The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
Jonathan Phillips
Viking Press ($25.95)

by Summer Block

By any standard, the First Crusade was an almost miraculous military success. Hounded by disease and starvation, debilitated by thirst and weakness, without adequate horses or weapons, and woefully outnumbered and on foreign soil, the crusaders managed one astounding victory after another, finally conquering Jerusalem with fewer than 15,000 men. In stark contrast, the Fourth Crusade was a shameful failure: burdened with debt and rife with internal divisions, the crusaders never even made it to Jerusalem, instead laying waste to the city of Constantinople and ruthlessly slaughtering its Christian inhabitants. Yet the very ideals that led the crusaders to victory in the eleventh century would lead to astonishing acts of brutality and cowardice in the thirteenth.

The First Crusade devotes much of its more than 300 pages to the idea of holy warfare as developed in the period leading up to the official beginning of the Crusade in 1095. By the time Pope Urban II embarked on his preaching tour of France, stirring up enthusiasm for the liberation of Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers, Western Europe was eager to answer the call. The military leader Bohemond responded to news of the crusade with typical fervor—“calling for his most lavishly wrought cloak to be brought forth, he had this treasured garment cut to pieces in front of an astonished assembly” and made into a series of small fabric crosses, one of which he displayed on his sleeve, prompting his rapt audience to take up the rest and imitate him. All over Europe, peasants and knights alike were inflamed by the rhetoric of clerics and popular preachers like Peter the Hermit and leapt to take up arms and head east. An unruly group of peasants and some knights dubbed “The People’s Crusade” were so enthused, they set out ahead of schedule and nearly threw the crusade off course with their lawless rampaging.

Several modern historians have tried to explain away the First Crusade as a greedy move to seize booty and property, a calculating political move on the part of Pope Urban II to consolidate the power of the papacy, or even as a way to rid war-plagued Europe of a class of roving and dissolute knights. There is more than a little truth to all these things—but as Thomas Asbridge makes plain, deeply held religious belief cannot be discarded as a genuine motivation for many. As he explains, “Medieval minds were plagued by one overwhelming anxiety: the danger of sin.” Sin was not an abstract concept or a cleric’s scold but a real and terrifying affliction. Priests and monks could hope to escape this stifling burden by lives of asceticism, but what hope did a knight have? His very profession was violence, whether on the battlefield or in tournaments—his only choice was to abandon his family, his livelihood, and his duties to his lord to become cloistered, or else wallow daily in pollution and worry desperately over the punishments that awaited him in the next life—demons, tortures, and eternal exile from grace. In The Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips will emphasize that “Religion saturated the medieval period in a way that is hard for us to comprehend.”

The crusades offered an exhilarating possibility—violence done in the name of the Lord would allow a knight to offer his services in pursuit of salvation, achieving both worldly prominence and spiritual assurance. No wonder thousands upon thousands looked at the crusade as a truly God-sent opportunity.

Furthermore, a wise knight would certainly think twice before joining up in order to make a fortune or secure new lands in the east. Asbridge estimates that the average knight would spend about five times his annual income on the trip, and much of what he found in the Holy City would be spent on the return journey, if he were lucky enough to have one. For most, the prospect was truly terrifying—leaving family and friends behind to risk life and property in a dangerous and unpredictable foreign land. Phillips dwells on the emotional cost of the journey, parting from beloved children and spouses, leaving unprotected women and children to defend their homes in a lawless time. Only heartfelt belief in the promise of spiritual redemption would motivate many to make the trek. To those fears, the Fourth Crusade added the dangers of a naval approach; for most crusaders, the prospect of a sea voyage was nearly as foreign and as startling as space travel today.

One question a contemporary might have offered to Pope Urban II was, why now? Muslims had held Jerusalem since 638, almost four hundred years earlier. But following the Investiture Controversy of 1075 (in which Pope Gregory VII, Urban’s predecessor, began a program to reform the weak and corrupt Church), the papacy entered a period of expansion, everywhere testing the limits of its worldly authority. Following in Gregory’s footsteps, Urban envisioned the Roman pope as the most powerful figure in the Christian world, the mouthpiece of God, with armies and kings at his command. Retaking Jerusalem (in the medieval mind, the “navel of the world,” the spiritual and geographic center of the universe) would forever cement the Latin Church as the ultimate arbiter of temporal and religious justice.

Rightly horrified by the callousness the crusaders showed toward their Muslim enemies, many modern commentators have focused on the racist and anti-Islamic sentiments of the Franks (as the crusaders are collectively called). Urban and others stirred up public sentiment with graphic—and oftentimes, wholly false—stories of the atrocities committed by Muslims in Jerusalem, including supposedly slitting open the heels of the poor to search for secreted gold as payment for the exorbitant taxes Christians paid to enter their holy city as pilgrims. But as Asbridge points out, “there is little or no evidence to suggest that either side harbored any innate, empowering religious or racial hatred of the other.” Certainly conflicts did sometimes occur, namely under the rule of the “Mad Caliph Hakim” (who was disavowed by his own people for his destructive and blasphemous behavior) and in response to the Islamic conquest of Iberia (parts of modern-day Spain and Portugal). But regular truce and trade continued, and Christians and Muslims lived in détente for most of the history of the Islamic faith.

