Review: Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think

In 1958, aged ten, my father took me on a day trip from Folkestone to Boulogne aboard the Royal Daffodil, one of the ancient ferries which British Railways used for the Channel crossings. You didn’t need a proper passport – a disposable day passport was available cheaply and easily. I found a terrific toy car – a Citroën DS – in a Boulogne shop and on the way back through British Customs kept my hand clamped over it in my raincoat pocket in the belief that it might be an illegal import. It probably was.

Now as someone whose way out of England is still through the Channel crossings, I read the News a bit anxiously as the border between England and France gets harder each day, wondering who will close it first. It was the English who inevitably opted out of Schengen – the word “British” is inaccurate in these matters – but I believe it will be the French who, one way or another, will shut the border completely. They would, wouldn’t they?

There will be lots of people buying Hazareesingh’s book. We would all like to know how the French think because we know that they do think and that this is one of the reasons why they are so difficult to live with unlike the English who don’t think, just get on with life as we have always lived it and intend to continue. We don’t, for example, have to worry about heads of our Ruritanian state – we have them already neatly lined up, hair parted, for the next one hundred years – and increasingly we don’t have to worry about elections: we presently have a government which simply installed itself, promptly telling Parliament that it is now a consultative body like the old Russian Duma.

Hazareesingh’s quite long book is very readable and often amusing. It has two weaknesses. It’s panorama of French thought is quite often not much more than a series of thumbnails. It reminded me in this of Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve which I reviewed here a while back. Thumbnails are all right if you are looking for a background briefing but I don’t belong to the class of people who need background briefings on how to deal with the French. The second weakness is its Oxford Common Room geniality. The author has been holed up in Balliol since 1990 and that does not bode well for anyone. At worst, he lets the French off scot-free which may be one reason they have awarded his book one of their big prizes, always a relief to have a foreigner who doesn't trash us.

Hazareesingh’s approach is broadly narrative chronological and it is perhaps this approach which allows the author to avoid anything which you might think of as a confrontation or contestation except in chapter 10 which is more decisive in this respect. What I would like to have seen is more use of the possibilities inherent in the contrast of history and structure – thank you, Lévi-Strauss and Sartre – trying to tease out how the structural awfulness of France today is the product of a history, including an intellectual history. How come the French end up with the paralysed figure of Hollande, who you could see as a sort of tribute act to Brezhnev? How come they end up with so little liberty, so little equality, so little fraternity? Why is it a police state? ( The author never mentions the CRS). Why do the French hate each other so much? Why are they always attracted to authoritarian solutions, left or right? How do they put up with having their lives micromanaged by the state, things closed when you want them open or not allowed to sell what you want, so that the only way to get a plastic bottle of Evian in Paris is to buy it from an illegal street trader? 

Why is the history so grubby and still unacknowledged as such – something on which Hazareesingh might have said more than he does. There is a marked contrast with Germany here. Fanon – a fine thinker and writer - gets in, but that’s about it. Why do they still go around denouncing each other? What is this childish rentreé into the trade union strike season all about? Why have they been  so incredibly conservative about everything down to smoking themselves to death, not learning English, being the slowest to adopt modern communications technology and media, thinking it part of les droits du chien to shit everywhere, and so on and so forth? And one which surely ought to have interested the author more, Why do so few – even none – of their universities figure in World Rankings?

I have a suggestion. The author is incredibly well-read to the point where his book sometimes reads like short book reviews strung together. He should take a deep breath, put all that aside, sit down and write an essay setting out just what he thinks about France. He could title it How I think about the French, even write it in French and put it out, a hundred pages long, no more, through a Parisian publisher. He's done the spade-work already.

Review: Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography

I read this at a couple of sittings and enjoyed every bit of it. It's like Marxism; read this and you have the answer to everything. The ideas underpinning in it are strikingly simple, though only one of them is fully articulated.

First, even now countries are limited or enabled by their basic geography - where they are on the globe, whether they have rivers,mountains, natural harbours, fertile soil, forests or deserts. Marshall makes out a compelling case. Second, geopolitics - geographically influenced or determined political possibilities and necessities - geopolitics is always Realpolitik. Your neighbours are unlikely to be your friends and you have to prepare for the worst. It's always going to be Them or Us, a zero-sum game. You must always be ready to fight.

It's this second, less articulated theory which gives the book its Boys Own Annual feel. They ( usually China, Russia) are out to get us and they will get us if we don't get there first. It's true that Marshall quite often shows understanding for and even some sympathy for what they are about - he gives a very good account of why President Putin felt he had no option but to take Crimea - but his suspects are the usual suspects and he has a Foreword by Sir John Scarlett (Tony Blair's man at MI6 and not exactly a persuasive choice) to back him up.

Keep that reservation in mind but do read the book. It's very well done and full of ideas and small asides you will never even have thought of. He does, for example, give an interesting geographical explanation of why the Americans eventually decided to use the H-bomb on Japan though it doesn't explain why they didn't give the Japanese a demonstration of its power on empty land before they used it on real cities. True, that would not have had the shocking power of the real thing and the Americans felt that it was the viciousness of the Japanese military spirit - don't forget their war crimes - which had to be broken.

Available Now: Trevor Pateman, Materials and Medium - An Aesthetics

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In store now at Basil Blackwell, Broad Street, Oxford  and online at www.bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

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Review: Lauren Elkin - Flaneuse

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There was a time – and I don’t know when it ended – when if you were self-assured, had the necessary leisure and some ability to write, you could write about pretty much anything which took your fancy, expressing your opinions or sentiments, often in short literary form (the essay), and you would have a decent chance of finding a publisher who would put you into print. You would then become a contributor to the genre of Belles Lettres.

