Common Knowledge

LITTLE REVIEWS

Brigitte Le Juez, Beckett before Beckett, trans. Ros Schwartz

(London: Souvenir Press, 2008), 272 pp.

In the early 1930s Samuel Beckett took a position as lecturer in French at Univer-
sity College, Dublin, his alma mater. He did not enjoy the experience, and after
eighteen months resigned, departing from academic life for good.
One of Becketts students, Rachel Burrows, had the foresight to preserve
the notes she took of his lectures on the French novel and French drama. With-
out attempting to recreate what Burrows must have heard, Brigitte Le Juez uses
these notes to present an account of Becketts early opinions on Balzac, Stendhal,
Flaubert, Proust, Gide, and Racine.
Burrows was clearly one of Becketts better students, one of a handful who
actually enjoyed the course (in an interview late in life she recalls that most stu-
dents found him remote and uncommunicative). Most of the time she gets Beck-
etts meaning right, though now and again her editor has to correct her. Becketts
likes and dislikes come through clearly (he detested Balzac, for instance), but
readers who come to this book hoping to hear the authentic accents of the young
Beckett (who was only twenty-four at the time) will be disappointed. Burrows
found it enough to note down the main points of her lecturers argument; and this
condensation is not reproduced verbatim, but instead used by le Juez as the basis
for an exposition in her own words of what the lectures must have comprised.
The value of this book lies not in any contribution that Beckett may make
to our critical appreciation of these French masters, but in what one can detect, at
a considerable remove, of his own as yet only half-formed ambitions as a writer.
J. M. Coetzee
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-092

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Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life in Poems

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(London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), 160 pp.

C o m m o n K n o wled g e

Many readers find this work a moving biography in verse, and it is written by an
esteemed poet with the cachet of a distant descendant of Charles Darwin. Padel
is fascinated by the amazing couple, Emma and Charles, and builds many of
Charless sentences into her poems. The stanzas will please. Some, however, may
feel themselves driven to undergraduate pastiche:

Poems found, within clear prose

Punctuated
To make them scan,
Abstracts of a fine hand and finer mind.
Sidenotes in the imprint of an Ancient Mariner.

Hes told her his discoveries: Darwin meanwhile was publishing his
shed love him to be right in everything. Journal of Researches later known as
Shes very afraid hes not. Voyage of the Beagle.
It fits, under the keel five fathom down.
O, for that lonesome spirit
Passing the South Pole, and not this.

Instead of reading products of the years Darwin industry, pick up any volume
of Darwin himself and open at random. The work is stunning. The man looked,
and thought: he was the most brilliant observer and reasoner (upon what he saw)
of all time. (His one rival is Aristotle.) Read Darwin himselfor else try the
arrowroot pudding from Mrs. Charles Darwins Recipe Book by Dusha Bateson and
Weslie Haneway (London: Glitterati, 2009), which could suggest to you what
ailed him. The cookbook reminds us that Darwin was above all a countryman
who loved the land and its denizens. So much in his work is about artificial selec-
tion, which means the skill of the breeders whom he knew. Their labors and
successes turned his inquiring mind to natural selection, the idea that was right
and changed the universe.
Ian Hacking
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-093

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Amir D. Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician:

287
The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed
(New York: Basic Books, 2007), 256 pp.

Lit tle Rev iews

Aczel takes the vagaries of Bourbaki as an emblem for those of structuralism as a
whole. A group of French mathematicians set out in the 1930s to produce a final
synthesis of all of mathematics based on set theoretical foundationsall to be
published under the collective pseudonym of N. Bourbaki. The group did issue
impressive work, but it now appears in retrospect like a dead end. Bourbaki was
founded, and then judged, on the false criterion of finality. If you aim for a theory
of everything, so as to end all theory, you will fail and put in question the quest
itself. But is that quite fair? It is not that theories of everything do not exist, any
more than Bourbaki does not exist. What they are is nonunique. There are plenty
of such theories. We should not expect any particular theory of everything to be
the last one: the infinite richness of the mathematical universe demands not one
theory of mathematical everything, but many. The same, of course, is true for the
infinite richness of humanity. We should therefore have many theories of human
everything: many structuralisms.
Works of popular science must decide on a balance between intellec-
tual weight and accessibility. Aczel chose accessibility, to the point where one
no longer can tell just what it was that was meant to become accessible. The
name-dropping of terms like cohomology and algebraical geometry resonates and
titillates, leaving no knowledge in its wake. What remains are mostly biographi-
cal vignettes . . . which brings to mind a paradox. Why are the biographies of
modern academics so boring, while the genre of the academic novel is so full of
charm? It appears that the modern research university has constructed the most
predictably boring form of life. It sets up the perfect setting for the comedy of
bourgeois boredomwhile academic biographies remain as interesting as the
CVs on which they are patterned.
Reviel Netz
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-094