Cynics often point to the unchecked greed and violence of the Crusades as proof of the fundamentally hypocritical nature of the Roman Church, its advocacy of war and conquest in direct contradiction of Jesus’ many pacifist teachings. In fact, even in the chaotic medieval period, many of the faithful were well aware of the shaky foundations of a holy war. Urban (and Gregory before him) labored hard to provide a theological framework that could support the idea of crusade, marshalling biblical and historical evidence and citing the precedents set by church fathers like St. Augustine. “Between the age of St. Augustine and the council of Clermont,” Asbridge explains, “western Christendom gradually became acculturated to the concept of sanctified violence.” Gregory VII employed subtle rhetorical shifts to ease the faithful into the idea of religious warfare. “Centuries earlier, patristic theologians had described the internal, spiritual battle waged against sin by devoted Christians as the ‘warfare of Christ’,” rhetoric Gregory manipulated: “he proclaimed that all lay society had one overriding obligation: to defend the Latin Church as ‘soldiers of Christ’ through actual, physical warfare.”

Over time, this language found its way into sermons, coupled with tales of supposed Muslim atrocities and the suffering of Christians in faraway lands. It was for Urban to go the final step, offering crusaders remission of all sins and a guarantee of eternal life. “For the first time,” Asbridge concludes, “fighting in the name of God and the pope brought with it a spiritual reward that was at once readily conceivable and deeply compelling: a real chance to walk through the fires of battle and emerge unsullied by sin.”

Even Urban was likely surprised by the sheer number and diversity of respondents, including large numbers of women, children, the poor and elderly, as well as the aristocratic knights to whom Urban originally pitched his message. Crusaders came from all over western Christendom, speaking a garbled mix of German, Italian, English, and French (then separated into two distinct dialects). In the end, around 7,000 knights set off for the Holy Land, along with 35,000 infantry and as perhaps as many as 60,000 civilians.

Over the course of the next four years, this group would lay siege first to Antioch and then to Jerusalem itself, against tremendous odds and despite truly staggering rates of attrition. By the time the crusaders crossed modern-day Turkey, “perhaps half of those who had left Europe had been lost to battle, disease, and starvation.” Starvation during the siege of Antioch would drive the poor to eat animal hides, shoe leather, and “the seeds of grain found in manure,” according to chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. Cannibalism was not unheard of—an expediency that put terror in the hearts of the Muslims who heard of it. Yet as the crusade progressed, “the crusaders had been reduced to a battle-hardened core—their army was dominated by an increasingly elite infantry force of well-armed, ferocious knights” who fought on foot after their horses were lost. Each narrow victory encouraged those who remained to view themselves as protected by God.

But what of the Islamic response to this rhetoric? Like many western historians, Asbridge focuses primarily on the Christian mindset. Yet one might well ask, what caused the Muslims, far greater in number and on their home turf, to yield so readily to the crusading forces? The answer seems to be twofold: warring internal factions within Islam prevented the Muslims from acting as a unified force, while the poor military leadership of the general Kerbogha left his soldiers open to attack after attack. Paralyzed with indecision, Kerbogha and other leaders choose to simply delay any action at all, while the fervently inspired crusaders continued unabated. Decades later, it would be factionalism and poor leadership that let Constantinople fall prey to a small number of western invaders.

Despite its subtitle, The First Crusade offers little explicit comment on the state of Christian/Islamic affairs today. To say that the First Crusade laid the foundation for East/West relations in the years to come is too simplistic, especially considering that further trade and cooperation with Muslim nations would follow the attack on Jerusalem in short order—the cycles of cooperation, violence, and then cooperation again continued roughly from the birth of Islam through the modern era. But parallels are easy to draw, and Asbridge is wise to use a light touch rather than hammer home an obvious agenda. The reader will find plenty to stimulate discussion on the subjects of religious extremism, Islamic factionalism, or terrorism (the medieval military model in the both the East and West relied heavily on committing atrocious acts to strike fear into the heart of the adversary—it was common, for instance, to catapult the heads of captives into or out of besieged cities). Asbridge, who walked the path of the crusaders himself, has a dramatic sense of place and a quick, rhythmic approach to storytelling—he lets the facts speak for themselves rather than drawing too many conclusions.

By the time of the Fourth Crusade, more than a century had passed. Jerusalem was again in Muslim hands, recaptured by the renowned general Saladin. Two intervening crusades met with disaster—the Second Crusade culminated in the failed siege of Damascus, abandoned after only four days; the Third ended in a truce that still left Jerusalem squarely in Muslim hands. Perhaps the novelty that helped galvanize the leaders of the First Crusade had simply worn off, but crusades were now a costly fact of medieval life. Pope Innocent III called for the Fourth Crusade in 1198 to retake Jerusalem, but it would be another four years before the ill-fated trip commenced.

Having decided to journey to the Holy Land by sea, the crusaders approached the wealthy merchants in Venice for assistance, for the Venetians enjoyed both an unrivaled expertise in maritime matters and apparently limitless resources. A contract was drawn up whereby the crusaders agreed to pay a set sum (85,000 marks, or twice the annual income of the kings of France or England) with the intention of summoning 33,500 participants who would each pay a portion to cover their expenses. When only 12,000 crusaders showed up in Venice in the summer of 1202, the Franks feared disaster.

