Bertrand M. Patenade
Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
Faber and Faber, 2009
352 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0571228751

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On the night of the October Revolution of 1917, Russia’s moderate socialists stormed out of the Second Congress of Soviets in Petrograd to protest the radical Bolshevik coup d’état underway across the city. Before the moderates managed to leave the chamber, however, an agitated Bolshevik delegate with a moustache, beady eyes, and sparkling pince-nez rose to hammer a final, icy nail in their coffin. “You are pitiful, isolated individuals”, Leon Trotsky roared. “You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!”

Having joined the Bolshevik Party just a few months earlier, Trotsky, a former moderate, narrowly escaped the dustbin himself. As the October Revolution progressed into a full-blown civil war, he became the mastermind of the Red Army’s campaign, solidifying his place in history as Vladimir Lenin’s ruthless and obstreperous War Commissar. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had won the war, and when Lenin died two years later (the result of a stroke, syphilis, poisoning, or some combination of the three), the question of who would lead the world’s first avowedly socialist state became, for Trotsky, one of life and death.

Josef Stalin was determined to sweep Trotsky into the dustbin. Afflicted by perpetual fevers and poor health, a sickly Trotsky was on his way to the Black Sea in 1924 when he received news of Lenin’s death via telegram from Stalin. The telegram misstated the date of the funeral, making it seem impossible for Trotsky’s train to return to Moscow in time for the ceremony. When the country’s revolutionary heroes paraded onto the Kremlin balustrade at Lenin’s funeral, Trotsky was nowhere to be found.

After years of political infighting, the ruling Stalinist clique voted Trotsky out of the government in 1927. A year and a half later, they exiled him from the country for good. By banishing Trotsky and later orchestrating his murder in Mexico, Stalin removed the only other person with a compelling claim to Lenin’s mantle. But he did not stop there. Over the course of the 1930s, Stalin gradually invented, in the likeness of Trotsky, the Soviet folk devil par excellence. He whittled Trotsky into the ultimate traitor, excised his legacy from the history books, and executed thousands in the name of fabricated Trotskyite sympathies. Having morphed from revolutionary war hero to public enemy number one, Trotsky spent most of his days in exile trying to clear his name, writing books and press releases to set the historical record straight, and mourning friends and relatives executed by Stalin.

This sunset period of Trotsky’s life forms the basis of Bertrand M. Patenaude’s book, Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Despite its title, the book covers only Trotsky’s exile in Mexico, from 1937 to 1940, and largely overlooks the time he spent exiled in Turkey, France, and Norway beforehand. The reason is clear: it is Mexico where the spiciest titbits of Trotsky’s life took place—where the old man liaised with Frida Kahlo, and later met his death in the form of a pickaxe to the skull—and Patenaude has written a book concerned more with narrative spice than with staid, analytical savour.

An academic by training, Patenaude has forayed into the realm of popular history in the footsteps of Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose successful biographies of Stalin and Catherine the Great have presented Russian history in the style of a dramatic novel. But where Montefiore shines in his use of slick and speedy prose, Patenaude disappoints, striking an unbalanced tone that oscillates between sensational gossip and hurried historical analysis. This deficiency, combined with the book’s schizophrenic timeline and repetitiveness, causes Stalin’s Nemesis to fall short of the robust novelistic recreation it might have been.

Yet the book does not fail completely. Patenaude unwittingly reveals the chief merit of his book when describing Trotsky’s biography of Stalin: “Like all historical research”, he says, “Trotsky’s job was one of excavation.” This is clearly how Patenaude interprets the biographer’s brief, for despite its shortcomings, Stalin’s Nemesis succeeds at the task of excavation. Patenaude airs even the most obscure and irrelevant dustbunnies of history, combing through archival and secondary-source materials on Trotsky’s later life in a way that leaves no sensational stone unturned.

The dustbunnies that Patenaude brings to light range the gamut, from real bunnies—Trotsky kept them on his Mexican patio as pets and tended to them just before his murder—to oral sex, a frank discussion of which appears in a letter that Trotsky wrote to his wife Natalia during the liaison with Frida. Why Patenaude believes that readers want to know about Trotsky’s erections, or rather lack thereof, is anyone’s guess. But blinded by the temptations of salaciousness, Patenaude forges ahead into the biographical depths, right down to the revolutionary’s anus: apparently, certain species of Mexican bacteria aggravated Trotsky’s colon, which was already irritated by colitis.

The book’s effusive details, some fascinating and others wholly unnecessary, hardly end there. For example, we learn that Trotsky briefly lived in the Bronx before returning to launch the revolution in 1917; the surrealist André Breton offended Trotsky by stealing Mexican figurines from a church the two visited together; the writer Saul Bellow sat in the hospital waiting room as Trotsky died; and the artist Diego Rivera—Frida’s husband and the guarantor of the old man’s asylum in Mexico—first appeared on Trotsky’s radar when he inserted Lenin’s face into a mural he painted at Radio City Music Hall. Ramon Mercader, the Spanish-born NKVD agent who infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle and killed him, apparently worked as a chef at the Ritz in Barcelona.

