is one of the best books to read on the insurgency in Chechnya. Not having read anything else of this nature yet, I can attest that this is at least an incredibly informative primer on the subject, as well as an excellent case study of how NOT to handle an insurgency/conflict (for other examples of well known past and ongoing insurgency conflicts, see Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria).

Schaefer starts out by establishing and defining some of the key terms in the field of counterinsurgency- namely, insurgency and terrorism, which actually are not the same thing and draws attention to the unfortunately named “War on Terror” that the US espoused during the 2000’s. Insurgencies themselves are organized movements in rebellion against a constituted government or authority for fundamentally political or ideological reasons that rely on subversion and armed conflict to achieve their objectives. Schaefer goes on the define the four prerequisites needed for an insurgency conflict to happen: lack of government control, ideology, available leadership, and vulnerable population, likening them analogously to the components needed to make a campfire.

Conversely, when we talk of terrorism today, it’s important to note that while there are terrorist groups that exist for the sake of causing chaos/destruction, terrorism also exists as a means to an end for insurgencies. Insurgencies often use terrorist acts as a means for coercing a desired action out of their opposing government, by attacking the population that supports it, and otherwise demonstrating to their local population that the government is illegitimate, by creating the perception that it is unable to defend its own citizens.

Al Qaeda is better defined as an insurgency than a terrorist cell in this case, and Schaefer does a good job of explaining exactly why that is the case. And incidentally, insurgencies are much more difficult to deal with than regular nations/combatants in the conventional kinds of wars we’re familiar with, which is why they persist for so long: because defeating an insurgency requires both a long-term political solution as well as a military one. It is not sufficient to defeat an insurgency through military means; one needs to win the support of the local populace involved in the conflict through counter-ideological means, delegitimizing the insurgents themselves by eliminating the issues that would motivate the populace to support them in the first place. Otherwise, the insurgents can just go into hiding among the locals and continue to breed support from them and anger at the government until a later point when they have sufficient means to start attacking again.

The insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus functions as a great case study for how to deal (and especially how not to deal) with such conflicts in general, as the conflict has effectively been ongoing for more than 300 years- morphing back and forth through different phases thanks to the generally ineffective methods that Russia has utilized and continues to rely on to this day. Schaefer spends much of the book outlining the history of the conflict, from the early days when the North Caucasus was besieged from all three directions (Ottomans + Persia + whoever controlled Russia) through the era of Yermolov and later the USSR, and finally the two Chechen Wars of the 90’s to the present shortly before the Sochi Winter Olympics. In the process he also provides much needed context on the Islamic nature of the conflict, noting that Islam has always been a factor since 300 years back, and clarifying the difference between the denominations/ideologies of Islam involved, Sufism and Salafism and Wahhabism and so on.

The most important content in the book is Schaefer’s detailed analysis of Russia’s counterinsurgency approach, and how counter it is in its priorities compared to established Western methodologies. I can only barely scratch the surface of the many issues that Schaefer addresses, but to put it one way, Russia’s problems are largely due to its lack of focus on the needs of the local Chechen populace, relying more on the support of the greater Russian population instead and otherwise ruling through coercion and fear. It has done very little to address the issues that have lead the local populations in the North Caucasus to see the insurgents as a legitimate cause in the first place, instead relying primarily on short-term solutions via the military/FSB and media censorship to control the public perception of the conflict. Because its standards are completely different from Western ones, Russia is able to judge its own methods as successful, even though the insurgents persist and still continue to carry out terrorist acts on the Russian population to this day, with no end in sight.

It is incredibly eye-opening to read about this conflict and see all of the ways it has gone wrong- and ironically, right in some cases. Russia’s methodology isn’t completely ineffective; it actually has made a number of gains in the past decade that Schaefer has also done a great job of presenting- but these gains are often only transient/short-term and not entirely sufficient for the kind of long-term recovery that the North Caucasus really needs given its lack of stability and poor infrastructure… not to mention the innumerable human rights abuses that have occurred in the area in the process. One can only hope that the situation may improve someday, but it’s hard to tell.