Unable to cover their costs, the crusaders made their first fateful error—they agreed to conquer the Christian city of Zara, a longtime rival of Venice, in exchange for a temporary remission of their debts. Appalled at the idea of turning on fellow Christians, Innocent III absolutely forbade the attack on Zara and threatened those responsible for the pillage with excommunication. But to turn back meant foregoing the trip to Jerusalem, breaking their sacred vow as crusaders and pilgrims, and therefore also endangering their salvation. In a dreadful predicament, the bulk of the crusaders agreed to hand over Zara, while some fled or conveniently absented themselves from the scene.

From this point on, the Fourth Crusade became increasingly mired in politics and dirty dealing, pulled further and further from its original course to Jerusalem. When the deposed prince of Constantinople approached the crusaders with an offer of money, resources, and the religious fealty of the Greek Orthodox Church to the Latin pontiff in exchange for laying siege to the great city and reinstating him as the rightful ruler, the Franks decided it was their only chance to continue the mission. Since the Great Schism that separated eastern and western Christians in 1054, Constantinople had been the jewel of the Byzantine empire, a seat of piety and learning, filled with countless priceless works of devotional art. In July of 1203, the Franks camped outside the “the greatest metropolis in the Christian world,” a stunning urban wonderland with a population nearly seven times that of medieval Paris or Venice.

In the face of the opposition, the Byzantine emperor Alexius III appeared to be what we might today term “in denial,” almost pathologically unable to face the threat that approached. While the crusaders set up siege engines and camps, Alexius busied himself attending dinner parties and landscaping. He even left the corn harvest stacked up outside the city walls, a gift to the invading army. Trapped at last between the crusaders on one side and an angry mob of his own citizens on the other, he fled the city. A series of coups followed, each intrigue involving the Franks in further wickedness, culminating in the conquest of Constantinople in the spring of 1204.

The mayhem that was unleashed is almost too terrible to contemplate: infants, the elderly, and priests savagely murdered; young women and nuns raped and tortured. Almost more horrible to the deeply religious (some would say superstitious) Greek people, the Franks melted down venerated church objects for the precious metals and jewels, even stealing treasure from the graves of revered patriarchs. The stately church of Hagia Sophia was soon filled with animal dung, prostitutes, and drunken thieves using altars as tables and benches. Not even the fabled Muslim “savages” were accused of such acts as the Christians performed. All the while, the pope was powerless to act, his letters often arriving months after the fact and virtually ignored. Later Pope John Paul II would issue a formal apology in 2001, but many in the Eastern Orthodox churches still remember the sack of Constantinople with rancor. One can easily trace the path that leads from Urban II’s rallying cries—demonizing the infidel “other,” exhorting crusaders to press on against all odds—to the slaughter of Christian brethren in one of the most prominent seats of the Christian faith.

Both Asbridge and Phillips go into more fascinating depth than can be summarized here, including details of medieval siege warfare (though additional pictures would have proved helpful for some of the more arcane methods). Maps are helpful additions to Asbridge’s text; Phillips would have done well to include more diagrams to illustrate his careful narrative reconstruction of Constantinople in the thirteenth century. Both authors enliven the sometimes dry enumeration of battles and sieges with amusing glimpses into medieval life (a visit by the king of Nubia affords the awed crusaders their first view of a black man; Godfrey of Bouillon suffers injuries when “attacked by a savage bear”), though Asbridge maintains the livelier tone.

In the admirable attempt to be even-handed, both authors are so accommodating of multiple critical viewpoints that it’s hard at times to find their theses. Phillips and Asbridge do an excellent job of summarizing extremely complex motives and missions in clear, accessible language, but there is little new material presented. Asbridge in particular is a valuable guide to medieval history, psychology, and politics, but better suited to those with little background in the subject.

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Alexandra Bruce
The Disinformation Company ($9.95)

by Jaye Beldo

Packaging quantum physics for the masses inevitably draws forth many a paradox. In the independent film What the Bleep Do We Know these paradoxes become difficult to dismiss and beg scrutiny by anyone who wants to gain a deeper, unbiased understanding of the science it attempts to explain. Having viewed the film, I found it nearly impossible not to regard it other than as a clever bit of New Age propaganda aimed at aging boomers looking for another optimism fix to carry them through what remains of Bush's second term. The intermittent cameos of noted physicists such as Gomit Aswami, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, and philosopher David Albert, amongst others, spliced in with computer animations reminiscent of toe fungus medication commercials, and a pathetic sub-plot involving a deaf woman who carries a cell phone around with her during her photo assignments left me hardly inspired to delve further into the wondrous realm of cutting-edge physics, a physics that could very well assist us in the full realization of free energy and perhaps even world peace.

Yet, one must admire the wild success the film has enjoyed. The producers obviously had enough promotional savvy to deliver a product that continues to sell well in spite of the utter ire it has evoked from such heavy science hitters as Richard Dawkins. Much of the controversy the film has generated seems to have been deliberately intended as well. Many of the physics luminaries that appeared in Bleep complain of how they were edited into the final product to make it look like they were promoters of the Ramtha cult, which has made millions of dollars in the process. Apparently F.A. Wolf, the esteemed quantum physicist who has written such books as The Spiritual Universe and Taking the Quantum Leap actually endorses the Ramtha's School of Enlightenment and often appears there to lecture along with many of the other physicists who appeared in Bleep.

