Reviews and Comments

I turned to this book feeling really uncomfortable with the way the invasion of Ukraine is used to justify militarisation, but also understanding the sense of betrayal that I understand Ukrainian leftists feel when their ideological comrades abroad oppose equipping the country with arms to defend itself. Of course, states, governments and armies are some of the most fucked-up 'things' humans have invented, but surely self-determination and some level of democracy are worth fighting for.

The book did not really provide a satisfying reflection on this topic. I felt that the author doesn't have the mental space to do that: of course he doesn't, he has been in the army for years, far from his family, angry at his fellow Ukranians who have decided to hide, flee or disert, at the Russians that, he feels, have not been able to stand up for their own rights, much less for the lives of Ukranians, at 'the West', who passes judgements while living in a bubble. Which is all more than fair enough.

What the book does deliver, however, is a very thoughtful, moving account of what is like to be called to go to war when one hates wars, and responding to the call willingly. In the past year, I have often found that it is hard to really immagine the full desperation that comes with sleeping in a tent in Gaza, knowing your chances of being killed during the night are high, that there will be no food in the morning, that there is no chance to wash, or use a bathroom, mourning your family and friends over and over...the suffering is almost too much to picture and makes me dull. Focusing on just a little fragment, meanwhile, has me in tears, like picturing Chapeye sending a selfie with the drawing of a cake for his son birthday, whom he hasn't seen in years, while his burly fellow soldiers do their best to help him master a smile for the photo.

Nevada is a funny book of highs and lows. Maria is a trans woman in a dysfunctional lesbian relationship, living in New York and working in a second-hand book store. She is also a minor online celebrity in the niche corner of the internet that is the trans blogsphere. On the surface it seems that this is a pretty good place to be: out and proud, surrounded by other queers, living the cool NY life. But it turns out Maria is a mess, largely because she is completely disconnected from her feelings and has a tendency to dissociate, developed as a defense mechanism. This is pretty much the plot of the first part of the book. In the second part, Maria has broken up with her girlfriend, stolen her car, and embarked on a road trip. In a shitty town in Nevada, she meets James, a young male-presenting person that she immediately identify as a trans-woman who hasn't figured herself out. She decides that helping James will provide her with some redemptive arch. Of course, a stranger on a car trip cannot help anyone figuring themselves out, and the road trip is bound to go nowhere.

I understand the book was a cultural landmark in US trans literature and made a lot of people feel seen and understood. I also enjoyed reading it, I found it amusing, and well-constructed. It is a very smart-ass kind of book, which both endearing and irritating. I'm struggling to come up with the right adjective, maybe sarcastic, or tongue-in-cheek? Something about the way Maria makes all these statements about punks, gentrification, gender, transphobia, etc., and we are simultaneously supposed to think they are insightful, but also understand that if they're off-the-mark, sanctimonious or shallow that's because of who Maria is as a character.

I read this book to intellectualise my hate of so-called artificial intelligence, and it worked. Hurray. In essence, it's a long literature review on how workers have resisted automation, from the Luddites to #techAgainstApartheid (which to my mind is a slightly different beast, since it is not focused on rejecting tech in any meaningful way). The argument is that technological developments tend to harm the interests of the working classes, notably because they restrict workers' autonomy over their work process. They are not exactly inherently oppressive, but tend to be so because often that's why they are developed, or at least applied on the work floor. In making this argument, the author enters into a respectful polemic with the accelerationists, and I appreciated this because it would be to easy to just disagree with the tech hype. Another interesting approach was the insistence that the book is not meant as a call for workers to break things at work, but precisely the opposite, as sort of celebratory analysis of how workers already are breaking things at work, and have been doing so for centuries. Long live the Luddites!

I'm proud to have read this in Dutch, but the result is that I constantly questioned whether I was understanding it right.

In a rural village in the Dutch bible-belt, a boy dies whilst skating on the pond. His sister, Jas, resentful at being left behind and scared her dad may kill her pet rabbit for the Christmas meal, had asked God to take Mathijs instead, and becomes convinced her prayers have been heeded to. This all happens in the first 20 pages or so. In the remaining 250, Jas and her family are left navigating the grief of this loss, a task that slowly destroys them. Death is everywhere, even more so after the village's cows are slaughtered in response to the BSE epidemic.

The book is told from Jas' perspective, i.e. a twelve-year old educated in a strict religious environment. The other main characters are her siblings, Hanna and Obbe. Very believably, these kids are naive and well-meaning, victims of the situation, desperate for some signs of affection, especially from their increasingly neglectful parents. They are, also cruel and sadistic. They experience remorse and guilt but, having always conceived of themselves as sinners, there is no relation between the intensity of these feelings and the weight of their actions.

Sex and death are taboo topics in this religious households (even mentioning Mathijs' name is forbidden), but at the same time they're everyday, matter-of-fact occurrences when it comes to the farm animals: cows must be inseminated, chickens are killed, rabbits mate. Indeed, the adults also seem to look at the children's bodies as animals, too: pushing soap up their butts against constipation, commenting on their developments as if they were cattle.