Mercader played the lead role in “Operation Duck”, the intricate plot to murder Trotsky, which comprises a large part of the book. Patenaude describes how the NKVD recruited Mercader during the Spanish Civil War and planned for him to infiltrate Trotsky’s circle by romancing Sylvia Ageloff, a Brooklyn social worker who had become involved in the American Trotskyist movement. Using Ageloff as a conduit, Mercader ingratiated himself to the members of Trotsky’s domestic staff in Mexico and eventually met his target. On 20 August 1940, the day he bludgeoned Trotsky in the head, Mercader entered the Mexican home straight through the front door, greeted by a cordial welcome from the guards. After 20 years in jail, Mercader was released and awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal for his service to the USSR.

While Patenaude treats the story surrounding Trotsky’s murder with particular rigour and care, the second-most memorable moment of Trotsky’s Mexican exile, his liaison with the painter Frida Kahlo, receives relatively scant attention, a mere ten pages in total. This is partly because the documents are few: Trotsky reportedly asked Frida to return the letters they exchanged out of fear that Stalinist agents would find them, and after Frida complied, the letters were destroyed.

The book gives very little sense of Frida’s personal rapport with Trotsky, aside from the detail that Frida apparently called him piochitas, or “little goatee”. Again, Patenaude concentrates on the dustbunnies: on the sexual symbolism of a monkey in one of Frida’s self-portraits, on Frida’s former Japanese-American lover and Rivera’s violent tendencies. These details come at the expense of a deeper look into the substance of the pair’s relationship. Moreover, the book’s depiction of Frida desperately lacks nuance, not least because it manages to render a feminist cult icon as something of a promiscuous flirt. According to Trotsky’s secretary, Frida described her life philosophy as “make love, take a bath, make love again”—a problematic portrayal of the painter, which Patenaude unflinchingly reproduces and reifies. To make matters worse, the book floats three possible reasons behind Frida’s decision to enter the affair: promiscuity, revenge for Rivera’s infidelities (he slept with her sister), and infatuation with a great man. One has the sneaking suspicion that women can be something other than wanton, jealous, or obsessed.

Some 60 years after the end of Operation Duck, it is worth asking whether Trotsky, and more notably the communist project he envisioned, in fact escaped the dustbin of history. In a speech to the British Parliament in 1982, Ronald Reagan turned Trotsky’s dramatic words against him, declaring that the march of freedom and democracy would leave Marxism-Leninism on the “ash heap of history”.

Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric presaged an era when communism would no longer define the world, and when the once-famous Leon Trotsky would be remembered primarily for his lover or for his nemesis. Patenaude could have corrected this by making a case for interpreting Trotsky’s legacy in some other way. Instead, he mistakes the forest for the trees, the dustbin for the dustbunnies, magnifying the minutiae of a sensational story rather than advancing a more complex argument about Trotsky’s historical bequest.

The mere publication of Patenaude’s book confirms readers’ continued interest in the life of Leon Trotsky. Yet the book’s title suggests a legacy in demise, a personage who now needs the name of his more famous enemy to enjoy historical significance in the popular eye. Trotsky, it seems, has yet to be relegated to history’s dustbin, but nonetheless has been consigned to its subtitle.

Paul Sonne is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at New College, Oxford. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Declan Kiberd
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life
Faber and Faber, 2009
400 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0571242542

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If Marilyn Monroe can read Ulysses, so can you. The 20th century’s archetypal blonde sits on the cover of Ulysses and Us, gracefully curled on a playground bench, attired in colourful stripy beachwear. Her eyes focus intently on the heavy tome balanced upon her knees; her mouth hangs slightly open; she is engrossed.

The connection between the cover photograph and the content of Declan Kiberd’s book is never spelt out. Although this is not ideal, it is probably for the best: to explain the link would be to risk implying that a blonde bombshell provides the best possible example of the ordinary reader. For Kiberd’s book is all about the common or average reader—that is, the reader who approaches Ulysses without academic incentive or guidance. Kiberd’s view, repeated with mantra-like regularity throughout this episode-by-episode guide to James Joyce’s masterpiece, is that Ulysses was written for precisely this kind of reader.

Ulysses and Us has two principle aims: to explain why Ulysses has missed its target audience, and to give that audience the means to enjoy and reclaim it. Kiberd argues that Ulysses is for ordinary readers because it is primarily about ordinary people. The novel’s minimalist plot revolves around a single day in the lives of three Dubliners: Stephen Dedalus—erudite young man and aspiring writer; Leopold Bloom—middle-aged Jewish man, advertisement canvasser; and Molly Bloom—Leopold’s wife, a concert singer.

While Molly waits for her lover to arrive, Leopold ambles about the streets of Dublin, trying in vain to keep his wife’s dalliance out of mind. Meanwhile, Stephen follows his own meandering trajectory through the city, thinking abstruse thoughts about life and literature. While Stephen is haunted by memories of his mother’s recent death, Bloom’s thoughts often return to his son Rudy, who died in infancy ten years earlier. The two men’s paths eventually cross as Bloom follows Stephen and his riotous drinking companions to Dublin’s red-light district. In the early hours of the morning, the two men amble back to Bloom’s kitchen for a cup of cocoa.

There may not seem much to this storyline, but Joyce’s masterful and revolutionary use of interior monologue infuses his protagonists’ experiences with emotional resonance and psychological complexity. The book derives additional meaning and structure from an external source: the title is a reference to Homer’s Odyssey, with which it entertains countless correspondences—Stephen is a modern-day Telemachus, Bloom a contemporary Odysseus, Molly an updated Penelope.