Fortunately, in Alexandra Bruce's much welcome book Beyond the Bleep, the hit film is addressed from a middle-ground standpoint, enabling the reader to get a much better grasp on the science the film ultimately fails to adequately describe. Quantum physics is given greater elaboration in Beyond the Bleep, enabling the reader to grasp some of the more arcane and difficult aspects of quantum phenomena. Bruce's depiction of John Hagelin, presidential hopeful and member of Transcendental Meditation founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Natural Law party is not quite as neutral however. Hagelin has actually lobbied the U.S. Government in the past to funnel money into his patently whacked project of creating a “Vedic defense shield” in which eight thousand meditators, “one square root of one percent of the planetary population” would be deployed to create “world peace.” Apparently, each “shield meditator” would have to invest in over $100,000 worth of TM products in order to qualify. The TM cult, the author informs, is apparently bent on world domination.

Beyond the Bleep is recommended for anyone left perplexed, dismayed, or downright disgusted by the film. It will assist you in gaining a much clearer understanding of everything from Dr. Emoto's water molecules, to Candice Pert's discoveries of the molecular origin of our emotions, as well as the tribulations of scientists like her who have dared to challenge the orthodoxy and the materialist repercussions they have suffered. The book will assist anyone who desires to delve into the convoluted worlds of quantum physics, the Create Your Own Reality paradigm so beloved by New Agers and neurology alike, allowing them to emerge from such a wondrous trip enlightened and, more importantly, unscathed by the underhanded indoctrination the film tends to induce in many of its followers.

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Michelle Herman
University of Nebraska Press ($25)

by Clifford Garstang

Mistakes were made: that’s the gist of The Middle of Everything, Michelle Herman’s “memoirs of motherhood.” Herman, a novelist and writing teacher, has come late to marriage and parenting but is so love-struck upon the arrival of her daughter, Grace, that she bursts with child-raising confidence. Having grown up with a distant, depressed mother, she determines to create a healthier environment for Grace. Rare among first-time mothers, she thinks she knows exactly what to do.

Before the reader understands that anything is seriously wrong with Grace, which happens only three-quarters of the way through the book, Herman fills the pages—as if hesitant to reveal her daughter’s problems—with recollections of young loves, then the joys of best-friendship, and the perils of aging—not only her own, but also Grace’s. At the age of eight Grace doesn’t mind so much anymore, but there was a time when a birthday was traumatic. She was perfectly happy being two, she insisted. Why should she go along with turning three?

Although Herman relates Grace’s experience to her own, it isn’t always clear what the stories have to do with motherhood. Finally, though, she gets to the point. In middle age (Herman imagines herself younger than she is), in the middle of nowhere (she can’t seem to get over the feeling that New York is home and generally superior to the Midwest), Herman feels that she has been thrust into the middle of a crisis, what she calls Grace’s “breakdown.” The title of the book comes from her grandmother’s Yiddish expression, in mitn derinnen. However, it isn’t as though Grace’s problems come “out of the blue” (another translation of the phrase) or are even terribly surprising, given Herman’s approach to parenting.

She smothers Grace with attention. Her “mantra” is “Meet every need,” which she expands into her commandments of motherhood: “Be available. Be attentive. Watch and listen. Keep your child from hunger, want, grief, loneliness, frustration.” Mother and daughter are together constantly and Grace’s every wish is granted. Is it any surprise that the result is an over-indulged little girl? Grace exhibits severe separation anxiety, never having developed a sense of herself as a being independent of her mother. And the cure, arrived at after countless consultations with psychiatrists, turns out to be no surprise either: say no, and let go.

Even if the reader is occasionally exasperated with Herman’s cluelessness, The Middle of Everything is nonetheless an entertaining glimpse into the shared lives of a modern mother and daughter.

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Joy Castro
Arcade Publishing ($25.00)

by Anne F. McCoy

You might be tempted to pass over The Truth Book because of its appearance. But in spite of the subtitle and the blood-red dust jacket, this is not a sensationalized story. There are no clear-cut good guy/bad guy themes. Neither is this a work of exhaustive journalism about Jehovah’s Witnesses, although throughout the book Joy Castro gives clear, factual, and fair explanations of beliefs and practices. Every person we meet is presented fairly, in all their humanness. While she is forthright about abuses which she experienced, Castro also introduces us to kind individuals and caring families, relating her own particular experience in spare and lyrical prose. At times it felt like poetry to me, as if the page were inundated by white space, although it's not. While there is this clean sense to the prose, the details are lush and specific.

The Truth Book’s compelling narrative is structured as a collage. The fluid boundaries and the movement across time and place are occasionally disorienting, but it does serve the reader: Castro spares us from slogging chronologically through difficult details as told from a child’s perspective. Our narrator is the adult Castro, a woman in her mid-thirties whose gentle sensibility guides us throughout.

We meet Castro’s mother, former show girl turned Jehovah’s Witness, who is easily embarrassed by her children. After Castro’s first dance recital at age six, she told her daughter that she looked like an elephant on the stage. The attention of her father, a pilot who took her on adventures throughout Europe, counter-balanced her mother’s sarcasm somewhat, until his extramarital affairs led to a divorce.

In her mother’s second marriage to a man from the Jehovah’s Witness community, there existed a ready-made opportunity for abuse, as there is in any religion which teaches that the husband has the unquestioned right to rule his household however he wants. Castro’s stepfather subjected them to bizarre regulations and increasing isolation. He put locks on the refrigerator and kitchen cupboards. There were rules regarding portions at meals. If he had two sandwiches, her mother was permitted one, Castro one-half, her younger brother one-quarter. After two years of forced starvation, at the age of fourteen, Castro managed to escape.

Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that because Jehovah loves the truth, people should always speak the truth. When she was young, the author found that this did not apply to every truth. In The Truth Book—which Castro wrote reluctantly, at the urging of those close to her—she finally bears witness to her experiences.

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Michael Finkel
Harper Collins ($25.95)

by Elaine Margolin

Michael Finkel made a serious mistake. An up and coming reporter for the New York Times Magazine, Finkel had just returned from the Ivory Coast where he had spent weeks researching a story on the child slave trade there. While meeting with his editor, he outlined how he was going to approach his piece, which was slotted to be the cover story for an upcoming issue. She nixed his ideas, instructing him instead to weave an emotional and biographical narrative around one of the children he interviewed, the kind of story that would grab the reader’s heart. Finkel spent the next few weeks in a wine- and sleep-deprived mania, producing a piece of writing he considered to be his best. The only problem was it wasn’t true; the boy at the center of the article was a composite of many different people rolled into one. Finkel got caught and was fired; full of shame and regret, he retreated to his home in Montana to lick his wounds.

Tortured by his own reckless behavior, Finkel wondered how he could have let this happen. A passionate and extremely gifted young writer, he had spent his entire life “trying to become Michael Finkel of the New York Times. Now, after scarcely a year, I was finished.” Children lie in order to master the world around them. It is a self-protective act, usually devoid of malevolence; the lie allows them to imagine themselves as stronger than they are. Adults lie for similar reasons; they need to create an image of themselves that is better than the one they have. But as Finkel found out, we have zero tolerance for our journalistic thieves, be they Steven Glass or Jayson Blair or the gentle but still culpable Doris Kearns Goodwin. Finkel spends a good portion of this book meditating on the forces and pressures that led to his personal downfall, but ultimately, he steps up to the plate and takes full responsibility for his actions. His struggle is for his own redemption and our forgiveness.

Finkel’s chance for salvation arrives unexpectedly when a reporter calls and tells him that Christian Longo, a highly intelligent young man on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, has been arrested for murdering his family. He had been picked up in Mexico impersonating a reporter—Michael Finkel of the New York Times. In prison awaiting trial, Longo was willing to speak about his life and the crimes he was accused of, but only to the real Finkel.

Thus begins a year-long odyssey for Finkel, who begins a highly charged and often turbulent relationship with Longo through letters, phone calls, and visits. As he attempts to analyze Longo’s descent, Finkel begins to look at his own, and the similarities he sees disturb him. Both men are too comfortable lying. Both have trouble with intimacy, particularly with women. Both seem to feel compelled to operate under a continual umbrella of performance pressure that crushes their spirit. Both are obsessed with their place in the world, their egos dependent upon maintaining a notion of their own uniqueness. Ultimately, however, True Story shows that Finkel is no longer willing to dance around the truth; his revelations about himself demonstrate the workings of a first-rate mind, a terrific journalist, and perhaps most importantly, an honest man.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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Michel Houellebecq
McSweeney’s Books ($18)

by Joel Turnipseed

Michel Houellebecq’s novels have had a violent reception—his last, Platform, landed him in court for inciting racial hatred. Even his supporters have praised him at an uneasy distance, praising his work as caustic satire. Céline’s name comes up a lot. Now, with the translation of his first prose work, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, we have one more turn of the ophthalmologist’s gauge to determine whether Houellebecq’s cynicism reflects a clear but dark hilarity or a kind of sinister, as yet unmeasured, revulsion.

His choice of subject in H. P. Lovecraft certainly raises the stakes in considering the latter, and though Houellebecq calls the book “a kind of novel,” it is more a kind of proxy blueprint for his later work—as when he writes of Lovecraft’s sensibility:

The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. This is what will finally prevail…. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure “Victorian fictions.” All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.

As an appreciation (and Lovecraft is certainly due an appreciation, with Dorna Khazeni’s translation of Houellebecq more-or-less coincident with the Library of America’s superb selection of Lovecraft’sTales), this is somewhat fantastic, but as literary appropriation it is indispensable. Throughout, one notes that maybe only Vargos Llosa’s Perpetual Orgy is as good as both art and homage.

After reading Houellebecq reading Lovecraft, you come to see not only the affinities, but the degree to which Houellebecq has prepared Lovecraft for us, making him available to us as readers of Houellebecq, so much so that certain sentences seem as though they could come from either man’s work:

… free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. The liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

If this hadn’t come from Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulu,” you wouldn’t have been surprised to find it in Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles. What Houellebecq detests in refried hippies and the veiled, violent inhabitants of Parisian suburbs is the same thing Lovecraft found in the Jazz Age flappers and multi-colored immigrants crowding the streets of Brooklyn. If humanity at its most liberated, wildest diversity is all this, perhaps the only rational reaction is horror—and a retreat from realism into mythology.

In both Houellebecq’s and Lovecraft’s case, however, this mythology is not a dippy sugar-coated paean to our better natures, but rather a further, more scientifically dissected and refined presentation of the state of things as they already are—archaic in their ruthlessness and scientific in their presentation of what lies between our conscious moments, unable as these are to fully realize the complete (and immanently strange) dimensions in which they (and we) exist. Where Lovecraft has created a world of Cthulu and the Necronomicon, Houellebecq has turned the same naturalistic exactitude to the even more terrifying (if only because more banal and recognizable) horrors of our near absolute reduction to outputs of the functions of sex and money. Houellebecq doesn’t achieve the parallel (and infinitely expanding) world of Lovecraft, but their methods (exposed in a wonderful stretch of Houellebecq’s Lovecraft entitled “Technical Assault”) are the same.

