Thursday, August 31, 2017

July's Book: Time's Arrow

Now this is a situation that, when I reviewed June's book on July 16, I hadn't envisioned. I had finished reading another book on July 28th, and then another on August 1st, and was all set to be caught up, or even ahead, on these monthly entries. (This will happen. Just wait.)

I suppose sometimes we'd all like to go backwards to fix things, even when we can't...

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Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
Literature (1991 - 165 pp.)

***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD***


(Of course, the book spoils itself on the back dust jacket…)


Sometimes a book is reviewed dozens of times, and the reviews say all you meant to say. Your review feels meaningless as a result.

Other times, a book is reviewed dozens of times, and the reviews are completely silent on what you want to say.

The narrative structure has been covered. Backwards conversations that read cogently each way are the closest Martin Amis gets to literary virtuosity. The rest is either novelty or kitsch.

The most interesting aspect of Time’s Arrow is the idea that, as life falls apart, we can somehow track back to that critical moment when we could have fixed it. What if I hadn’t taken out that loan? What if I’d dated that one girl instead of that one other girl? What if I’d flown to Oslo when I had the chance?*

Life presents us with choices all the time. In Time’s Arrow, though, the reader can’t look back. The reader has to experience the life of a deceased German doctor who performed experiments in Auschwitz during World War II in reverse, narrated by a spirit or soul who follows along with the reader and is shocked by the protagonist's life events. Memories are of the future, and new experiences are of the past.

Obvious gimmick aside, along with the more literal interpretations of backwards (such as the oft-cited everything being made of shit), Time’s Arrow makes the ideas of past and future unsettling. One of the book’s famous lines is when the narrator, who is an observer inside the protagonist’s** head, realizes he can never commit suicide no matter how horrible World War II gets. The future has already happened. Our narrator can never look back and wonder what could have been, because it’s already been decided. The railroading of time leads to few opportunities for regret.

Amis is praised for the research he put into Time’s Arrow, most notably his reading on the psychology of Holocaust doctors. The Auschwitz scenes capture the intense mental anguish the narrator feels upon seeing the protagonist’s actions, along with prosaic but no less gut-punching phrases like “It was I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat.” Recall when reading this passage that the story happens in reverse.

This leads to the great disappointment of the book, which no other review I’ve read has ever caught. The beginning of the book, or end of the protagonist’s life, happens in 1998,** when the protagonist dies at 81. From 1998-1946, Time’s Arrow follows his life back through senior citizenship, middle age, and then that period people apparently experience in their 30s when they philander constantly. Auschwitz, which all the book’s promotional materials place at the forefront of the book’s importance, doesn’t happen until three quarters of the way through.

One mirrored set of questions remains. It’s the set of questions I slogged through monologues on a retired German-American doctor to see answered.

To the reader and the narrator, where did it all lead? To the historian and the protagonist, where did it all begin?

The protagonist is 22 when World War II begins.*** He is a medical school graduate with a wife by the time he starts participating in the Holocaust. The period of his life from 1939-1917 only lasts about twelve pages. All those memories – or new experiences – of life as a young adult, adolescent and then child in interwar Germany are barely mentioned. They are so formative to the protagonist as a person, yet they are pre-empted by his later life.

Our protagonist is from Solingen, a medium-sized city in Northwestern Germany. After the bizarre backwards rollercoaster ride that goes from waking up in a dead senior’s body through New York City, Portugal, Poland and Germany, shouldn’t there be more wonder at the place where his life started – and ends? Aside from half a paragraph on famous knives and scissors, all Amis can scrounge for information on a city of over 100,000 residents is: “Finally, modest Solingen harbours a proud secret. I’m the only one who happens to know what that secret is. It’s this: Solingen is the birthplace of Adolph Eichmann.” A city where our young protagonist grew up, and where our weary narrator is rewarded for his stunning patience, is reduced to this?

Time’s Arrow is a fun read. It just feels front-heavy and back-light.

And then, to quote from the time when the protagonist assumes the name of John Young during middle age, over a third into the book: “Thank God. He’s out. Like a baby.”

