Book review: "The Shortest History of Italy" by Ross King

 

When you're about two-thirds into this book, you realize that Ross King could have cheated by documenting only the last 150-odd years of the history of Italy, because before that, Italy wasn't a country. Luckily for us, the author starts around 1200 BCE and takes us through 3000 years of history in less than 250 pages. 

Before reading this book, when I thought of Italy, three periods came to mind: Ancient Rome, especially those crazy emperors; the Renaissance; and Mussolini. As it turns out, the history of the country-that-mostly-isn't-a-country is a wild ride that goes off in all kinds of directions. Its cities constantly take turns dominating the area. First it's Rome, obviously, but then it's Ravenna, next Venice, then Florence, and later Milan. For most of its history, "Italy" is a hodgepodge of small city-states, many of them running something approximating democracy, and all of them constantly being invaded (by Huns, Goths, Lombards, Normans, Napoleon, and each other), overtaken, decimated by disease, or otherwise in a state of flux. Even something as basic as the Italian language isn't properly fixed in place until the 1800s. After the country unifies in the 1860s, things don't exactly calm down. Whatever else you might say about Italy, boring it's not.

The book is very enjoyable to read: never oversimplifying, fast-paced and full of fun little anecdotes. The writer obviously knows his stuff and uses foreshadowing and back-referencing to stitch together the fragments of Italian history into something resembling a coherent narrative. As a quick introduction to the country and its history, this book is hard to beat.

Book review: "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" by Giorgio Bassani

 

Many attempts have been made to express the loss that the Holocaust caused, the huge gaping hole left across Europe by the millions of lives it claimed. This classic Italian novel is a melancholy, poetic portrayal of the Jewish community, leading up to its extinction, in the city of Ferrara. It's all the more heart-rending because it barely touches on the impending doom, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.

My edition of the book included an introduction that compared the book to Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," and like that novel, here, too, an unassuming narrator from a humble background finds himself mesmerized by an elite family, especially one of its members. And that's a fair comparison. But in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the inevitable, omitted final chapter looms over the book like a sword of Damocles. 

In the novel, the unnamed narrator, who presumably lives in the Jewish ghetto in the south of the city, befriends the Finzi-Continis, a well-to-do, intellectual family living in the richer, greener north. When Mussolini's oppressive antisemitic laws forbid Jews from playing at the local tennis club, the Finzi-Continis instead host tennis matches in their large garden. There isn't all that much of a plot here, but there doesn't need to be. The narrator's hopeless infatuation with the daughter of the family, Micol, feels like a metaphor for the hopeless situation the characters find themselves in --without realizing it.

It's rare to come across good writing, but this is it.

Book Review: "Ravenna - Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe" by Judith Herrin

Growing up in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s, I always felt that there was a gap in the history of my country. What was going on after the Romans left and before the Middle Ages properly began? From roughly 400 to 1100, nothing much seemed to be going on in my country, nor indeed anywhere else in Western Europe. Charlemagne seemed to be the only noteworthy character from those days. And the Roman Empire? Well, it was gone after the barbarians destroyed Rome around the year 500. There was something called the East Roman Empire, which went on for about 1000 years longer, but my history teachers didn't really dwell on that.

"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin explains the history of the two Roman empires, the one based in Rome and the one based in Constantinople, through the perspective of one Northern Italian city, Ravenna, that linked them together, but today doesn't even make it into the top 20 places to visit in Italy.

My history books was right in saying that, after the sacking of Rome (or rather sackings --there were several), its population was decimated --in the original sense of the word, from some 600,000 people to barely 60,000. Its political power was equally diminished: "Rome" no longer controlled present-day France, Italy, England or Germany. 

But the Roman Empire was far from gone. It continued to flourish, now as a Christian society with its headquarters in Constantinople (later Byzantium and eventually Istanbul). From there, the emperor called the shots and controlled a huge area, covering almost all land around the Mediterranean, from Andalusia to Syria. And Ravenna was the capital of the western half of the empire.