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Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA,

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and the Craft of Counterintelligence

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 399 pp.
C o m m o n K n o wled g e

The arcane techniques of literary criticism prosper little on soil outside the acad-
emy. They thrive in classrooms, particularly in seminars where the intricacies
of poetic device can be scrutinized and the more delicate points of irony and
recessed meaning can gently be brought to the surface. Imagine, then, a moment
in recent governmental history when a young man tutored in such skills (indeed,
within the very sanctumYaleof such techniques) had risen to a commanding
position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Imagine him constructing methods
over many decades whereby the movement of covert agents, turncoats, traitors,
and even triple-agents could be studied as if such an intricate design were itself
a kind of poem. Imagine the paranoia that at last enveloped him and profoundly
damaged the agency. This is the story of James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-
intelligence at the CIA for two decades, from the early 1950s to 1974, as put forth
by Michael Holzman.
Holzman wants to believe that he, working in his own way as a detective,
has found the key to Angletons spectacular rise in the CIA and, later, his spiral-
ing downfall. Yale, in the persons of his teachersNorman Holmes Pearson and
Maynard Mack, among othershad trained Angleton never to give credence to
the surface of things but always to look for the buried tensions beneath. Appear-
ances were never to be trusted. According to Holzman, Angleton in the end took
such lessons too seriously and wound up convinced that all was seeming and all
seeming was suspect. This is an enticingly melodramatic way to look at Angleton
and the CIA, but can it be trusted? Can everything the CIA so ignobly did over
the decadesand Holzman names them: lists of Americans to be interned, the
attempted destruction of the alternative press, the assassination of Black Pan-
thers, the audits of ordinary citizens, and what Holzman calls the coup dtat
that replaced the Nixon governmentreally be traced back to one man and
his days in New Haven? Did Angleton indeed have such power? Did the New
Criticism have such a long reach? Was so little else involved? Holzman gives us
a hothouse world in which a singular personality appears to dominate events.
Perhaps he is right; but often those who study for an extended time the claustro-
phobic world of conspiratorial thinking have a way of emerging with their own
conspiratorial notions in hand.
William M. Chace
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-095

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Zhao Ziyan, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyan,

289
trans. and ed. Bao Pu, Renee Chiang, and Adi Ignatius
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 336 pp.

Lit tle Rev iews

This book is based on about thirty audiotapes of statements made by Zhao Ziyan
when he was under house arresta prisoner of the statefrom 1989 until
his death in 2005. Zhao was premier of the Peoples Republic of China from
198087 and general secretary of the Communist Party of China from 198789.
He openly sympathized with student demonstrators during the 1989 Tianan-
men Square protests, losing favor as a consequence with paramount leader Deng
Xiaoping. This book discloses serious power struggles among the highest leader-
ship of the Communist Party around issues of market economics and the separa-
tion of the party from the state. Actually, when Zhao was premier, he was mostly
out of touch with problems relating to reform of the political system. But Zhaos
statements, as recorded in this book, show that eventually he concluded that the
party should release its monopoly on power. Now as then, China needs a par-
liamentary democracy, a free press, freedom to organize, and an independent
judiciary.
Fang Lizhi
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-096

Lawrence Rothfield, The Rape of Mesopotamia:

Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 216 pp.

