To me, reading is like a vaccine for the spirit: the difficult, the negative, the choice that others might consider depressing fortifies me against vicissitudes of mood or mental stamina. My (re)reading during the first pandemic months included the Existentialism of my youth: The Plague and “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Camus and the chapter on Bad Faith in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his introductory “Existentialism—a Humanism.” Louis Menand’s excellent new intellectual history of the years 1945-1965 (The Free World) confirmed my view that Sartre and Camus have been underestimated as formative influences on the 60s generation. I recommended the clear and concise “Existentialism—a Humanism” to all my friends. Though the Existentialists are considered morose and pessimistic, their philosophy of freedom and concept of the absurd are actually exhilarating. They can teach us to face the worst with equanimity. In a word: liberating.
I read or reread the recent Russian women writers: Svetlana Alexievitch, Ludmila Ulitskaya, and my beloved Ludmila Petrushevskaya in English and in Russian. They have an ability to recount the most hair-raising conditions without adopting the jaded or brutal tone of certain male colleagues. I was moved by Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House.” It’s about the apparent death of a young girl and only child. It takes the reader into the antechambers of death where life is sometimes preserved by the force of hope and determination. The evocation of a post-Soviet hospital recalls the hidden spaces of the hospitals we’ve all gotten lost in or, for me, the wards into which I’ve escorted older dialysis patients during the pandemic winter. In French literature, I found the same mixture of humanity and realism in the French counterparts of those Russian authors, in Laila Slimani, Annie Ernaux, or Virginie Despentes. They also relate the horror without its inhumanity infecting their tone. As Camus put it, “The most devastating truths perish once recognized.” The women writers I read during the pandemic were good at looking the devastating realities in the eye without flinching or posturing.
I read Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy as a parable of the death of free popular culture, a tale of the destruction of the autonomous production and communal enjoyment of musical culture under the assault of the commercially manipulated new media. The bankrupt vinyl record store owner who loses his foothold in the world and descends to the very bottom, sleeping in parks or on the streets, is rescued by his fellow derelict and restored to his circle of friends where he inspires the semi-mystical “convergences” of music and dance. Vernon Subutex could just as well embody the demise of the culture of the book which I tried with disappointing results to impart in my university career and now find revived in our marginal gatherings in parks and a train station waiting room.
There were other books I read for my research or for a political reading group. The French author Emmanuel Carrère fascinated me with his language and unusual themes (he wrote about his Russian ancestry and involvements; his conversion to Christianity and subsequent loss of faith; his studied reconstruction of the lives of the apostles; or of the alleged mystical illumination of Philip K. Dick; or of his own eye-witnessing of the tsunami on Sri Lanka; or the life and times of the Russian avant-garde writer and nationalist politician Eduard Limonov); but I read Carrere avidly without really liking him in the way I felt about Petrushevskaya or Despentes, Camus or Sartre. They were like mentors or friends to me while Carrère was someone to hang out with, entertaining but not sympathetic as a personality. In times of isolation, books are like friends, either close or distant, deeply comforting or superficially amusing—or alarming.
Signed
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 