The various groups of barbarians who were fighting all over Europe in the 400s through 600s, the Huns, the Goths, the Lombards, may seem at first glance as the logical mortal enemies of this empire. But the Constantinopolitan emperors were not the decadent, Rome-burning fiddlers many of us are familiar with, and the barbarians were less barbaric than you might imagine. Sharing the Christian faith, the two  groups actually found common ground, and the symbol of this new convergence was King Theoderic (thee-OH-de-rick), whose long and wise rule over Ravenna and its territories cemented the city's importance for centuries to come. Theoderic is decidedly civilized, focused on good governance rather than on splitting skulls, and surprisingly tolerant --for example, he treats his Jewish subjects with much more respect than the rest of Europe does.

The book also makes clear how the early Middle Ages were defined by endless quibbles over what even present-day Christians might consider minor doctrinal details. The exact nature of the Holy Trinity, for example, was a topic of heated debate, and led to schisms between the Arian Christians (that's Arian, not Aryan) in the east and the Catholic Christians in the west. The city of Rome was pretty much an afterthought, and not at all the heart of Christianity that it would later become. Also, some eight or nine centuries before Calvinists in the north would destroy depictions of Jesus, Byzantium had its own iconoclasm, possibly under the influence of the Muslims, who were keeping the eastern part of the empire busy with their attacks, and opposed depictions of the Prophet pretty much from day one.

The happy side effect of these Muslim conquests was that the eastern emperor took his eye off the ball in the west, allowing Ravenna to keep its "graven images," allowing many of them to survive until today (although the mosaic of Theoderic would eventually be covered up). This is what makes Ravenna so special: it's one of the few places where early Christian art survives.

"Ravenna" is much more than a history of the city; it's a portrait of Europe and the Middle East in that fairly unknown period from roughly 300 to 700. The book is also well-written and especially well-structured: it's divided into parts, then chapters, then sections, the last of which never cover more than about 4-5 pages, making the information much more bite-sized than your average history books. Multiple inserts show the beautiful mosaics and buildings in Ravenna that managed to survive till the present day.

Book Review: "The Travels of Ibn Battutah" (abridged)

Here's a game: using your place of birth as the center, how far west, east, north and south have you traveled on this planet? For me, the westernmost point is San Francisco, northernmost is Luleå (Sweden), easternmost is Moscow, and southernmost is Marrakesh.

Now think of people living in the 1330s. Who, in those days, was the most well-traveled person in history? The vast majority were born, lived and died within spitting distance of their birthplace. Who didn't? Marco Polo? Alexander the Great? Maybe a Chinese merchant traveling the Silk Road?

All signs indicate that the person was Ibn Battutah, a qadi (judge) who left his home town of Tangier, Morocco in 1325 and didn't stop traveling until 1354. What begins as a pilgrimage to Mecca by way of the Horn of Africa soon becomes a true globe-trotting journey, taking in the pyramids in Gizeh, Constantinople, the Arabian peninsula, and Central Asia, and then on to India, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and further still, to Bangladesh, the islands of Sumatra and Java in Indonesia, and finally the east coast of China (then ruled by a descendant of Genghis Khan). But that's not all: after returning home, he goes on to visit Andalusia in Spain and travels all the way down to Timbuktu in Mali, where he meets Mansa Sulaiman, the brother of Mansa Musa, arguably the richest man who ever lived. (Of course, most of these places have different names in Ibn Battutah's day.)

Virtually everywhere he goes, there is a Muslim presence of some kind, and vast swaths of the ground he covers are ruled by Muslims. He generally gets a warm welcome by the local rulers, who are keen to hear his stories about distant lands, and receives enough horses, camels and slaves to make it to his next destination. And, miraculously, he survives everything, being none the worse for wear, escaping even the Black Death that is ravaging Europe when he's there.