Ease of Reading: 6
Educational Content: 3



*In 2011, in what is still my only ever foray to the Newark, NJ airport, I passed a gate where a plane was about to depart for Oslo. I was carrying my passport, too. My ticket was to Ithaca, NY, where I did go. I probably couldn’t have boarded that Oslo flight at the extreme last minute, but it’s always fun to wonder…

**The protagonist’s name changes so often I simply call him “the protagonist”.

***Time’s Arrow was released in 1991. Why Amis added to the already confusing timeline by placing the start of the book seven years into the future, I’ll never know. I got to this date by adding 81 to the protagonist’s birthdate of 1917. If I’ve made an error here, let me know.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Rediscovering the H.L. Hunley [WaPo] [UNC]

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported on the unearthing of the H.L. Hunley, the fabled Confederate submarine that sunk in 1864 while assaulting a Union post during the Civil War. After 136 long years on the seafloor near Charleston, South Carolina, and then another 17 years after the sub's recovery in 2000, a team of researchers were finally able to figure out what sunk it.

The report contains a picture of the inside of the recovered H.L. Hunley, as it looks now. The closest comparison I can think of is a sewer with a skeletal tree branch running through it.

Here's the report.

University of North Carolina biomedical engineer Rachel Lance, assisted by the omnipresent co-author et al., couldn't find a reason for the crew's deaths on the sub, as the Post explains:

But when they ventured inside the boat, they found not a single clue. Its 40-foot-long iron hull was barnacle-encrusted but not broken. The skeletons of eight members of the crew were found still in their seats at their respective battle stations; their bones bore no evidence of physical harm. The bilge pumps hadn't been activated. The air hatches were closed. There was no sign that anyone had tried to escape.

The report and article demonstrate that the H.L. Hunley may have accidentally sunk itself by means of a pressure wave caused by its own torpedo. The pressure wave could kill without a trace:

Instead, when a torpedo blows something up underwater, it creates pressure waves that reverberate in the water and through the body of anyone who happens to be in it. The instantaneous increase in pressure can squeeze oxygen out of the lungs and pop blood vessels in the brain. The effects are often deadly.

But the damage occurs exclusively in a victim's soft tissue, like the gut, lungs and brain — from the outside, it can be impossible to tell that the person has been harmed.

On the plus side, if it can be called that, the torpedo sank the Housatonic, a Union ship.

The academic article also contains some really cool diagrams of the H.L. Hunley as it would have looked on its final voyage back in 1864.

Here's the article.

A couple interesting thoughts after reading that aren't answered by the article or the study:

1. The WaPo story is filed under "Science", rather than "History" or something similar. Where does such an inherently interdisciplinary article get filed? The study it cites was written by an engineer, which supports the "Science" label. Still, not every traumatic blast happened in 1864, and history books frequently focus on disciplines from artists to homemaking...

2. To what extent did the Confederacy or outside observers realize what had happened? The discovery is so new, yet self-defeating pressure waves apparently weren't such a problem 50 years later when submarines were standard fare during World War I. The Russian Empire's submarine program faced severe problems in the Baltic Sea, but they were still 55 strong.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

ESPN: Finding Darko

This past Wednesday, ESPN published this fantastic piece by Sam Borden about retired NBA centre Darko Milicic.

Yes, that Darko.

from Detroit Free Press

Milicic was frequently the butt of jokes during his surprisingly long NBA career (2003-2012). Those who watched the 2003 NBA Draft recall the following draft order:

1. LeBron James
2. Darko Milicic
3. Carmelo Anthony
4. Chris Bosh
5. Dwyane Wade

Four of those five went on to do great things in the NBA. LeBron James has appeared in seven straight NBA Finals, winning three, among countless other accomplishments. Carmelo Anthony has career averages of 24.8 points and 6.6 rebounds per game. Dwyane Wade has won three NBA championships, two of them coming with the aforementioned James. Chris Bosh has won two NBA championships, on those same Miami Heat teams with James and Wade. Bosh is also the only Toronto Raptor to ever average 20+ points and 10+ rebounds in the same season - thus far. (He's done it thrice.)

Milicic never made it in the NBA. No worries, though. He made $52 million, learned a lot about life, and now runs his own fruit farm in his home Serbia, near his hometown of Novi Sad.

He looks happy and healthy. A monk from his local monastery put it best (from the linked ESPN article at the top):

The monks see Darko differently than everyone else. When I ask Father Joanikije what he thinks of Darko as a person, he pauses for a beat or two, then says, "A man who succeeded in life. A man who achieved his goal."
... 
They just see a man who has a wife and children and a business and a comfortable life and a place in the community of his hometown. They see a man who achieved his goal or, at the very least, is trying to right now. So why can't they be right?
Milicic mentions farming apples and cherries, two of my favourite fruits.

from the ESPN article mentioned above
Sometimes success comes in surprising places. Looking at it from a detached view, five years after Milicic's retirement, it doesn't seem that surprising that someone who seemed so unnatural in the NBA would return home to Serbia, put his money to good use, and put his efforts into something he loves.

Sounds delicious to me.