Ulysses and Us convincingly portrays Bloom as a representative of civic bourgeois virtue. Kiberd aptly and engagingly captures the tenderness and tolerance with which Joyce endows his everyman: it is in Bloom’s well-intentioned concern for others and kindness in action that Ulysses’s everyday wisdom resides. However, Kiberd’s contention that Bloom’s values are Joyce’s own—that Bloom is in some way privileged over other protagonists as a mouthpiece for Joyce’s opinions—is more controversial. It is on this premise, however, that Kiberd’s overall interpretation of Ulysses hinges.

Literary critics tend to think of Ulysses as a modernist triumph (the book was first published in 1922) that can surely delight any reader who attends to its demanding prose, but only yields true intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction—as arguably do all works of art—when submitted to close scrutiny. Kiberd maintains that Joyce wrote with everyday readers in mind. Accordingly, he laments the fact that “a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.”

A university professor himself, Kiberd thinks Ulysses has been “wrenched out of the hands of the common reader” by the ivory-towered academy: the canonical status bestowed upon Ulysses from within these intellectual enclaves cements the book’s reputation as an abstruse and indecipherable work of genius. Ulysses and Us is an impassioned clarion call to allow the book to “reconnect” with “the everyday lives of real people.”

Its author, however, does not help Kiberd’s case. Joyce famously stated that “I have put in [Ulysses] so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” Of his ideal audience, he quipped that “the demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” Such comments need not discourage the average reader from picking up the book, but they help explain why generations of critics have emphasised Ulysses’s apparent opacity.

Indeed, not all share Kiberd’s sense that Joyce needs to be returned to a mass ordinary audience-in-waiting. In 2004, prize-winning Irish novelist Roddy Doyle railed against Ulysses’s monumental standing, deploring its inflated length (the book, he said, “could have done with a good editor”) and its failure to engage with real human concerns: “People are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books”, he said, “but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it.”

Whether Kiberd or Doyle are right about Ulysses’s ability to touch the hearts of its readers, and surely the heart of the individual reader should be the judge of that, the book has undeniably made it out of the library and into the limelight. On 16 June every year, Dublin and many other cities around the world celebrate Bloomsday, commemorating the day on which Ulysses is set and on which the Blooms face their marital crisis (always one to mark anniversaries in style, Joyce sets his opus on the date he and his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle, had their first tryst). In 2004, Bloomsday’s centenary year, over 10,000 people took to the streets of the Irish capital to take part in the day’s festivities. Yet such high levels of public visibility are not—as Kiberd acknowledges—a measure of Ulysses’s true readership so much as a reflection of the current trend for the government-funded fetishisation of Joyce’s works: the prime beneficiary of this enthusiasm is arguably the Irish tourist industry rather than Ulysses itself.

Although it is no state-sponsored Bloomsday, Kiberd’s enterprise is at heart a popularizing one. Between introductory and concluding sections devoted to the book’s mission statement (these come under such titles as “How Ulysses Didn’t Change Our Lives” and “How It Might Still Do”), 18 numbered chapters give an episode-by-episode account of Ulysses. The titles chosen for these summarizing sketches epitomise the dangers inherent in Kiberd’s project. Instead of referring to the episodes by the Homeric names that signal their connection to the Odyssey (these are used by academics, as they were privately by Joyce himself), Kiberd resorts to platitudinous gerunds, such as Waking, Thinking, Ogling, Parenting, Loving. To be sure, the basic activities singled out here do feature in Joyce’s encyclopaedic book. But to suggest that any one episode is predominantly about a particular kind of action is to do Ulysses an injustice, for each of Joyce’s episodes muses on all—and a great many more—of the aspects of everyday life that appear on Kiberd’s list.

Kiberd’s overly personal tone is another cause for discomfort. His musings can be unabashedly grandiose (Joyce “excavated the very depths of the self and the world”), embarrassingly corny (”it is the reader who can decide whether to change, the reader who has been made heroic by the act of working through the challenges posed by the book”), and nostalgically moralizing (”If today a twenty-two-year-old graduate would feel quite unsafe in taking up the invitation of an unfamiliar man to come home with him for cocoa and a chat, that may be our loss.”).

Kiberd’s strong point, on the other hand, is contextualisation, both literary and historical. He does an excellent job of resituating Joyce’s works in relation to the Irish Literary Revival, arguing, in a refreshing turn against the status quo, that the author’s aims were not so fundamentally different from those of his more openly political Irish contemporaries. Joyce’s epic of modern life is read side by side with the Bible and the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Whitman. Kiberd also illuminates connections between Ulysses and World War I: in the light of that conflict, he suggests that Joyce’s redefinition of the notion of heroics—largely by way of his endearing, civic-minded bourgeois modern hero, Leopold Bloom—takes on a more prescriptive edge than is usually recognised.

Kiberd’s take on Bloom is key to his thesis: again and again, he praises Bloom as a paragon of the empathetic everyman. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this view, but Kiberd is rather too forceful in his assumption that Bloom functions merely as a vehicle for Joyce’s message. Joyce’s use of interior monologue for all three of his protagonists makes his novel resistant to such a reductionist reading.