Once home, he sits down and turns his experience into a manuscript that's 1000 pages long. The entire thing was translated in English in the 1950s, and a scan of all four volumes is online for free at the Internet Archive. (I've read only a 300-page abridged version.)

The story sounds almost too good to be true, and you'd have good reason to be skeptical: in Europe, one Sir John Mandeville, around the same time, wrote a travelogue filled with fantastical monsters, men with dog heads and cotton plants that grow sheep, and the Europeans eagerly ate up the baloney. 

But this is in sharp contrast with Ibn Battutah, who not only describes his itinerary so meticulously that there is a Google Map of his voyages, there's also a mere handful of cases where his claims cannot be corroborated by 21st-century scholars. He write cautiously, and his caution is understandable: his claims are scrutinized and criticized by scholars when he returns, even when he tells things that are verifiably true, say, that rulers in India throw handfuls of dirhams on the ground for their subjects to scramble over. He explains what hippos are, what a coconut is and how pepper is grown and dried.

Equally surprising, compared to the highly dramatic style of European books of the time, is his non-judgmental, objective and detached style: only very rarely does he express any kind of emotional reaction to people and customs that to him must have seemed perfectly alien. He reports his experiences with a neutrality that could make a present-day cultural anthropologist jealous.

In other words, the book is a contemporary portrait of the world in the Middle Ages (except for the Americas, of course) that is without equal. Maybe I'll eventually sink my teeth into the full, 1000-page version, but for now, I'll cherish the abridged and heavily annotated version.

Book review: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann

 StoryGraph link

A few years ago, I read an article in The New Yorker about a new kind of archeology: archeologists would fly in an airplane over a South American jungle, sending down continuous laser beams as they flew. Dense though the canopy may be, the little laser beams still managed to find the minuscule gaps between the leaves and send down their light to the landscape below, resulting in a 3D rendering of what lay hidden under the trees. The result was astounding: an entire overgrown civilization was concealed in the jungle, undiscovered for centuries, waiting for this breakthrough technology to find it.

This book is like that airplane: it reveals that many, indeed most, things we thought we knew about the Americas before Columbus now turn out to be false. The civilizations of the continent were considered static, underdeveloped and uniform, and this book shows them to be none of the three. After reading 1491, the Americas seem to me as alien as a faraway planet. Most of the population died out before the rest of the world had a decent opportunity to discover and explore it. Those deaths, the book argues, were much more numerous than we previously imagined (Mann quotes a 95% death rate in some areas) on the one hand, and also much less intentional than conventional wisdom assumes (most died of diseases they were completely unfamiliar with, rather than directly at the hands of European invaders).

Because of this massive loss of life, what we're left with are scraps and ruins, hints and clues about what was lost. From what we know, the Indians (a term preferred by many indigenous people over the stiffly PC "Native Americans") did almost everything so wildly differently from the rest of the world that outsiders were not even capable of recognizing the sophistication, subtlety or even existence of it.

A good example is agriculture. To Eurasians and Africans, this means cordoning off land, growing a crop on it, maybe letting animals graze on it, that sort of thing. To the original Americans, it means turning the Amazon rain forest into a gigantic garden, growing multiple plant species side by side (a technique called milpa) and using fire to control the land. Because this was an alien concept to the rest of the world, they mistook a giant stretch of agricultural land for untouched wilderness. In this way, the book also does away with the romantic notion of Indians living in some kind of New Age harmony with nature.

At the same time, it's also a big misconception to see the population of this giant continent as one homogenous group. Quite the contrary: in addition to the cultures most of us know, like the Inka, the Aztecs, the Olmecs and the Mayans, there were many more cultures I'd never heard of, like the Wari, for example, and other cultures whose names we'll never know. Some were bloodthirsty, brutal and warlike; others were peaceful, surviving under harsh conditions, or democratic to an extent that Europe was at that time unfamiliar with (and tried to suppress).

