Last year was an outstanding year for reading (perhaps because I was so busy neglecting this blog) so I thought I would kick start the latest attempt to revive good old Torn and Frayed with some notes on some of the best books I read over the past 12 months. I’ll start with three very different nonfiction books, each outstanding in its own way.
Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
I’m a sucker for tales of goons and thugs and Roberto Saviano's description of the Camora, the Naples mafia, is a cracker.
Our ignorance of the vast criminal economies of the world suits everyone; the criminals who can continue making their invisible billions and the forces of social control who don’t want us to see how easy the money is on the other side of the tracks.
Yet relying on the reports of the legal economy is like looking at the world with one eye shut. In many parts of the world, including, obviously, the Philippines and Naples, the black economy is what really makes the money go round. One of Saviano’s great achievements is to bring out the weird symbiotic relationship between modern organized crime and the state. These lines are spoken by a Neopolitan Mafiosi but they fit the Cagayan car smuggler and businessmen such as Lucio Tan like a greasy glove:
For us the state had to exist . Our philosophy was different from the Sicilians … we wanted to live with the state.
Saviano’s philosophical asides (he is a philosophy graduate and book opens with a Hannah Arendt quotation) and Gomorrah’s unconventional structure take a bit of getting used to, but the power and modernity of the subject matter—“the houses around here are disappearing, the Chinese are taking them” says one of the small-time Neapolitan hoods—make this a essential guide for the century that is scarily opening up before us.
The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell
Few non-British readers, or even Brits under the age of 60, have heard of the six Mitford sisters, but a biography of a family that included Hitler’s platonic girlfriend (Unity), a best-selling novelist (Nancy), a famous beauty and wife of the British Union of Fascists (Diana), and a communist and anthropologist (Decca) is unlikely to be dull. In fact The Mitford Girls is a beautifully written and organized history of six eccentric, not always lovable, daughters of minor British aristocrats who breezed their way onto the world stage by virtue of their beauty, charm, talent, and strangeness.
I loved this book so much that from about 10am I would find myself longing to leave my office to return to it. It is fascinating not just because of the sparkling characters that people its pages, but because of their closeness to the centres of power. Surely no other family can have had equal access to Churchill and Hitler? The fact that Deborah, the youngest and one of the less dramatic of the sisters, was briefly related by marriage to the Kennedys is just one of many ways in which the sisters were connected to the central pieces of the vast jigsaw puzzle that was the 20th century.
To really appeal to me, a book has to have a blue note running through it and the second half of The Mitford Girls becomes increasingly poignant as the sisters die off or, in one way or another, fail to find happiness. As one of the characters in Nancy’s witty novel Love in a Cold Climate says, “It’s the dropping off the perches. I’ve always dreaded when that begins.” Still, what perches they dropped from and how well their biographer has charted their fall.
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taker Akçam
There were times this book made me so angry I just couldn’t read it any more. It also completely changed my view of Turkey, a country that I had previously been quite well disposed to.
Taker Akçam is a Turkish historian who has, inevitably, had to go into exile because of his research into the Turkish state’s active participation in the genocide of over 1 million Armenians from 1916 to 1920. Before reading it, I had wondered whether perhaps there might be something in the Turkish argument, which reads something like “yes, people died but you have to remember this was wartime—and even if Armenians died, this was the result of rogue elements, not a systematic government policy.” A Shameful Act makes it clear that this is a complete lie, that the massacres were systematically coordinated by key elements of the Ottoman state, the ruling Union and Progress Party, and elements of the military. Akçam’s book carefully and dispassionately documents the planning of the genocide as well as the clumsy cover up, the burned files and silenced witnesses.
Amazingly, Turkey not only continues to deny that the genocide took place, it has closed the Turkey–Armenia border and persists in persecuting writers and journalists (including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk) under the notorious Article 301 of the country’s penal code for the ludicrous “crime” of “insulting Turkishness”. The gunning down of Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in broad daylight in the streets of Istanbul in 2007 was a bloody reminder of the risks courageous people like Taker Akçam run in laying bare Turkey’s shameful past.
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