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Reading Wednesday (Two Wednesdays in a row!)
Jezebel: The Untold Story Of The Bible's Harlot Queen by Lesley Hazleton. A nonfiction account of, well, look at the title. Hazelton draws in a number of sources to flesh out Jezebel’s story: the original Hebrew of the Book of Kings, archaeological excavations, writings from Phoenician, Assyrian, and Babylonian contemporaries, visits to the real-life places mentioned in the text, and so on. She does an excellent job of turning Jezebel into a sympathetic figure and fleshing out her world, making it a real, complex place to live. If you have any interest in the history of the Middle East around 800BCE, this is definitely a book for you.
There is one stylistic tick that I didn’t like: Hazelton frequently takes a novelistic turn, imaging Jezebel’s emotions or actions or the scent of the night breeze in her hair. To be fair, she always clearly marks these sections as separate from her research, so there’s no chance of a reader confusing the nonfiction and fictional. I just found them pointless and boring; if I wanted to read a novel about Jezebel, I’m sure I could have done so; instead I picked up a history book and would have liked it to stay historical. I also felt that Hazelton leaned a little too heavily on the “this story is a perfect parallel for our modern life!” theme, but eh, that was likely a necessity to get the book published.
Overall, it’s not the best nonfiction I’ve ever read, but it was interesting with an easy flow. A good book to pass the time while learning a few memorable facts.
The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag. (There's no translator listed, strangely, but this was originally written in Swedish.) A murder mystery set in 1790s Stockholm. Cardell, a watchman in name only since he’s more interested in getting drunk and escaping his memories of being a soldier, is called in when street kids find a human body dumped in a nearby lake. The body is a torso only: limbless, toothless, eyeless, and, of course, nameless, and yet very recent. Cardell teams up with Winge, a Sherlock Holmes-like detective, devoted to rationality and tiny details, who’s also busy dying of consumption. Together they a) figure out how to identify the body, and b) trace the killer.
A perfectly fine premise. And yet THIS BOOK IS SO TERRIBLE. So terrible that I don’t even know where to begin listing all of my problems with it!
Okay. Let’s start here: The Wolf and the Watchman is divided into four parts fairly equal in length. Parts One and Four are the story of Cardell and Winge as they investigate the mystery of the torso. Parts Two and Three are the stories of, respectively, Kristofer Blix and Anna Stina, who have only the most tangential of connections to the main plot. So minor are their contributions, in fact, that they could have served the exact same role in the mystery without even being given names, much less 100 pages each of backstory. And their sections aren’t uninteresting; if I had read them as independent novellas I probably would have enjoyed them, particularly Anna’s. But when you’re in the middle of a book and it suddenly jumps to a different character with no apparent relation to what you were previously reading (both of them do eventually connect to the murder plot, but only near the end of their sections), you can’t help but be distracted by wondering when you’re going to return to the main point of the book.
The Wolf and the Watchman also absolutely revels in the grossest, dirtiest, harshest, most sickening parts of history. Which you probably could guess from any book that opens with a limbless torso, but it’s true of every element of plot and setting and description. And that limbless torso – I’m trying not to go into any great detail, because if I did this post would need an abundance of trigger warnings. But let me say: I read a lot of murder mysteries, and this one is definitely a step beyond the usual, verging on torture porn. Not to mention the literal torture, the multiple rapes, and the child abuse, to name only a few other elements. I don’t require a rosy portrayal of the past, but The Wolf and the Watchman is so self-evidently gleeful at rubbing its readers' faces in shit, mucus, and rotting corpses that it’s hard not to take a step back and roll your eyes. It reminds me a bit of Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue – though oddly I liked that book; I suppose Donoghue simply could pull off the grimness better than Natt och Dag does – but they share a similar desire to be The Most Depressing and The Most Gross.
Yet another problem was an absolutely appalling, out of nowhere, simply horrific scene of blatant anti-semitism. The Jewish character is a loan collector (such a surprise, I'm sure) who seems to be reenacting The Merchant of Venice, taking his pound of flesh:
“I am no simple bean counter who drives my business by way of interest rates, Kristofer Blix. I trade in other commodities. When the young man’s debt became considerable, I realized that I owned him and that I could do whatever I wanted with him [...]. Once I formed glass into the shapes that pleased me. Today I shape your lives in the same way.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, he is then described as having LITERAL HORNS:
When shadows fell across his face, I thought I could glimpse fangs between his lips and a forehead bulging with two small horns, each finger ending in a claw. I rubbed my eyes to coax back reality.
