Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I loved The Mosquito Coast, which is what drew me to pick up Mother Land from a book store. The book is billed as a novel, but Theroux takes pains to make it feel as autobiographical as possible: the narrator is a travel write and novelist with two sons, and many of the family members referenced in the book correspond to real people in Theroux’s life, albeit with different names.

This lends a certain queasiness to the story, as the characters are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant people to be around. And no one is more unpleasant than the titular mother of Mother Land, a vain, narcissistic woman who sees her children more as treasures of conquest than actual people. The book chronicles a period stretching most of the narrator’s (Jay, though he may as well be named Paul) life, though it focuses primarily on two points: one period in his young adulthood when he fathered a child out of wedlock, and another in his middle age when his father dies and he moves back to Cape Cod. The plot is light and episodic, focused more on the interactions between the siblings than on events. There is a certain repetitiveness to the story, and we get the sense by the last fifty pages that Jay’s mother will simply never die. That she is somehow eternal, a creature of avarice feeding off her own young.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Mother Land, though that’s not to say the book was boring or bad. Theroux’s writing is rich, and his characters have great psychological depth. They just aren’t very nice people. I had no trouble picking p the book to read it, but when it was over, my biggest feeling was of relief. It’s a feeling shared by the children at their mother’s death, so this sensation may be deliberate. If so, then it’s a bold literary move and one Theroux should be proud of. It takes courage to write such an ugly book, especially one that most readers will assume is about you and your family.

The New Testament - (translated by) David Bentley Hart

Growing up as a regular church-goer, I don’t recall being unaware that the English bible was translated from a much earlier text. Certainly if you’d asked me from the age of, say, ten and up what language the bible was originally written in, I would have said something in the ballpark of correct. Yet despite this knowledge, it is easy to feel in your bones something fundamentally unchangeable in the verses you grew up hearing, as if they were phrased precisely that way form the moment of their conception. This is particularly true of the King James bible, whose thee-thou pronouns and archaic phrasings ring with an unmistakably biblical air.

But however we feel about them, these are works of translation, and suffer the same limitations as any translated work. Compromise and distortion are, to some level, inevitable. Such is true of the King James bible, in which its authors’ decisions to translate pneuma as “ghost” rather than the much more accurate “breath” have fundamentally colored perceptions of dogma for billions of people, among other items. The Revised Standard Version, though hewing closer to the original text, has its own issues, and more modern translations have relied on a committee structure that flattens style across books and imparts a sameness to the prose that makes for easier reading, but obscures the true magpie origins of the new testament as it was first compiled.

David Bentley Hart sought to address these shortcomings in his own translation of the New Testament, which adopts as its guiding principle to be unswayed by doctrine or tradition and instead depict a “pitilessly literal” interpretation of the original prose. The result is a startling and engaging work, full of linguistic peculiarities and quirks that enrich the historical nature of New Testament. The differences in style (and also in some cases the deliberate cribbing) between the gospels gives a sense of oral histories, and the tortured grammar employed in some epistles and Revelations underscores that these were not erudite scholars, but simple people compelled to share their understanding of the world.

There seems little to say about the book’s contents, well known as they are. The style is, by its very nature, a bit off-putting at times, and there are some passages that simply sound wrong to me even though I don’t dispute their greater accuracy. “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) will always remain with me, even if the text would be more accurately read as “for what does it profit a man to gain the whole cosmos and to forfeit his soul?“ However, the rawness of Hart’s translation lends the book its own power, and there is at times a poetry that arrives from its very crudeness.

This is an important work of scholarship, and a good version of the New Testament for those who have some familiarity with the text but want to wade through it in its entirety for the first time.

Death's End - Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem Trilogy reminds me of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Both tell stories massive in scope, where the focus is less on the arc of an dividual character than that of the universe itself. Each tells a continuous story over a long span of time, with a new central character for each installment, while the characters who set the initial story in motion—Ye Wenjie in The Three Body Problem and Hari Seldon in Foundation—loom large in the mythos but are never much more than background characters.

In Death's End, the main character is Cheng Xin, a physicist from the common era who plays a critical role in the shaping of the Human-Trisolarin conflict. The story picks up after Luo Ji's discovery of Dark Forest Deterence, wherein a message identifying the location of the Trisolarin and Human solar systems is used to leverage mutually ensured destruction and stave off war. Cheng Xin is nominated Swordholder to succeed Luo Jito, meaning decision that in the event of a Trisolarin attack she will bear the ultimate decision to initiate the message and doom both worlds. The Trisolarins call her bluff, and her failure to act results in humanity's enslavement.

From there, the book takes a series of odd and fascinating turns. Rather than turning into a rebels versus empire tale of conflict, it explores a vast range of philosophical and scientific principles, carrying Cheng Xin across a sweep of time and space that dwarfs the not inconsiderable scope of the previous two books.

One of the most unusual aspects of Death's End is its tone. The other two books were contemplative in their own right, favoring reflection over action, but increasingly the story becomes in a away a meditation on it’s own smallness. I was struck by its melancholy, an emotion I don’t see reflected very often in literature. Tragedy is used a lot, but tragedy is grand and operatic. Melancholy is small and quiet and sad. In this sense, the latter half of Death’s End reminded me more than naything of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. As in Shute’s novel, the characters in Death’s End face an apocalypse—indeed, one on a much larger scale than the one featured in On the Beach —with more resignation than anguish. There is grief, to be sure, but it’s grief of a muted, elegaic sort. It’s a bold stylistic choice to end a three-part epic, but I think it was the right one. Liu’s work has always felt like classic sci-fi, which dwelt more in the realm of ideas than characters, and the detached way in which it depict’s humanity’s end and potential new beginning seems apt.