There’s great stuff here, and any writer will marvel at the care with which Houellebecq has broken down Lovecraft. Still, neither writers’ characters are thick in the ribs with humanity, but rather gaunt with disgust, and Houllebecq’s apologies (either for Lovecraft or himself, as he put it in Whatever: "clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight…always seemed pure bullshit to me, I’m sorry to say”) are not always convincing. Lovecraft is certainly fascinating, and Houellebecq does a good job of showing how he is both the Bingham of our most exotic fears and the Agassiz of our wildest dreams (as well as a creator of algorithmic worlds that can take the pages of The National Geographic and Nature and reflect them back to us as an endless catalogue of horrors), but at some point, the work of both men seems as much an evasion of humanity as it does a rejection of it.

They are, both of them, writers who can be easy to detest (they detest back), while being equally hard to put down. If their moods, whether registered as fantastic horror or clinically-diagnosed disgust, seem too-confined to a limited register of possibility, it may well be out of an admirable artistic purity. Then again, depending on how the lenses shift, it may well be out of human failure. That Houellebecq and Lovecraft have fully embraced both purity and failure there’s no doubt; there’s only the question of whether these have been twined into art—and a lot to wonder about how far we should follow them. Whatever your view, Lovecraft’s tales and Houellebecq’s appreciation are endlessly fascinating prisms of fear and loathing.

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Michael Downing
Shoemaker & Hoard ($23)

by Carrie Mercer

Described by one Native American as “the white man cutting an inch off the bottom of his blanket and sewing it to the top to make it longer,” the idea of Daylight Saving has been mocked and championed in equal measure for more than two hundred years. In Spring Forward, Michael Downing chronicles a surprisingly checkered and bizarre history, including arguments between federal, state and local governments. Lobbying efforts came from such diverse groups as farmers, railroads, retailers, Broadway, the beef industry, and even church clergy.

The general public has the impression that Daylight Saving was invented for farmers, but as Downing makes abundantly clear, farmers were vehemently against it from the start. Among many non-farmers who contended the benefits of Daylight Saving was A. Lincoln Filene, chairman of Boston’s largest department store. “Most farm products are better when gathered with dew on,” he claimed. In fact, many crops could not be harvested until the sun had dried the dew off. Ironically, Daylight Saving actually had the effect of lengthening the farmer’s workday, since his schedule was determined by two different clocks—the natural one and the one controlled by his local government.

Who started this nonsense in the first place? And why? The blame (or credit, depending on your viewpoint) can be spread among many characters, as Downing notes. Although Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion may be the first on record, no one is really sure anymore if he meant it as a joke. In the early 20th century, English architect William Willett lobbied parliament after having a revelation that the early morning summer sun was being wasted on sleeping townsfolk, that they should be out enjoying the extra light. Claims of energy savings and workplace efficiency resulting from Daylight Saving are still popular. Such claims have never been substantiated, despite the fact that the U.S. government has been using such reasoning to implement, and even extend, Daylight Saving since World War I.

In general, having more late afternoon/evening hours of light has made the most difference in people’s leisure time, increasing how much they spend (in time and money) on activities such as barbeque and “pleasure driving,” making the beef and barbeque industries as well as auto and fuel manufacturers heavy lobbyers for Daylight Saving. Of course, entertainment industries that depend on people going indoors for the evening—including Broadway shows and movie theatres across the nation—lobby just as hard against Daylight Saving. One worldwide change that Daylight Saving can be credited with is a huge increase in the number of people playing golf, due to later hours of daylight. And while there are less than five million farmers left in the U.S.—about 2 percent of the labor force—there are now over 30 million golfers.

Who knew an hour could make so much difference? If only it were that simple. As Downing details, even when communities have agreed to participate in Daylight Saving, there is still no consensus on how long it should last—anywhere from three to six months. This lack of agreement has created some ridiculous arrangements, such as the 1966 case of one office building in St. Paul, Minnesota, in which half the floors—those working for the city—observed Daylight Saving, and the other half—those working for the county—did not.

As entertaining as Downing makes the madness over Daylight Saving, he does an even better job of putting this one bone of contention into the larger context of worldwide timekeeping. His discussions of Greenwich Mean Time, Stalin’s failed five-day week in the 1920s, and the aggressive race between countries to be the first—by way of an altered clock—to arrive in the new millennium, give the reader an idea of how powerful a tool timekeeping is, and what huge economic and cultural forces depend on it.

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Eileen Chang
Translated by Andrew F. Jones
Columbia University Press ($27.50)

by Lucas Klein

By now, Chinese Communist Correctness has long since receded, changing Eileen Chang’s writing from being a guilty pleasure to simply a pleasure. The trend began in the West, as Chinese literature scholars in American universities during the ’60s promoted her vision and style as supreme in 20th-century Chinese literature. Readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan then discovered, or re-discovered, an individual talent, opening the mainland floodgates by the end of the ’80s. And yet, while the resurgence of her popularity can be traced to the American academy, her essays have, until now, been inaccessible to English readers.

Chang’s deft and sympathetic translator, Andrew Jones, an accomplished academic who has also translated the fiction of Yu Hua, has given Chang an English that suggests her own fluency and comfort in the language. Indeed, some of her essays were originally written in English, then expanded in Chinese, from which Jones translated—or “triangulated”—for this volume.