While he falls short here, Kiberd acquits himself well on many counts. Popularization is always a tricky business. Indeed, there is an inbuilt paradox in Kiberd’s self-appointed task: if Ulysses was written for the average reader, why does that reader need a guide to enjoy it? The reviewer of Kiberd’s book faces a related double-bind: while the novice reader of Ulysses cannot be expected to evaluate the guidebook’s accuracy, an academic reader is hardly in an ideal position to appreciate how useful Kiberd’s book may be to its intended audience. The best advice to the potential first-time reader of Ulysses may simply be to cut out the primers and take a tip from Marilyn Monroe: get started on the real thing.

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. She is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Nick Lane
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
Profile Books, 2009
288 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-1861978486

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A white wooden plaque hangs next to the door of Darwin’s original home in Shrewsbury. “Charles Darwin was born here in 1809”, the plaque reads, but the exhibit ends there. Visitors are not invited to enter. “The Mount”, as it was known to the Darwin family, who occupied it for the better part of the 19th century, has been converted into a government tax office.

The absence of any further mention of The Mount’s most famous inhabitant is especially remarkable this year, Darwin’s bicentennial. A few miles away, in downtown Shrewsbury, large banners proclaiming “Darwin 200” are concentrated in the main shopping plaza. Walk into Waterstones on the town’s High Street and you’ll find a torrent of titles whose publishers are hoping to ride the wave of worldwide “Darwinmania”. Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, by Nick Lane, is Profile Books’ attempt to get in on the game.

Lane, who earned a doctorate in biochemistry before becoming a full-time science writer, garnered high praise for clear exposition and bold ideas in his first two works, on oxygen and mitochondria, respectively. These books, aimed at non-specialists, succeeded in unconventional areas: neither diatomic molecules nor organelles are typical popular science fare, and that gave these ambitious books a certain panache.

A background in biochemistry lends itself to the molecular issues less frequently covered in popular books on evolution. The most interesting of these issues is the question of abiogenesis: how did life on Earth emerge from inanimate matter. In his most famous work, Darwin avoided speculation on this question (ironic for a book titled The Origin of Species), instead focusing on how life evolved once it existed. The curious, elegant last sentence of The Origin reads: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This sentence—which leaves room for a creator who “originally breathed” life into the first organisms—was more a move of political expediency than scientific inference. Darwin knew the question of life’s genesis was intractable with current science, and though he was fully aware of the religious implications of his work, he was probably relieved to leave a place for a creator in his theory. Following publication of The Origin, Darwin never showed an interest in engaging in the religious debate it engendered, focusing his work on further scientific investigation (including eight years devoted to drafting the definitive study of barnacles) and defending his theory from scientific attack. The popular and religious debates he left to his friends and supporters, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”. Privately, however, he did muse about the origins of life. In a letter to his close friend Joseph Hooker, he wrote, “But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine (sic) compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were found.”

This speculation was put to the test in 1953 by the young Stanley Miller. Lane begins his discussion on the origins of life here, with the famous Miller-Urey experiment. Miller, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, reacted a mixture of water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen gas—then believed to be the contents of Earth’s early atmosphere—with electric sparks, meant to play the role of lightning. Within a few days, he found appreciable concentrations of most of the amino acids which form the building blocks of proteins. The notion of a “prebiotic soup” out of which life evolved came to dominate thinking about life’s origins for the next two decades. Miller’s findings, however, were perhaps too perfect. With the fluency of an adept biochemist, Lane masterfully deconstructs this appealing but flawed hypothesis. Given what we now know, the Miller-Urey soup recipe turns out not to be the correct one. More recent experiments have not reproduced Miller’s promising results. Lane then introduces us to two competing theories which account for the early evolution of life from deep ocean vents.

It is here that Lane is at his best, parsing competing theories with the command of a practitioner, yet cushioning the sharp edges of the technical details. He deftly employs metaphor, toeing the line between presenting the fully scientific details and sketching the larger picture. The old metaphorical stalwarts are there (thermodynamics is the science of “desire”, what atoms do and don’t “want” to do), but so are some new ones (the transfer of high-energy phosphate groups is a children’s game of tag).

But as Lane ascends the ladder of life—moving away from prebiotic chemistry onto topics such as sex, movement, sight, and “hot blood”—his comparative advantage as a biochemist fades. This area of evolutionary literature already has been covered extensively in popular format by biologists such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and EO Wilson. One wonders whether Lane would have been better off if he had remained on his native terrain.

Indeed, prebiotic chemistry is especially rich terrain in the immediate aftermath of last month’s announcement by University of Manchester researchers that they had synthesized RNA nucleotides in a laboratory setting using the ingredients that would have existed on early Earth. Proponents of the “RNA world hypothesis” argue that ribonucleic acid polymers—whose subunits are composed of a sugar, a base, and a phosphate group—could have given rise to life by encoding information (as DNA does) and catalysing replication (as proteins do). But no scientist had successfully shown how the initial RNA nucleotides could have emerged in high yield from appropriately prebiotic conditions—until now.