The Iraq Museum was wrecked by a mob, just liberated and ready to take out its
feelings on what were experienced as symbols of authority. Then other sites were
wrecked as well and plundered with an eye to profits that the objects lifted might
produce. Mobs will always be with us, and it is impossible to dispel the profit
motive, even when profits fail to materialize. The recycling of buried and lost
objects has been a human activity since remote antiquity, and the resulting col-
lections have as distinguished a history in scholarship as state museums do but of
course need regulating. The remedy lies with governments (quicker to pass laws
than enforce them), the military (which has other priorities), museums (which
do their best with minimal resources), and educators (who have not brought the
people to feel genuine awe at our heritage). Still, we are unlikely ever to stop
folk from destroying the human heritage if they believe it is not their heritage or
is seriously at odds with their heritage (think of Islam and Buddhism at Bamiyan).
And national greed plays its part tooin the clamor for local restitution of what
is by now global heritage.

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International resolutions do not cut much ice these days. The Hague Con-
29 0

vention of 1954 covered military activity, and a UNESCO resolution in 1970

made illicit the loot from unauthorized excavation. Fair enough; but now we
C o m m o n K n o wled g e

are hearing that such material is itself blameworthy, should not be conserved or
even kept intact, and never looked at or used for scholarshipand many of those
saying so are archaeologists and other scholars. It would seem that mobs come in
more than one kind.
John Boardman
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-097

Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 170 pp.

In search of diversity and disagreement in medieval intellectual life, Bartlett finds

them among the grandest conceptions of thingsexplanations of what causes
what in the physical world, of what sorts of creatures inhabit it, and of what kind of
agency they exert. Neither broad theological uniformity nor the other common-
alities of (what Roger Bacon called) the respublica Latinorum precluded a range of
opinions on these matters during the Middle Ages or the intellectual discomfort
thereby produced. What was natural or supernatural or monstrous, where
magic and witchcraft were to be placed on any map of knowledge and practice,
whether the world was more like a machine or a book, and how individual phe-
nomena like eclipses or night flying or cynocephali were to be accounted for, were
questions for debate and controversy. Yet both these issues themselves and the
fraught, boundary-challenging consequences of debating them are familiar
familiar, in any case, to historians who have recently traced them through to
at least the eighteenth century. Thus Bartletts lecture series does not so much
recruit the Middle Ages (and specifically, a naturalist like Bacon) for the world of
intellectual diversity or for Max Webers narrative of disenchantment. Instead
Bartlett reinforces a periodization increasingly used to identify the peculiarities
of intellectual life during the long early modern age. From the thirteenth to the
eighteenth centuries, it seems, knowledge issues of the sort traced in these lec-
tures, rather than any straightforward trajectory of disenchantment, were char-
acteristic of the republic of letters. Hence the answer to a rhetorical question
Bartlett poses to his audience is contained in his own arguments: how does one
reconcile the art of Leonardo, the science of Copernicus and Galileo, and the
literature of Shakespeare with the witch craze? This question is no longer, as he
terms it, perplexing; it is merely old-fashioned.
Stuart Clark
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-098

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J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 14921830

291
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 560 pp.

Lit tle Rev iews

Over the last few years, a number of exciting analyses of the historic European
empires have emerged in English. Elliotts book, a solid and scholarly compari-
son of the two main colonial empires of North America, is traditionalist rather
than innovative. With over 400 pages of text and 100 of footnotes, the author
manages to give a stimulating overview of the latest research, though inevitably
there are matters that in the allotted space he could not cover. He emphasizes
what the Spaniards and English tried to do, which lends support to the notion of
empire as achievement and greatly affects his presentation of the Spanish empire
in particular. Conquest, ordering, and monopoly are his guiding ideas in dealing
with Spanish America, and the Catholic religion is said to have been effectively
instilled there. Clearly, there is substantial scope for disagreement with this tra-
ditional view. Though a highly professional study, it is not the last word.
Henry Kamen
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-099

Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Out of the Cave:

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Dead Sea Scrolls Research
(Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press; Cambridge, MA;
Harvard University Press, 2006), 167 pp.