The most important, inescapable conclusion, is that Europe was, in many ways, the inferior culture. It may seem as if only superior firepower could explain how a handful of foreign invaders could subjugate an entire continent. But the reality was that that firepower was not nearly as superior as you might think, not to mention that Indians got their hands on some of those firearms themselves before long. Physically, the native population tended to be strong, muscular and imposing: they were horrified by the Spanish with their pockmarked faces. It was chicken pox and various other diseases that wiped out huge swaths of the population, often emptying a region even before the colonists caught up with the bugs.

Maybe you've come across the story of the passenger pigeon, a now-extinct pigeon species of which, at one point, there were a billion in the Americas. You'll probably have been told that this incredibly abundant bird (one in four birds in America were passenger pigeons at some point) went extinct due to deforestation and large-scale hunting. And that is all true.

But what's often left out of the story is the odd fact that the Indians before Columbus seem to have eaten very few passenger pigeons. When examining Indian sites, the bones of all kinds of animals can be found, but bones of these birds, despite their apparent abundance, were quite uncommon. How could this be? The shocking explanation is that before Columbus, passenger pigeons were not as abundant: they had large numbers of human predators. That all changed after the Europeans arrived: the mass deaths of the indigenous population paved the way for a population explosion of the bird.

We'll probably never know the real scale of the devastating loss that the "discovery" of the Americas brought about. But this book offers a glimpse, through stories like these. We owe it, not just to the lost peoples, but also to the world, to find out as much as we can about the people who lived in the Americas --even if that is very little.

JSLL #76 - The Spider's Thread, part 24

 Sentence:

この分でのぼって行けば、地獄からぬけ出すのも、存外わけがないかも知れません。

このぶんでのぼっていけば、じごくからぬけだすのも、ぞんがいわけがないかみしれません。

Vocabulary

• 分 means "part, portion, share" but also "condition, extent, rate (as in 'at this rate, ...')"
• 存外 means "beyond expectations, contrary to expectation, unexpectedly"
• わけがない means "there's no way that..." or "easy, simple." わけ on its own means "reason, grounds, cause."
• かも知れません, which is usually written only with kana, literally means "[I/you/someone] can't know whether..." but is invariably translated as "perhaps, maybe."

Kanji

Two new kanji: 存 is an N3 kanji in 18 common words. 外 is an N5 kanji in 84 words. The second kanji has a connotation/meaning of "outside, except, exception."

Translation

If he would climb at this rate, sneaking out of hell would perhaps be easier than expected.

JSLL #75 - The Spider's Thread, part 23

It's a Sunday, so we'll do 2 sentences, with very few new words and only 1 new kanji.

Sentence 1:

すると、一生懸命にのぼった甲斐があって、さっきまで自分がいた血の池は、今ではもう暗の底にいつの間にかかくれて居ります。

すると、いっしょうけんめいにのぼったかいがあって、さっきまでじぶんがいたちのいけは、いまではもうやみのそこにいつのまにかかくれております。

Vocabulary

• 甲斐 means "result (that makes an act worthwhile), worth (in doing something), value, effect, use, benefit, avail." 
• いつの間にか means "before one knows, before one becomes aware of, unnoticed, unawares"
• かくれる (usually written 隠れる) means "to hide, to conceal oneself, to take cover"

Kanji

The only new kanji is 斐 which is an N1 kanji that occurs in only 3 words, always preceded by 甲. The trendy Japanese concept of "ikigai" is 生き甲斐, where 生き comes from 生きる, "to live." So literally, "ikigai" means "reason to live."

Translation

Then, it had been worth climbing with all his might: the lake of blood where he had been until recently, had become hidden in the deep darkness before he had realized it.

Sentence 2:

それからあのぼんやり光っている恐ろしい針の山も、足の下になってしまいました。

それからあのぼんやりひかっているおそろしいはりのやまも、あしのしたになってしまいました。

And that terrible Mountain of Needles, too, shining dimly, had ended up under his feet.