Last month, the University of Manchester’s John Sutherland and his team stunned the world of prebiotic chemistry with an announcement that they had synthesized RNA nucleotides under conditions similar to those that existed on the early Earth. Whereas other scientists had tried to put the sugar, base, and phosphate group together piece-by-piece, Sutherland’s team took a different approach. As Sutherland told reporters: “Basically, we took half a base, added that to half a sugar, added the other piece of base, and so on. The key turned out to be the order that the ingredients are added and the way you put them together — like making a soufflé.”

RNA synthesis could have occurred under “prebiotically plausible conditions”, Sutherland and his co-authors wrote in Nature. Or, as Sutherland subsequently said, “It’s consistent with a warm pond evaporating as the sun comes out”. In short, Darwin’s speculations in his letter to Hooker might have been correct after all.

For readers interested in learning more about prebiotic chemistry and early evolution, Lane’s Life Ascending provides a helpful primer (even if Sutherland’s findings mean that the recently released book is still not quite up-to-date). But ultimately, the cottage industry that has emerged around Darwin’s bicentennial pays little homage to his scientific legacy. After penning The Origin, Darwin dedicated his final years to filling its gaps, and published a further five editions. The most meaningful celebration of his life is the work of scientists such as Sutherland who continue to test his hypotheses—and who strengthen the theoretical framework that The Origin of Species left behind.

Jacob Lemieux is a DPhil student Clinical Medicine in the Molecular Parasitology Group at St. John’s College, Oxford.

Werner Herzog
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Ecco, 2009
320 Pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-0061575532

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The 64-year-old German filmmaker Werner Herzog has long been as famous for his statements about film and culture as he has been for his actual movies. In speech and in writing, he inclines to aphorism rather than argument, issuing dicta with a hermetic self-containment bordering on the inscrutable. The 300-page Herzog on Herzog (2002) reads this way, as does his 12-point “Minnesota Declaration”, an impromptu manifesto delivered at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 1999. Herzog’s aphorisms teeter between the visionary and the bizarre, as these two points of the “Declaration” attest:

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

Herzog has become an object of cinematic fascination in his own right. Director Les Blank has made two documentaries starring his colleague: Burden of Dreams (1982) follows the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) features Herzog cooking and devouring a leather boot while delivering pronouncements on the near-extinction of imagination, the need for artistic daring, and the difference between fact and truth. The collective word count of Herzog’s pronouncements about art and culture probably exceeds the words spoken by his characters onscreen (despite a prolific 55-film career). A master of elegant strangeness, Herzog has profited by this canny ability to expound and practice an artistic philosophy.

Once again, Herzog has managed to have his shoe and eat it, too. In Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog publishes the diary he kept from 1979 to 1981 while shooting (or, more often, waiting to shoot) his acclaimed film about a bombastic anti-hero in the Brazilian jungle. Thanks to Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, the plagued history of Fitzcarraldo already holds a notorious place in filmmaking mythology: assistants died; actors became injured and ill; some of the local extras plotted to kill hot-blooded star Klaus Kinski. Typically, Herzog took these incidents as cosmic portents, telling Blank: “The trees here are in misery. The birds here are in misery – I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain.” The essence of the jungle is “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away”.

A darling of cineasts and prize committees, Werner Herzog is savvier than the humorless neurotic he sometimes plays on-screen and in his journals. He is fully aware of the cartoonishness of his morose Weltanschauung, but seems to relish situating himself at the juncture of comedy, melodrama, and nihilism. Of Conquest of the Useless’s 320 pages, this sort of vague cosmological pessimism probably accounts for some 50. The book finally shifts from being very funny (though we are never sure whether Herzog is an accomplice or an object of our laughter) to slightly dull.

That said, Conquest of the Useless is a singular book, so strong at many points that it could be read and appreciated by someone who had never seen a single Herzog film. In Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog says: “Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images… That’s what I’m working on: a new grammar of images.” Without them, he says, we are doomed to “die out like dinosaurs.”

In contrast with this “new grammar of images”, Herzog sets the false images offered by television and advertisements. These “kill us” and “kill our language” because they lull instead of provoke, working within a familiar spectrum of wonder, desire, and repulsion. Herzog’s films can be interpreted as antidotes to this deadening complacency, and the countless strange moments in Conquest of the Useless as yet another curative, this time through the medium of language.

The book’s images of grotesque surrealism arrive abruptly amidst more mundane descriptions of weather or squabbling actors. In a sudden, peculiar flash they suggest whole worlds abutting Herzog’s, yet with utterly different codes of behavior, stores of knowledge, and interpretations of reality. In “Iquitos” a tiny boy named Modus Vivendi earns a living playing the violin at funerals. Children steal a bit of sound tape from Herzog’s crew and tie it between two trees, so tight that the wind makes it “hum and sing.” At festivals men shoot each other with bows and arrows, the recipient catching the shaft midair before it hits its mark. A large moth sits on Herzog’s dirty laundry and “feasts on the salt from [his] sweat.” In the crew’s shipment of provisions they order kilos of arrow-tip poison, which serves as local currency. “For a spoonful of this black sticky mass, you can get yourself a woman to marry, I was told in a respectful whisper by a boatman as he cleaned his toes with a screwdriver.” Such surprises exemplify the newness to Herzog’s “grammar of images”, a newness that is not simply indicative of their shock value but illustrative of a voracious curiosity about how other beings survive, and sometimes enjoy, their passage through the world.