For over half a century, scholars have been trying to investigate the link between
the Dead Sea Scrolls found in caves, the archaeological discoveries on the nearby
site of Khirbet Qumran, and the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes described by
three first-century CE writers (Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephusboth
Jewishand the Roman Pliny the Elder). The large majority of experts holds
that the three elements are interconnected and that at least some of the literary
works are of Essene origin. During the last three decades, competing theories
have emerged that deny the link between the Qumran establishment and the
scrolls. Edna Ullmann-Margalit, an Israeli philosopher of science, in a booklet
devoted to research about scrolls research, dissects the arguments offered by
mainstream scholarship. Yet, although from the philosophical point of view she
finds the reasoning of the Qumranologists here and there slippery and wanting,
she nevertheless believes that none of the challenges have broken any of the links
of their argument and that none of the alternatives can compete in attractive-
ness with the Qumran-Essene theory. This is about right, she concludes; and the
reviewer agrees.
Geza Vermes
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-100

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Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War:

292

The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 253 pp.
C o m m o n K n o wled g e

The title of this book serves warning that the author is an ironist. His villains are
the army of God, or soldiers of Christ, or heavenly avengers; his lead villain
is a model Christian prince; the actions of his villains epitomized sanguine
beauty. But dripping irony is by no means Peggs only rhetorical mode. Villains
hiss, whisper slyly, swagger; they do not merely burn and slaughter but do
so joyously; massacres delight them. The decibel level is continually high: a
nasty abbot gallops hard all summer; innocent victims terrified by ribald fury
seek to escape with crying and weeping. Vultures are never plain vultures but
always black vultures. What is the point of all this? If Pegg thinks he is tell-
ing a ripsnorting good story, he might realize that most readers prefer not to be
bludgeoned. Yet he surely believes that he is shouting for a larger purpose. For
him, the Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine
salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice
on the cross. I have no intention of siding with the Crusaders (is there anyone
today who does?) but find that I need to make two objections. Technically, the
crusade indulgence did not assure salvation; one gained absolution from sin
by contrite confession and absolutionthe crusade indulgence concerned time
spent in purgatory after one was assured salvation. If that distinction may seem
to some a quibble, the easy use of the word genocide should not. The crusade was
proclaimed against unbelievers (whether justly or unjustly is another question),
not against a genus or people; those who joined the crusade had no intention of
annihilating the population of southern France. If Peggs message is that Chris-
tians have a long history of slaughtering in the name of the faith, he might have
started with Charlemagne or devoted more than two paragraphs to the First
Crusade. If Pegg wishes to connect the Albigensian Crusade to modern ethnic
slaughter, wellwords fail me (as they do him).
Robert E. Lerner
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-101

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Frederick Seidel, Poems, 19592009

293
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), 509 pp.

Lit tle Rev iews

Aside from the antiwar poetry Web site, whose designation steers protesters
into a ghetto and reduces their grievances to a single foregone conclusion, Ameri-
can poetry has not lately bothered much with cultural criticism, although the
culture is not beyond criticism and such criticism has been a mainstay of poetry
since Hesiod composed Works and Days. Abdication of the role of cultural critic,
indeed, may explain the low status accorded to poets nowadays. Enter Frederick
Seidel. A breakfast sugar bowl presages the morning commute, offering an image
of the greed, addiction, and suppressed mayhem visible to the poet as critic: The
sugar bowl on the counter is a D-cup, containing one large white breast. / The
breast in the bowl is covered by excited specks / That are so beyond, and running
around, they are wrecks. / They like things that are sweet. Thats what they like
to eat. Unlike the Beats, who polarized the world into Hip versus Square (You
killed him, you in the grey flannel suit), Seidel is no finger-pointer. His own
persona embodies the quest for immediate gratification that his poetry depicts.
A poem that begins, The homeless are blossoming like roses, concludes: I
bathe in their screams . . . / I dress for the evening / My Name is Fred Seidel. /
I paid for this ad. Hence a readers first impression of Seidel is not that he treats
cultural ills but that he exemplifies them. His treatment of decadence is, more-
over, so laugh-aloud funny we dont notice the medicine go down. Unlike Charles
Bukowski, a self-proclaimed slob who asserts his vices are acts of personal defi-
ance (Here I am . . . drunk again at 3 a.m.), Seidel is never sloppy, and it is not
a slobs vices in which he delights: . . . not that I care / Being debonair . . . / /
Delighted by an impairment of feeling / That keeps everything away / People
standing around in a display case, / Even when they are in bed with you. Like
Hamlet forcing Gertrude to Look here, upon this picture, and on this, Seidel
holds his own mirror up to the shallow culture we have, all together, made. The
future of psychoanalysis, he writes, is a psychology of surface. . . . The future of
psychoanalysis / is that it has none. The future of psychoanalysis may be grim,
but the future of American poetry is looking up.
Belle Randall
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-102