(Just to note: this book is rather expensive if you can't find it in a library. ~$50 on Amazon. Sigh.)

Review: The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most [implicitly] terrifying and sinister scenarios I’ve ever seen in a sci-fi. What if your dreams really could rewrite the nature of reality? And what if someone tried to take advantage of your ability to do so? And I guess on a more abstract level, would anyone really have the right to harness such a power?

I’m almost reminded of Death Note except on a much grander scale: it’s one thing to supernaturally kill people off; it’s another to just rewrite them out of existence and everyone else’s memories altogether… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg here.

In this book, Le Guin manages to take a deceptively simple premise- the reality-altering power of dreams- and use it to explore a ton of other crazy philosophical ideas and possibilities from a wide range of other utopian/dystopian tropes. You wouldn’t even recognize it as a sci-fi until some of the later changes, some of which actually made me giddy for reasons I won’t spoil. I found myself wondering why there wasn’t already a movie of this, until I did a wiki search and saw that there’s already been two movie adaptations. I’m clearly behind the times.

The implications that Le Guin derives can feel a little heavy-handed at times, being not-so-subtly critical of utilitarianism and practically everything that the psychologist Haber does against George's conscience, and especially considering how conveniently inconvenient George’s power can be at the worst possible moment, but at the same time the concerns espoused are natural and valid ones. The novelty of the premise and the way the rest of the story developed were enough for me to get past that and just enjoy the ride, anyway... along with the interesting ideas.

Review: Nine Stories

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty straightforward to read, but NOT straightforward to understand, which I guess is how these kinds of short stories ought to be written to begin with. It felt more jarring here considering how often I would find myself puzzling over what just happened after finishing each story.

A lot of the stories aren’t very… happy when you think about them, which kind of draws on Salinger’s preoccupation with the experiences of soldiers post-war and the shallowness of traditional American values and society in the 40’s and 50’s. Incidentally, I couldn't help notice how children played a role in almost all of the stories. The first one, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", encapsulates all of this pretty well, and especially after considering it within the context of the later works about Seymour Glass, or should I say "see more glass"… I just wanted to crawl into a bed somewhere and lie down for a while. Sigh.

Three of the stories here are actually Glass family stories, but you wouldn’t really know it unless you’d read Zooey or Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters first, because these stories function well independently already, and actually came out before those two, which were written at a point when Salinger was starting to consolidate the world of the Glasses (pun intended). The stories here are also very different in character than his later works, although you can start to see signs of his interest in spiritual topics like Zen philosophy by the time of the last story in this collection, “Teddy."

A worthwhile read overall, but expect to have to think a lot more than usual to really appreciate, because it’s really easy for these to go over your head and they go by fast.

Review: A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wonder what I’d have thought if I read this a decade and a half earlier. The idea of a tesseract isn’t exactly new to me anymore (and just look at popular films like Interstellar now), but for a kid I’d imagine it’d be eye-opening… as are a lot of other developments in this book. It’s a great read for anyone young and looking to expand their imagination.

That said:

- I found the characters not really all that believable, especially Calvin; at least you could get away with calling Meg and Charles precocious or something even though that’s still stretching things a bit.

- The explicit references to Christian ideas and quotes from the Bible felt out of place; they often got mentioned in passing without much in the way of reflection or commentary in the context of the actual story, so I found them hard to appreciate here even if I might actually agree with them. Just what are they doing here?

- The final resolution was a bit too predictable. I know it’s a children’s book, but still, given all of the other scientific and philosophical ideas going on, finishing it all with some (view spoiler)[love wins-deus ex machina combo (hide spoiler)] is really disappointing… although ironically fitting with the narrative’s tone.

Basically some fascinating ideas at play, but I’m not so sure about their execution or if I should be giving it all a pass given the target audience. But honestly, I think children’s lit can do (and has done) better.