In Conquest of the Useless, Herzog may have stumbled across the genre to which his writing is best suited. The journal form provides an inherent structure, in which seasons change, personalities clash and reconcile and clash again, and budgets dwindle. All Herzog has to do from time to time is log the current conditions of all these factors, and the drama writes itself. This single linear structure is steady and comprehensible enough to accommodate a great deal of eccentricity and divagation, and the reader never feels mired in the wash of surreal imagery and quasi-philosophic musing. With entries averaging three or four paragraphs, few feel overstuffed with detail.

When Herzog simply shows what’s there, the result is breathtaking, and even a reader unacquainted with Herzog’s work could imagine why Francois Truffaut called him “the greatest film director alive”. What spoils some of these images, however, is Herzog’s occasional habit of glossing or interpreting them for us. This can result in cringe-worthy purple prose: “In its all-encompassing, massive misery, of which it has no knowledge and no hint of a notion, the mighty jungle stood completely still for another night, which, however, true to its innermost nature, it didn’t allow to go unused for incredible destruction, incredible butchery.”

Fitting this “grammar of images” into an argument or philosophy is often misguided. Herzog’s attempts at articulating a convincing credo fail, but his rendering of the world’s strange particulars achieves the “ecstatic truth” which for him is both the aim and the content of art. Herzog scholars will perhaps read Conquest of the Useless with the goal of supplementing their understanding of his astonishing films. Doing so risks overlooking the value of Conquest as a work of art itself. The pleasures of the word are different from the pleasures of the camera. Herzog’s strange and original voice, by mediating a place and mood through language rather than footage, provides yet another new grammar by which imagination speaks.

Laura Kolbe is an MPhil student at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she is studying American Literature.

Born in 1946, Philip Pullman graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, and went on to become a teacher. He published his first book for children, Count Karlstein, in 1982, and has produced over 20 novels and other works since. Pullman has been honored for his writing with numerous prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Eleanor Farjeon Award for Children’s Literature, and the Carnegie of Carnegies.

He is the author of numerous novels, including The Broken Bridge (1990), the Sally Lockhart mysteries, and the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman has also published a number of fairy tales and plays. Many of his works have been adapted for screen and stage, including The Golden Compass (2007) and His Dark Materials, which debuted on stage in 2003. Pullman has been a fellow in the Creative Writing MA programme at Oxford Brookes University since 2008.

You recently have been concerned with enhancing the graphic and tactile quality of your work, particularly the illustrations, maps, and other physical objects related to your Dark Materials books. Is this a conscious move toward more physical reading objects?

Well, it’s partly publishers. Publishers always like to have a new edition to put out, something new and fresh that hasn’t been seen before. I’m a little bit worried about that because after a while it can become just a scamming of the reader. But if there’s a chance to say something new in graphic form, then I think it’s worth doing. I’ve always been fascinated by this interplay between word and picture, and the one thing doing what the other thing can’t do—sometimes the one thing undercutting or subverting what the other can do. One thing I would like to do one day is a sort of PowerPoint book that exists in a kind of presentation with picture succeeding picture, graphic works merging with text, and so on.

Do any of your current projects fit this format?

I’m halfway there with one thing that I’ve been doing, which is a forgery. Something that’s always fascinated me is the work of the architect Andrea Palladio, who wrote books of architecture [I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura or The four books of architecture] in 1570. At the minute I’ve got a little story that I tell about one of the plans in this book, because there’s a little anomaly in which the measurement doesn’t work. The design has been reprinted and recut many, many times, and everyone has repeated this mistake without noticing it.

So what I did was to forge a page of Palladio’s book. Well, I didn’t forge the page. I forged some notes on it, in the handwriting of Inigo Jones, the great English architect. Because in Worcester College, Oxford, there is Inigo Jones’s own copy [I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura] with annotations, but he didn’t notice this little mistake, so I have had him notice it and done a little thing like that. When I put the story into the final form, I’ll see if there is a way of publishing it on my website.

Your companion pieces to the Dark Materials books, Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time in the North, do not limit themselves to the Will and Lyra story. Do you envision any future installments, perhaps involving Mary Malone or the wheel people, or the Sebastian Makepeace character, which seems to have been left open?

Yes, probably a story about Will. There are many left, plus it’s an interesting length. The story in Lyra’s Oxford is more of a short story, whereas Once Upon a Time in Oxford is more of a novella sort of length. I once thought I couldn’t do a shorter piece, but I’m just at the point of finishing a book that is 100 pages long. What frustrates me with the short story is the fact that you can’t really get going with the background—you can only sort of sketch it in.

I always would rather take a bit more time and spend more effort in establishing a world, and I think you can do that in 100 pages or so. Henry James used that length a lot—the blessed novella, he called it. I don’t think I’ve adapted my style. It’s a question of pruning down the other stories—a question of focusing on one story rather than on three or four, I think.

You’re a writer who has negotiated a lot of different genres, including fantasy, science fiction, adventure, comics, crime, and historical fiction. Have you ever considered doing a non-fictional book project, perhaps a memoir?