As the book proceeds, the level of darkness, brutality and goriness increases. One could talk of a crescendo, if it wasn't that suicidal thoughts, animal torture and sexual violence come to dominate the second half of the book to the point that there is nowhere to go from there. It is relentless.

I had read this book as a teenager, and loved it, though I'm now unsure whether I had paused to contemplate what the author was trying to say. This time around, I was somewhat turned off by its misogyny, especially considering the book is meant, in a way, as a critique of macho militarism. It isn't 'just' that the book wouldn't remotely pass the Bechdel test, but also that virtually every woman described in the book is reduced to her attractiveness or lack thereof and, more often than not, characterized as stupid. The partial exception is Montana Wildhack, a (porn?) film star, who is not explicitly denigrated, but whose only function in the story is to have sex with Billy while they're both imprisoned in an alien zoo. Billy is very good about it because he waits until she enthusiastically consents, which strikes Kurt as both exceptional and admirable.

War makes no sense, and neither, one could say, do postmodernist plots. The protagonist -Billy Pilgrim - was/is a young, inept soldier during WWII, who witnessed the Dresden bombing as a prisoner of war, returned to the states to marry the rich daughter of an optometrist mogul and became himself rich. Billy can travel through time, intentionally or not is hard to say. Or, to be more precise: since being kidnapped by aliens, he has learnt to see time the way they do: as a series of moments that coexist, just as peaks of the same mountain range, next to one another. And if time is not consecutive, then it logically follows that things just happen because that's how a given moment is structured, there is no cause and no consequences. So, children are sent to fight in Europe, ill-equipped and frightened, mostly against forcibly conscripted German farmers who would most certainly prefer to do something else. And then they kill each other, and so it goes.

When I came out, I devoured Dykes to Watch Out For, in the edited volume I bought in preparations my very first lesbian book club. I fell in love with the characters and wished my life was more like theirs. I, too, wanted to hand out with lesbians (of which I knew none) and kiss hot people to make a statement at political demonstrations. Which is to say, these dykes were, despite all their flaws, kind of role models. What a weird experience, then, to be able to follow your heroines into middle-age, having settled down in Vermont and made compromises, big and small, with 'the man'.

I related in many ways, I enjoyed most of the story-lines, and laughed out loud many times. And yet, of all of Bechdel's book, this one is perhaps the weakest? If I try to pin down the issue, I think that the format that works so well in the strips, is hard to put into a book with an overarching narrative. Bechdel has tried through the themes of 'our relationship with money' / 'how to live ethically in a capitalist word' (unclear which one). But I'm not sure whether she has managed to say anything insightful about it.

I could just accept that the book is meant to be funny, and it is. Why be snobs? But then I wish she hadn't framed it around Marx's Capital, whilst engaging with Marx precisely zero. By contrast, for the two books she wrote inspired by literature and psychoanalysis, she clearly went into a very deep dive and took those writers and theorists very seriously. I cannot help but feeling that here's a metaphor about queers today: plenty of psychoanalysis, some performative claims about socialism, but no one bothers with actually finding out what Marx (or other socialists) actually have to say about capitalism.

I loved the premise of the book: so much has been written about what's wrong with capitalism, and a fair amount about what life could look like after capitalism has been dismantled, but we need to think and discuss more how to get there. How do we imagine to be able to transition out of capitalism? Whether one believes it will take a revolution, or taking power by winning democratic elections, the question remains. And it isn't just about how to nurture a revolution or electoral victory, but what it will take after that, since it's clear that socialists had a fair share of revolutions and electoral victories but capitalism is still here. After the necessary disclaimers about the need for conjunctural analysis and specific, context-dependent strategies, the authors propose two key ingredients for a successful transition: popular protagonism (something along the lines of democratisation, the people taking more and more charge, rather than a leader or a party) and contested reproduction (meaning that even before we can dismantle capitalism we need to build up and alternative system/logic through which to organise the social metabolism, the tasks of drawing on nature's resources and caring for one another). Just for these ideas, it was worth reading the book.

The second half, however, changes gear, and goes from the theoretical to the very practical, discussing one very specific institution the authors see as very promising for incentivising popular protagonism and contested reproduction, namely 'public-common partnership'. PCP are models for the ownership and management of productive facilities (the examples are a market, a factory and farms, but it could apply to many more), whereby workers, people (likely, residents within a catchment area) and the state collaborate. Workers have autonomy over how to organise their work, but then turn the profit to a third-party, a sort of assembly where all three types of actors are represented, and that decides on how to re-invest the profits, e.g. by funding other PCPs, or improving local infrastructures. The role of the state here is primarily to de-risk the operations of the PCPs, and possibly to bring in the perspectives of other regions. The idea is compelling, even if the examples are a bit uneven, with the London market being by far the most realistic and thought-through.