At some point, belles lettres got put under pressure and specifically by professionalised academic writing where it was obligatory to distinguish fact and opinion and, in either case, obligatory to situate what you were saying fully and explicitly in the field of what other people had been saying - and preferably, very recently saying. The footnote and the Bibliography are the outward markers of academic writing - you might even say invented to mark the difference with belles lettres.

Publishers - and I suppose readers too - became wary of belles lettres. What was left from what academic writing had taken over was fiction, poetry and journalism, including the journalism of book reviews. Nowadays, the last bastion of belles lettres is the serious book review or essay in one of the serious Reviews: The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, and so on.

Lauren Elkin situates her book within academic writing by providing copious notes – which I felt under no pressure to read – and a fairly long Bibliography. But the jacket design – very messy, actually – title page and quaint publishing house (Chatto and Windus) situates this as a non-academic book. On the jacket flap we are told it is “Part cultural meander, part memoir” – I am surprised they put it like that because this is tantamount to saying that the book is belles lettres.

And none the worse for that. It’s an interesting read, the short quasi-academic studies spliced with personal narrative and the stage set changing from city to city. The title and sub-title Flâneuse: Women Walk The City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London is not misleading but I would bet a bit of money that the author was under some pressure from literary agent and publisher to make it all hang together so that it could Fit into some category – social history or literary representations of the city or sexual discrimination at street level or just autobiography. There are many possibilities, some of which would have led to the writing of a dreadful book, dull and correct and easy to shelve. 

I enjoyed reading this book, though she lost me for a moment when late on she mentions keeping a dog in Paris, a dog shit city when I lived there (1971 – 72) and even long after. But I did find her narratives of Parisian history helped me understand how and why I have come to dislike Paris. She narrates the tragedies which today repeat themselves as farce: the ritual demonstrations, the immature bad temper (they were still honking car horns last time I went, albeit less fervently than in the 1970s), and the intense conservatism of the radicals, who think that the past is the model for the future right down to the cigarettes they still smoke. If you think Ruritania is stuck, try France - a country haunted by a collective memory of which several parts still have to be denied. Empire and Collaboration for starters.

I think the weakness of the book is that Elkin does not quite know what she stands for. On occasion, she expresses a forceful opinion or cracks a telling joke but much of the time she muses, a bit ironic, a bit fey. I made a mental contrast with Katie Roiphe. She should strike out a bit more, strut her stuff rather than stroll it .

Deborah Cameron's Summer Reading Picks

Times Higher Education summer reads 2016

Members of the higher education community tell us about two books they plan to take on holiday: a new must-read and a classic worthy of a second look

Deborah Cameron
Professor of language and communication, University of Oxford

I’m about to embark on a project that involves revisiting the classic texts of second-wave feminism, and I’m planning to begin with a book I haven’t read since I was 20: Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, an ambitious attempt at what its author called “a materialist view of history based on sex itself”. My new book is The Best I Can Do(degree zero), a collection of short essays in which the philosopher-turned-stamp-dealer Trevor Pateman reflects on everything from bus passes to the semiotics of lipstick – and whether scholarship should be a hobby rather than a salaried occupation.

THE, 14 July 2016

Review: Robert Roper, Nabokov in America

The core of this book is a scholarly study of how Lolita was made.It's clever idea was to notice that Lolita is a road-novel in which Humbert Humbert and Lolita criss-cross America by car and then to ask how Nabokov, a Russian emigre who arrived in the USA in 1940, aged forty, knew the roads. The answer is that Nabokov travelled them and did so primarily in pursuit of butterflies though ostensibly on the way to this or that lecturing job. They were long trips and they absorbed whole summers and Nabokov made copious notes about everything - roads, motels, sky-scapes, landscapes. All the time, he was collecting butterfly specimens for museum collections where he had a paid curatorial role.

Roper makes a fascinating piece of road-scholarship out of this and it only weakens when at the end he throws in a study of Pale Fire and a brief review of Nabokov's later life in Switzerland which could have been left out. In contrast, there is nothing here on Nabokov's role in the making of the first film version of Lolita.

Roper tracks the geographical sources of specific passages in Lolita and does the same for literary sources and antecedents in Nabokov's own writing. He turns up interesting facts such as the information that one of Nabokov's colleagues solved the problem of his own taste for nymphets by marrying a fourteen-year old (there being many more places where this could be legally done circa 1930s - 1940s than there are now). Nabokov duly absorbs the information his colleague volunteers.

I thought this an interesting and worthwhile book. I would have cut the chapters which don't belong and I would have asked for more insight into the extended collaboration between Nabokov and his wife Vera, who agreed with Nabokov that he was a genius and who clearly played a large part in keeping the show on the road, literally and metaphorically - she drove, she took dictation, she wrote lots of the letters needed. But the nature of their relationship remains opaque; perhaps it was essentially banal, like the political positions they occasionally espoused.

Though the book has been adequately proof-read, someone forgot to check the Contents page with results for which that someone ought to win a prize for negligence.

Added 19 May:

I left out what may be the most important thing. In all those road trips across America, Nabokov was not driving. His wife drove or a student hired as a chauffeur drove. Nabokov sat in the passenger seat or the back seat writing. Even in the posed photograph on the front cover of Roper's book, he is not in the driving seat. I need to go back to the book and check if he ever drove at all - maybe did not know how to. It may be important: driving in the 1940s and 1950s was surely marked as a + M masculine characteristic. Nabokov ducks the + M role - and as a result gains writing time.

On sale now: Trevor Pateman's new book The Best I Can Do

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This is the cover, ready for its ISBN barcode 978-0-9935879-0-0. Inside, 165 pages of text occupied by 26 essays as listed on the cover, extensively rewritten from my Blogs. Paperback, cover price £8.95

Available from Amazon, Blackwell and Waterstones online