Yes, but not yet. The British Library, a year or two ago, set up a programme on lives, and they asked me if I wanted to be in on this project and record my life for the British Library. I thought about it and said no, because that’s my material. If I give it all away, not only will it be not really private anymore, but it will have been fixed in some form that maybe isn’t useful to me. I like it fluid. I will write a memoir, but some day, not yet—and when I do I’m sure I’ll make most of it up, because that way it’s still private. But there are a couple of other nonfiction things that I want to do. One is a book on the fundamental units of narrative.

What shape would this study of narrative take? Would it be a William Empson-esque exploration of a form?

Well, I’m not as clever as he was. So this will be a very practical and pretty straightforward thing, I think. I’m very impressed by the way David Hockney talks about painting. He talks about it in very practical terms. That is, when you’ve got a pencil, you can make one kind of mark with it, and with watercolor painting, it sloshes about, so you must use it in a certain way. Because he has done so much looking and drawing, he can see in another painting whether somebody isn’t doing it from life, because there’s a certain flatness that he can put his finger on straightaway.

I am very impressed by that as a way of talking about story. What I mean is looking at a story and sensing exactly when a writer’s attention has gone off the line of the story—you can see that after you’ve done it yourself for a while. I’m going through Grimm’s fairy tales at the moment, to select 70 of them for an edition for Penguin Classics. Some of them don’t need retelling, because they’re beautiful, they’re just perfect. Others need a bit cut out, because it gets in the way, and goes nowhere, and does nothing. You can see that almost instantaneously.

Your work has been adapted in many ways, including for the stage and screen. Are there any other mediums in which you would like your ideas portrayed?

Sally Lockhart has been done on the television, but one day I will write Sally Lockhart short stories, which I think will make much better television than the novels have done. And Henry Selick, who directed Coraline, is doing Count Karlstein next.

Would this be a claymation, stop-motion type of film?

I very much hope so. He’s working on the script at the moment—it all depends on financing. But I’m a huge fan of Henry Selick, and I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas [he was creative supervisor]. I would love him to do my book Clockwork, which I think is absolutely made for him. But we shall see.

How do you think your place in the canon of modern literature is defined by the genres in which people classify your work? Do you think that young-adult books or fantasy books are sequestered, in a way?

I don’t think about canons at all. I’m not even sure what genres I write in. I suppose I have to classify His Dark Materials as a sort of a fantasy, it’s not exactly realism, though I hope it’s psychologically more real than most fantasy. Critical fashion has a lot to do with this, but we don’t know who will survive. Canons are for time to decide, not for the present day.

Rebecca Rosen is reading for an MSt in English at Jesus College, Oxford.

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Orange’s Thick Skin. AS Byatt has called it “sexist“. Tim Lott adds that it is “perverse“. But the Orange Prize—awarded each year to the best English-language novel by a writer with two X chromosomes—remains impervious to attacks. (The chair of last year’s jury has suggested that men should be able to judge—if not compete for—the award, though organisers chose to maintain a male-less panel nonetheless.) American author Marilynne Robinson accepted the £30,000 prize (and the accompanying bronze “Bessie” figurine) last week for her 2008 novel Home and shot back at critics who say a women’s-only award is discriminatory. “I do think it’s a necessary corrective“, Robinson told Reuters. (In contrast to Home, which was “unnecessary and contrived“, according to the New York Times‘ chief book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani.)

The “biggest winner” at the Orange awards was the Oxford-based Francesca Kay, says The Economist. Robinson “hardly needs introductions” (Barack Obama lists Robinson’s Gilead as one of his favourite books on his Facebook page), but Kay—who won the prize for best first-time novelist—could use a name-recognition boost. The Guardian dismissed her debut An Equal Stillness as “heavy-handed” earlier this year (though The Independent was more impressed).

The All-Knowing Noodle. Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a restaurant review titled “Worshipping at the Alter of Ramen“. Food critic Frank Bruni visited a Greenwich Village noodle shop and concluded that the cuisine was—metaphorically—mesmerizing. But Andy Raskin has taken his love of ramen to another level. A therapist advised the 44-year-old Raskin to “surrender to a higher power“. So Raskin, unattached to any organised religion, adopted instant noodle inventor Momofuku Ando as his deity. His memoirs, reviewed in the Washington Post, also tell the tale of the twice-jailed, thrice-married Ando and his quest for the perfect packaged meal. Apparently, one’s love of instant noodles does not diminish after the university years (as MP Marc Francois’s expense reports also reveal).

The Balance of Gastronomic Power. One’s love of French cuisine does diminish over the years, according to Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger. And that’s because French cuisine is on a downward trend. The Observer reviews Steinberger’s new book Au Revoir To All That and agrees that the small-town bistro is “withering” while upmarket restaurants are suffering a “crisis of creativity”. The Sunday Times, which reviewed the book last month, agrees that the balance of power in the culinary world is tilting westward: “[I]t is Americans who now uphold the classic French techniques, obsessing over the best raw-milk cheeses made to the old formulas, while the French themselves scoff Big Macs in Le McDo.” (Steinberger, for his part, worried recently in a Slate column that the White House was not upholding its commitment to classy wines: Thomas Jefferson amassed a 20,000-bottle collection, but the cellar’s inventory has fallen under a thousand. The situation is so bad that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were served a 2004 Newton unfiltered chardonay, a wine that is “cloying”, “buttery”, and “overwrought”).