The context of Chang’s writing in English suggests the nature of her danger for a Communist reading public: her essays describe her upper-class background, and are forthright about fleeing war-ravished China in favor of English-style university education in Hong Kong, but Jones’s footnotes reveal an even more sinister truth. Much of her English journalism was printed in a pro-Axis periodical published in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Chinese writers, especially those still read and studied today, matched their opposition to Japanese imperialism with an increasingly vehement leftism. Chang’s resilience against social pressure from the rest of the Chinese intellectual community displays an impressive strength, and despite writing from an occupied zone for collaborationist magazines, she would have called herself apolitical. Daily life, human interactions, and even fashion concerned her too much, it seems, to have been bothered by politics.

Daily life, human interactions, and fashion are—particularly for 1940s China—considered female topics, and if Eileen Chang has any political dreams, they are for a space in which women’s problems can be accepted and considered. “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” in which she presents the preceding several hundred years of Chinese history as a tale of its fashions, even allows for an intersection of politics and panache: “In times of political turmoil and social unrest—the Renaissance in Europe, for instance—there will always be a preference for tight-fitting clothes, light and supple, allowing for quickness of movement . . . During the days when the revolution in China was brewing, Chinese clothes were nearly bursting at the seams.” She even portrays fashion as a response to oppression: “In a time of political chaos, people were powerless to improve the external conditions governing their lives. But they could influence the environment immediately surrounding them, that is, their clothes.”

Advocating for a women’s view of history, though, does quite not make Eileen Chang a feminist. Her essay “Speaking of Women” spends pages cataloguing sexist statements in an English pamphlet called Cats (along the lines of “Time is money, which is why the more time women spend in front of their mirrors, the more money they must spend in a boutique,” or “Two women can never make friends as quickly as two men, because there are more secrets between them”), but she follows it with no piquant rebuttal. Rather, her response is measured, mild, even meek. While she begins with a fine attack against generalizations—“The price of such so-called wisdom is a cheapening of the truth, for how could it be possible to sum up all women in a single phrase?”—she later depicts women in particularly unflattering terms: “In a democratic system … the problem is that most women are even less able to govern themselves capably than men.” While her topic is ostensibly egalitarian, her tone is aloof, whether writing about women in government or moralizing that, “when poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.”

The Chinese word for essay includes the character for “scattered,” and the general style of Chinese prose allows for much more meandering than the English version of the genre. Not surprisingly, some of Chang’s best moments are when she strays from the assigned topic, talking about Japanese children in an essay “On Dance,” or Chinese attitudes to the law while ostensibly writing about “Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes.” The entire essay “Seeing with the Streets” is a grand digression, demonstrating the refined vision of an exacting author as she free associates through an urban neighborhood.

But despite the roaming elegance of her longer pieces, the freshest pieces are the most clipped, those mini-essays where Chang gives herself no room to meander. One, “On Carrots,” plops into a meta-nonfiction; recording a quick dialogue about carrots, Chang elaborates only with:

I secretly jotted down this little speech, without changing even a single word and then couldn’t help laughing to myself, because all I needed to do was add a title—“On Carrots”—and a stylish little essay appeared on the page before me. . . And its wonder lies in brevity: by the time you start reading, it’s already over, which only makes you ponder its meaning all the more.

When she died in 1995, Chang—whose Chinese name Zhang Ailing is a transliteration of her English name—had been living in the United States for forty years. She had stopped writing years earlier, and her reputation had fluctuated, but she had remained a highpoint of Shanghai culture at the low point of the city. This new translation of her essays, providing in English what was composed under its influence, fulfills her charge by allowing us into that zone between two poles.

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Nadeem Aslam
Alfred A. Knopf ($25)

by Scott Esposito

In Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam develops a set of relationships that reveals the ways in which love—often abetted by religion and nationalism—can divide people instead of bring them together. Dasht-e-Tanhaii, Aslam’s stylized community of Pakistani immigrants to England, is "a place of Byzantine intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds."

Within this community, the lovers Jugnu and Chanda appear to have been murdered for living together without marrying, and Chanda’s two brothers are the suspected killers. As he tries to get on with his life, Jugnu's brother Shamas must endure the silent scorn of Kaukab, his fundamentalist wife, because he was permissive of Jugnu's lifestyle. Soon, however, Shamas meets a beautiful Muslim woman named Suraya and falls in love. Unbeknownst to him, however, he is being used: she must marry Shamas in order to remarry the husband who drunkenly divorced her one night since, under Islamic law, a divorced couple can only remarry after the wife has married another man.

This plot may appear busy, but over the course of almost 400 pages it proves sparse indeed. Instead, what fills the cavernous pages of Aslam’s book are deep, lyric studies of Shamas and Kaukab and their relationships to Jugnu, the other residents of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and their three estranged children. Aslam's talent for rendering the complexities of many difficult relationships is substantial, and the more we read, the better we understand each character as he or she develops throughout the novel. It is this that makes Maps for Lost Lovers mesmerizing.

In the book’s first section, Aslam writes that as a young immigrant to England, Shamas's wife Kaukab was so excited at the prospect of learning English that she filled a notebook with “jumbled up” proverbs she had overheard. Aslam presents a list of these, the last of which is “Heaven is other people.” As Aslam explains, “The last she had heard and remembered correctly, Hell is other people, but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one—no people no civilization—would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?”