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Joyce Tyldesley, Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt

294

(New York: Basic Books, 2008), 290 pp.

C o m m o n K n o wled g e

Cleopatra continues to be a perennial favorite for scholarly and popular writ-

ers. If you want Cleopatra viewed through the lens of Roman history, Michael
Grants 1972 study is still hard to beat for its writing and for the authors ability
to reason through the biased, not to say sensationalist ancient sources. In the last
several years, Sally-Ann Ashton and Susan Walker have written a number of brief
popularizing books that focus on Cleopatra as an Egyptian queen. Diana Klein-
ers Cleopatra and Rome is an art-historical entry that documents Augustuss (and
more generally, Roman) Egyptomania, especially after the queens death. We
also have versions of Cleopatra by Hughes-Hallett (1990), Whitehorne (1994),
Rice (1999), Chauveau (2000), and Burstein (2004). Tyldesleys 2008 contribu-
tion to this overpopulated field attempts to have the best of both the Egyptian
and Roman worlds, though as an Egyptologist her real contribution is the docu-
mentation of Cleopatra as a queen operating within a particular set of Egyptian
religious and political constraints (and opportunities). The chapters on the high-
profile events of Cleopatras lifeher liaisons first with Julius Caesar then Marc
Antony, her defeat along with Antony by Octavian, and her subsequent suicide
(from the bite of an asp?)alternate with chapters on Ptolemaic history and
Egyptian religious practices, and throughout there is a deft setting out of mod-
ern fetishes about Cleopatra, particularly with respect to ethnicity and gender.
Tyldesley concludes with a brief chapter on the growth of the Cleopatra industry,
making this a Cleopatra pitched to nonspecialists rather more than either clas-
sicists or Egyptologists.
Susan Stephens
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-103

Matthew Simms, Czannes Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 228 pp.

Does civilization need another new book on Paul Czanne? Several ambitious
ones have been published during the past few years; they have significant over-
lap, but we can learn from all of them as long as they are themselves sufficiently
learned. Simmss book is. The recent exhibition Czanne and Beyond, orga-
nized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, demonstrated how Czanne affected
the future that he never saw in ways he could never have imagined nor would likely
have approved. He has been our universal donor, inspiring artistic generations
to this day, so that diverse lines of aesthetic evolution in painting seem linked

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to a common ancestor. Simms reaches further back, establishing a nineteenth-

295
century context for Czannes practice, stressing the significance of his attention
to the lesser medium of watercolor. Although long acknowledged as a major part

Lit tle Rev iews

of Czannes achievement, his watercolors have lacked the intense analysisboth
formal and historicalthat Simms accomplishes in this deeply documented and
generously illustrated book. He argues that with watercolor, Czanne could hold
drawing and painting, line and color, in a shifting aesthetic equilibrium, all the
better to express his transient sensations: The fragmentary quality of Czannes
watercolors indicates a careful calibration of the pencil and the paintbrush to the
rhythms of the artists attention and the patterning of his sensations, rendered as
tactile drawing and optical color. Like other art historians and critics, Simms has
inherited a standard set of binary oppositions (drawing, painting; touch, vision);
he wrestles with them, sometimes invoking philosophical synthesizers, such as
Henri Bergson. Perhaps Czanne was wrestling with concepts as well, even as
his sensory experience transcended them. I wonder whether these categories
plagued him, impeding his own resolution of feeling and thinking. We struggle
to describe the aesthetic experience of a brief moment, and it requires paragraphs
of description and chapters of analysis based on documentation and theoryan
elaborate auxiliary construction. Simms has mastered such construction, which
is to his great credit. Art history and art criticism nevertheless remain strange
enterprises. Their expanding practice may be a sign of our collective aesthetic
anxiety, even while offering glimpses of aesthetic satisfaction.
Richard Shiff
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-104

Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 416 pp.