The Jungle Book, Chapter 11. With two of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers now bankrupt, the Daily Telegraph says that “Motown is now more like an echoey ghost town“. Not to be confused with the actual Amazon ghost town where “Fordlandia” was once found. The Wall Street Journal reviews a new book on Henry Ford’s ill-fated attempt to build a rubber plantation in the Brazilian rainforest. (His dream was dashed by labour unrest and “very hungry caterpillars“.)

Meanwhile, the London Review of Books looks at the lessons that an army ant trail in Panama may hold for highway traffic management. According to Oxford zoologist Iain Couzin, ants have developed a three-lane system—with the outbound ants taking the outer lanes and the inbound ants coming down the centre. But apparently, not everyone follows the rules of the road:

A constant game of chicken ensues, with the outbound ants holding their ground against the returning ants until the last possible moment, then swiftly turning away from the oncoming traffic. There is the occasional collision, but Couzin says the three-lane structure helps minimise the subsequent delay.

Perhaps not the best model for managing the M40 at rush hour.

Meanwhile, Joshua Blu Buhs, whose previous book was about a fire-ant infestation in the US, turns his attention to a larger creature in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, reviewed in this week’s New York Times. In 1968, a pair of amateur filmmakers in Northern California claimed they had captured footage of a large, ape-like creature on the prowl; hundreds of people across North America asserted that they had seen Bigfoot as well. Buhs argues that “white, rural men” in 1960s America who felt “threatened by women’s rights [and] civil rights” chose to believe in Bigfoot as “a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists”. Meanwhile, Bigfoot hunters in Oklahoma said last month that they had found a 15-inch-long footprint, and a new book by a California police officer claims to show compelling evidence of Bigfoot’s existence.

The Novelist and His Labyrinth. For the second time in as many weeks, the New York Times reviews Gerald Martin’s biography of Gabriel García Márquez. This week, Paul Berman weighs in on Maria Vargas Llosa’s allegation that García Márquez is a Castro “lackey”. Berman takes Vargas Llosa’s side of the dispute: “The world’s most popular serious novelist does seem to be a flunky of the world’s longest-lasting monomaniacal dictator.” But the Seattle Times says that Martin offers no new insights on the bizarre feud between the Vargas Llosa and the García Márquez, which began when the Peruvian Thatcherite threw a punch at the Colombian Nobelist, leaving García Márquez with a black eye.

Tonto Fistfight at 30,000 Feet? Whereas Vargas Llosa actually did sock García Márquez, Sherman Alexie only thought about thumping his fellow passenger on a recent flight to New York. Alexie, whose new collection of poems was reviewed in ORB, drew the ire of Amazon.com when he told the New York Times last week that he “wanted to hit” a woman who was reading on her Kindle in-flight. Alexie later elaborated on his remarks in an interview with bloger Edward Champion:

“If eBooks do take over the market, then dozens more independent bookstores will close, and all sorts of communities will lose a vital social force. Does Amazon have any plans to fill the social gaps left by those closed stores?”

Alexie may move closer to answering that question when he meets with Amazon representatives to “listen to their arguments for the machines“. The author says he has reconsidered his ire toward e-readers after receiving notes from Kindle users who, “because of various physical issues”, can only read with electronic assistance. And on his website, Alexie now avows that he “will not beat up anybody at Amazon or Kindle“.

The Bodleian in a Bottle? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos acknowledged last month that “Kindle is never going to have the same smell as a book“. But the world’s 68th richest man now stands corrected. A company called DuroSport has launched a new product line called Smell of Books, a “revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer” that will leave your Kindle with the odour of an old library. Alas, it’s a spoof, but the Guardian’s Alison Flood is intrigued: “I think the idea could really catch on.”

Speaking of online books and old libraries, Cambridge University has announced that it will digitise its collection of pre-1501 incunabula, including a 1455 Gutenberg Bible. The BBC carries an almost certainly apocryphal account of the Bible’s acquisition:

Legend has it the book was handed to the then librarian Alwyn Schofield out of the blue when an old man turned up at the library door saying he had an old bible to donate to the library. The man turned out to be Arthur Young, retired lawyer and member of Trinity College.

Cambridge’s own website reveals that Young’s gifts to the university (340 volumes in total) came in two installments in 1933 and 1934 and a third batch after his death in 1936. If—as the BBC suggests—Young hand-delivered the donation, the octagenarian would have needed to possess superhuman strength.

Body-Building With Books? The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News carries an op-ed arguing that schoolchildren should not be “forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks”. The op-ed writer who wants to lighten the load on California schoolchildren is none other than the state’s weightlifter-in-chief, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The “Governator” thinks that the plan could cut costs from the cash-strapped state’s budget, but the state superintendant of public instruction says that the plan is a “pipe dream“.

A £275,000 Mistake. Speaking of Cambridge and first editions, a Sunday Times review of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (also reviewed by ORB this week) reveals that Clare College fellow Mansfield Forbes acquired the Joyce novel shortly after its 1922 publication but “was so panicked at the thought of being caught with it that he bundled up his illegal copy and threw it in the Cam“. Treasure-seeking Cantabrigians might take that as a cue to dress up in scuba gear and scour the river bottom for the remains. A first edition of Ulysses sold for £275,000 last week. The vast majority of the pages appear to be untouched; the original owner only read “the racy bits at the end“.