Death in the Afternoon

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway, 218 pages

Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's book-length non-fiction essay on the art of Spanish bullfighting.  It is, Hemingway insists, an art rather than a sport, since it is by its nature an unequal contest with a foreordained conclusion.  The question is not whether the bull will die, but how, and the apparent contest is actually the tragic drama of the death of the bull.  In this drama, there are many characters, each of whom will be tested and proven in the arena.

The book is itself Hemingway's proof, an experiment in style that would shape his later writing, an attempt to find new ways to convert experience into prose.  As such, it has its successes and its failures.  The author's long imagined dialogue with an obliging older American woman wears out its welcome long before it is abandoned (a fact which Hemingway acknowledges in the text).  At the same time, there are passages which will make the sympathetic soul yearn to share in the romance of not-quite-modern Spain.  Doubtless, at times Hemingway's own vicarious desire for machismo colors his commentary and judgement.  He seems almost entirely blind, for example, to the obvious ways in which the bullfight symbolically reenacts the triumph of human reason over the brute power of nature.  Yet Hemingway is quite forthcoming about his own inadequacies in the arena, and his analysis of the toreros of the past and present is remarkable in its refusal to accept either the myth of progress or the myth of the golden age.

Death in the Afternoon is, perhaps, a better introduction to Hemingway than it is to bullfighting.  That's not necessarily a bad thing - most readers are probably more interested in the author than the subject anyway.

107 Days

107 Days by Kamala Harris, 300 pages

On July 21st, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris got a call from her running mate, President Joe Biden.  He had decided, after weeks of pressure, to drop out of the campaign and back her as the Democratic nominee for the 2024 election.  It was up to Harris to step into the breach and save the Democrats from defeat by the deplorable Donald Trump.  She only had 107 days to do it, and 107 Days is her own day-by-day account of that momentous campaign and its immediate aftermath.

Of course, Harris failed, but the hidden comedy of 107 Days is that she still does not seem to have realized this.  The book is filled with stories about how her campaign succeeded and Trump's failed, most directly when discussing the Joe Rogan podcast, which she somehow manages to present as something that she was cheated out of and simultaneously something that hurt Trump.  Again and again, the former vice president is caught believing too many impossible things, that Biden was perfectly fit for a second term but should have quit the race sooner, that she was an inspiring success as vice president but unknown to the American people, that it was impossible to mount a successful campaign in 107 days but that on election night she believed there was no way she could lose.

Throughout, it is not entirely clear whether Harris is consciously trying to deceive or whether she is herself badly out of touch with reality, a distressing but by no means unusual trait in an American politician in the early 21st century.  Pointless agreements about combating climate change are touted as great foreign policy successes while wars rage around the globe.  The importance of job programs and affordable housing for American workers are touted as major priorities but legal and illegal immigration are treated as a minor concern.  She repeats Bernie Sanders' advice on the day Biden stepped aside not to concentrate on abortion as her defining issue, yet again and again that is what she does, secure in her complacency that no one who matters could possibly disagree with her.

This is the punchline of a very funny 300 page joke.  Harris claims to represent the future of democracy in the United States, but she repeatedly demonstrates that she neither understands nor particularly cares for the actual people of that country.  The comedy of her comeuppance is that much greater for not being hers alone, but shared by every institution that mocks the concerns of ordinary Americans because they do not conform to progressive ideological orthodoxy.

Life of St Dionysius

The Life of St Dionysius the Areopagite by Michael Syncellus, Anthony Pavoni, and Evangelos Nikitopoulos, 267 pages

The book of Acts records that St Paul, on his visit to Athens, converted one "Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus."  Tradition relates that this Dionysius, venerated as St Dionysius the Areopagite, would become the first bishop of the city, and was eventually martyred.  Halfway across the Roman Empire, the first bishop of what would become Paris, St Dionysius or Denis, was beheaded, his remains buried at the place where the church and abbey dedicated to him were eventually built, and it was sometimes claimed that this Dionysius was the Areopagite in exile from his native Greece.  In the early centuries of Christianity multiple works appeared which claimed to have been written by the Athenian bishop, among them foundational works on Christian mysticism and angelology, most of which seem to have been written by a single author.

Modern historians discount most of this, beyond the existence of two Dionysii, one in Athens and another, later one in Paris.  The writings are ascribed to a hypothetical pseudonymous author who is thought to have lived around 500 AD.  The Life of St Dionysius the Areopagite is a panegyric composed in the 9th century by the Greek scholar monk Michael Syncellus, a translation of which takes up about fifty pages of the present book.  Most of the rest is a scholarly attack on the historical consensus, arguing that the Dionysian corpus is actually the work of the Areopagite.  The authors argue that apparent seeming anachronisms are explicable in a 1st century context, and, more exhaustively, that what are assumed to be Pseudo-Dionysian borrowings from Proclus actually represent Proclean borrowings from Dionysius.  This last point is convincingly buttressed by what appear to be references to the corpus present in pre-fifth century writings.  

If the textual analysis is quite dense and sometimes baffling to a layman, it clearly deserves to be taken seriously and not dismissed with stale references to 19th century skepticism.

White Eagle, Red Star

White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20 by Norman Davies, 278 pages

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Empire fractured.  While the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over the core territories, the Baltic States asserted their independence, and Poland became a sovereign nation again after a century of foreign domination.  As Norman Davies relates, this was not a simple, clean, or peaceful process.  With the Bolsheviks preoccupied with the Russian civil war, the Poles rushed forward to establish their eastern border near Minsk.  The Soviet response was conditioned not only by the border question, but by their dialectical fantasies of a general European revolution, which envisioned Poland as a stepping stone to Germany and the West.  In the end, the superior Soviet forces overextended themselves and were routed by a counterattack at the gates of Warsaw, and the whole episode concluded with a hasty peace which pleased neither government.

Writing in the early 1970s, Davies laments that the war is little known and poorly understood.  The Soviets were badly embarrassed by their defeat, and soothed their wounded pride by casting the bourgeois Allies as the actual belligerents.  However, as Davies chronicles, the British particularly gave the Poles little support, with David Lloyd George far more interested in building bridges with the Soviets than guaranteeing the future of the Polish state.  After the victory was won, the Western powers were glad to share in this view, with much of the credit accruing to the French general Maxime Weygand who was sent to Poland as an advisor and was credited as the architect of the Polish victory.  Yet Davies demonstrates that Weygand was treated with indifference and even contempt by the Poles and contributed little of value.  For the Poles those most responsible were Commander-in-Chief Pilsudski and God Almighty, and having dismissed the latter Davies gives the credit to the former.

As Davies demonstrates, despite the brief duration of the war and the compromise peace that ended it, the Polish-Soviet War had far-reaching consequences, especially in the area of Soviet foreign policy and the growing rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin.  For the Poles, of course, the war merely bought them a couple of decades before Nazi and Communist occupation.  For Davies, from his position in the early '70s, this seemed a small enough thing, but from a later perspective it is undoubtedly significant that Karol Wojtyla spent the first 19 years of his life in a free, Catholic Poland.