What did those early moderns want? Job satisfaction, marital happiness, honor,
fame, a glowing funeral sermon, coffee, sumptuous curtainsearly modern
Englishmen and women, it turns out, wanted most of the same things that the
rest of us do. In this sweeping account of how people in the sixteenth through
eighteenth centuries gave meaning to their lives, Thomas shows us how little has
fundamentally changed. Pursuing ones own idea of happiness and fulfillment;
maintaining a good reputation for oneself and ones family; sharing ones daily
life with intimate friends; achieving a level of worldly success and wealth without
sacrificing too much to the workplace; battling the oblivion that lurks around the
corner: these were some of the most pressing concerns of early modern English
culture. Not only the goods but also the evils of this societyoverwork, extrava-

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gant consumption, gossip, slanderare deeply familiar to us, so familiar, in fact,

296

that this book feels at times like a clever projection of the present onto the past.
Mitigating this charge, however, are the diarists and poets, philosophers and
C o m m o n K n o wled g e

merchants, politicians and priests, whose voices fill Thomass pages with a strong
sense of historical specificityof there and not here, of then and not now.
Ramie Targoff
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-105

K. David Harrison, When Languages Die:

The Extinction of the Worlds Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 292 pp.

While mainstream theoretical linguists following Chomsky continue to hunt for

what is universal and innate in some of the worlds 6,912 remaining languages,
there are others who seek, as Harrison does, evidence of uncommon knowledge,
divergent ways of organizing linguistically terms for species, time, space, num-
ber, kinds of talk, and other concepts. Interviewing last surviving speakers like
the Tofa reindeer herders or the Tuvan nomads of South Siberia, the Wayampi
hunter-gatherers in the rain forests of French Guiana, the few Karaim in the
Lithuanian village of Trakai, the Ifugao rice farmers in the mountains of the
Philippines, or the Ho-Munda tribals in Orissa State in India, he salvages shreds
of a dying language and culture from elderly people who no longer have anyone
to speak it with. Harrisons goal in this book (and in the stunning sixty-minute
video The Linguists viewable at www.babelgum.com) is to show the urgency of
recording or saving the 3,000 or so languages projected to disappear this century
and the human knowledge they incorporate.
Bernard Spolsky
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-106

Elizabeth Farrelly, Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 219 pp.

Recently, the French governments attempt to curb the jouissance of smoking

claimed another victim. Alain Delon is now a nonsmoker, his cigarette digitally
extinguished from popular culturehis thumb now resting on his chin in a
superfluous mannerthe fingers slightly parting where the cigarette once dan-
gled casually. The war against excess demands the re-creation of narratives and

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paradigms in search of the good lifean act of rewriting history that the State

297
of Public Health justifies. The narrative of aesthetic modernism suffers the same
fate in Farrellys Blubberland, in which architecture talks to Hegel and comes up

Lit tle Rev iews

with disaster if we do not turn to sustainable and modest ways of dwelling. Mod-
ernism produced a few lovely things, of course, but its trajectory was catastrophic:
capitalism converging with modernist aesthetics produced desires consummated
in postwar suburban sprawl and excess. Happiness is not a swimming pool, slow
down, go back: the maxims are all expectable, and continents filled with differing
human societies are subjected to them. The Amazon is destroyed, China is about
to implode, great herds of humanity cry out in desperation. In the end, though,
Farrelly confides: the Darwinian in us may kick in. Our famous adaptability may
yet triumph, the planet may just survive. But then, shouldnt Farrelly reflect on
how the human hubris she attacks may be the very element propelling the adapta-
tion and survival for which she hopes?
Yoke-Sum Wong
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-107

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