Kaukab’s misappropriation of Sartre’s aphorism is emblematic of the greater paradox that Aslam relentlessly drives at throughout Maps for Lost Lovers. Kaukab is a sweet, caring person who would never truly believe that that other people make the world into a hell. For her, relationships are rewarding and fundamental. Yet, unwillingly, Kaukab’s prejudices often create a hellish setting for her friends, her family, and herself. Her rigid fundamentalism and her continual disapproval of the ones she loves send her husband into the arms of another woman and prevent her three children from ever coming home. Although this paradox may be most easily seen in Kaukab, it is no less present for Shamus, Suraya, or many other characters. Tragically, instead of coming together in a time of despair, they make things even more difficult for one another. The question Aslam ponders in presenting this paradox is whether his characters are tragically flawed, simply incapable of doing better, or if they are coerced into such things by their memory of Pakistan and their interpretation of Islam.

Such subject matter may make Maps for Lost Lovers, at times, a depressing read, but it is nonetheless a very worthwhile one. Throughout, the book is buoyed by Aslam’s lovely prose, which is saturated with imagery to the point that virtually no object or feeling is presented without a striking image to accompany it. A slow book that casts a very deep gaze, Maps for Lost Lovers is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on powerful forces con drive us apart: nationalism, religion, and, most of all, love.

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Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday ($24.95)

by Kevin Dole

From the references to The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales in the jacket copy, one might expect Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted to establish mainstream literary credibility for its author. It doesn’t: Haunted is no more or less literary than any other book by Palahniuk. Similarly, early reference in the text to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and the Villa Diodati—the country house where Mary Shelley and friends created, among other tales, the story of Frankenstein and the modern vampire archetype—might make one expect the book to be a horror novel. It isn’t: Haunted, while often disturbing and occasionally disgusting, it is not a very scary book.

Haunted is, despite all indicators otherwise, a black satire, like most of Palahniuk’s work. What differentiates Haunted from his other fiction is that it is a collection of short tales told by disparate, desperate characters, much like the classical works of literature that it so conspicuously mentions. The storytellers are all participants in an unconventional writers' retreat, held by the extremely wealthy and aged eccentric Mr. Whittier—who, in the grand tradition of wealthy eccentrics given to odd experiments, is not who he seems (his secret being, in the tradition of Palahniuk, bizarre enough to make one simultaneously laugh aloud and squirm)—in an abandoned theater. There the novel’s 18 narrators spend three months in isolation in hopes of creating their magnum opus.

The stories that they produce, masterpiece or no, comprise the text. This structure is not without its flaws. It allows Palahniuk to explore his major themes from multiple angles, but despite this freedom Haunted feels almost mathematically rote. Each chapter is a self-contained story. Each story is prefaced by an unremarkable prose poem that introduces the character and establishes the circumstance of the story. In between stories we learn how the group is coping with confinement in the face of ever increasing privations (this connective tissue is told in collective third person, the same “we” that presumably narrates the poems). But while predictable, the real reason that this structure proves problematic is that it places total reliance on the individual stories, which are a decidedly mixed bag.

Most of them, thankfully, are at least worth reading, and some are even great. Included is the notorious “Guts”—which, along with “Exodus” and “Speaking Bitterness,” shows Palahniuk at his provocative best. The final story, “Obsolete,” is an allegorical tale of speculative fiction that would have been at home in the best of the ’70s sci-fi pulps, and “Hot Potting” would make the high point in any horror anthology. But too many others are merely mediocre. Readers quickly learn that each story will contain a Shocking Twist, and while always inventive, the twists are sometimes desperate in their outrageousness. Stories like “Punch Drunk” and “The Nightmare Box” just try too hard and are the worse for it.

The relationship between the stories is also confusing. A collection of short fiction needn’t necessarily be cohesive, but much like the characters that tell them, these stories just don’t get along with each other. “Dissertation” and “Post-Production” don’t even seem to occupy the same reality. And Haunted takes a bewildering turn toward the paranormal in its second half; it’s difficult to reconcile later explorations of werewolves and psychic powers with earlier stories of personal failure and devastating irony. Most of the stories succeed on their individual merits but fail when taken collectively, especially since the subtitle tells us that Haunted is supposed to be a novel.

The overarching narrative shows Palahniuk at his worst. As befits a group of people so damaged, the characters quickly move from self-pity to self-destruction. Unfortunately, they all have suggestive names like The Reverend Godless and Miss Sneezy. These pseudonyms and the structure of the theater itself are probably meant to recall “The Masque of the Red Death” but instead the action takes on pastiche, like the end solution to a session of the board game Clue— "Comrade Snarky in the Blue Velvet Lobby with the Chef's Knife!" The mayhem wears out quickly, becoming profoundly ineffective and at times incoherent. Palahniuk wants to talk about self-sabotage and our "culture of blame"; he wants to address the connections between storytelling, victimhood, and voyeurism. He does this with some success inside the characters’ stories, but in the collective narrative he feels it necessary to tell us explicitly, and this weakens the work.

Haunted starts to come together as a book at the end, despite the supernaturalism; it nearly closes with a tone that's almost hopeful (in a Samuel Beckett sort of way), but its grace is quickly dashed by pointless, mean-spirited irony. This is a book that can be admired for its complexity and ambition, but will likely be remembered for its failure.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005