Granted, this character only appears on about three pages out of an entire novel, so it would be easy enough to skip over it, but what is it even doing here? What is happening in Sweden that this appears so nonchalantly in a novel published in 2019 – well, 2017 in the original Swedish? Apparently it was even voted best debut novel that year by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers which... I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
In an equally appalling but entirely separate plot development, a young woman ends up pregnant after being raped. Being unmarried, she's worried her life will be destroyed if her pregnancy is discovered, plus, you know, she violently hates the rapist. The man she goes to for abortion drugs instead gives her a placebo, telling her the truth only once it's too late for her to safely have an abortion. He then uses her dilemma to force her into accepting his proposal of marriage. This plot would fit in just fine with all the grimdarkness above, except that we're apparently supposed to see it as a good thing. The man's actions are repeatedly described as his redemption, and the woman, instead of being furious, is grateful and happy, decides she really does want the baby after all, and even finds her trauma over the rape and the rest of her past healed by her continued pregnancy. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
And in a minor detail apparently just thrown in for fun, Winge sets free a man who murdered his wife. There's no particularly redeeming features about this guy – he and his wife fought repeatedly, one night he got drunk and hit her harder than usual – but he's less bad than the central murderer of the plot, which I guess I agree with? I don't think that justifies Winge's decision to set him completely free to live his life as though he never murdered anyone, though.
Just an awful book all around. I cannot believe the good press and huge marketing push it's getting.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
There is one stylistic tick that I didn’t like: Hazelton frequently takes a novelistic turn, imaging Jezebel’s emotions or actions or the scent of the night breeze in her hair. To be fair, she always clearly marks these sections as separate from her research, so there’s no chance of a reader confusing the nonfiction and fictional. I just found them pointless and boring; if I wanted to read a novel about Jezebel, I’m sure I could have done so; instead I picked up a history book and would have liked it to stay historical. I also felt that Hazelton leaned a little too heavily on the “this story is a perfect parallel for our modern life!” theme, but eh, that was likely a necessity to get the book published.
Overall, it’s not the best nonfiction I’ve ever read, but it was interesting with an easy flow. A good book to pass the time while learning a few memorable facts.
The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag. (There's no translator listed, strangely, but this was originally written in Swedish.) A murder mystery set in 1790s Stockholm. Cardell, a watchman in name only since he’s more interested in getting drunk and escaping his memories of being a soldier, is called in when street kids find a human body dumped in a nearby lake. The body is a torso only: limbless, toothless, eyeless, and, of course, nameless, and yet very recent. Cardell teams up with Winge, a Sherlock Holmes-like detective, devoted to rationality and tiny details, who’s also busy dying of consumption. Together they a) figure out how to identify the body, and b) trace the killer.
A perfectly fine premise. And yet THIS BOOK IS SO TERRIBLE. So terrible that I don’t even know where to begin listing all of my problems with it!
Okay. Let’s start here: The Wolf and the Watchman is divided into four parts fairly equal in length. Parts One and Four are the story of Cardell and Winge as they investigate the mystery of the torso. Parts Two and Three are the stories of, respectively, Kristofer Blix and Anna Stina, who have only the most tangential of connections to the main plot. So minor are their contributions, in fact, that they could have served the exact same role in the mystery without even being given names, much less 100 pages each of backstory. And their sections aren’t uninteresting; if I had read them as independent novellas I probably would have enjoyed them, particularly Anna’s. But when you’re in the middle of a book and it suddenly jumps to a different character with no apparent relation to what you were previously reading (both of them do eventually connect to the murder plot, but only near the end of their sections), you can’t help but be distracted by wondering when you’re going to return to the main point of the book.
The Wolf and the Watchman also absolutely revels in the grossest, dirtiest, harshest, most sickening parts of history. Which you probably could guess from any book that opens with a limbless torso, but it’s true of every element of plot and setting and description. And that limbless torso – I’m trying not to go into any great detail, because if I did this post would need an abundance of trigger warnings. But let me say: I read a lot of murder mysteries, and this one is definitely a step beyond the usual, verging on torture porn. Not to mention the literal torture, the multiple rapes, and the child abuse, to name only a few other elements. I don’t require a rosy portrayal of the past, but The Wolf and the Watchman is so self-evidently gleeful at rubbing its readers' faces in shit, mucus, and rotting corpses that it’s hard not to take a step back and roll your eyes. It reminds me a bit of Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue – though oddly I liked that book; I suppose Donoghue simply could pull off the grimness better than Natt och Dag does – but they share a similar desire to be The Most Depressing and The Most Gross.
Yet another problem was an absolutely appalling, out of nowhere, simply horrific scene of blatant anti-semitism. The Jewish character is a loan collector (such a surprise, I'm sure) who seems to be reenacting The Merchant of Venice, taking his pound of flesh:
“I am no simple bean counter who drives my business by way of interest rates, Kristofer Blix. I trade in other commodities. When the young man’s debt became considerable, I realized that I owned him and that I could do whatever I wanted with him [...]. Once I formed glass into the shapes that pleased me. Today I shape your lives in the same way.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, he is then described as having LITERAL HORNS:
When shadows fell across his face, I thought I could glimpse fangs between his lips and a forehead bulging with two small horns, each finger ending in a claw. I rubbed my eyes to coax back reality.
Granted, this character only appears on about three pages out of an entire novel, so it would be easy enough to skip over it, but what is it even doing here? What is happening in Sweden that this appears so nonchalantly in a novel published in 2019 – well, 2017 in the original Swedish? Apparently it was even voted best debut novel that year by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers which... I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
In an equally appalling but entirely separate plot development, a young woman ends up pregnant after being raped. Being unmarried, she's worried her life will be destroyed if her pregnancy is discovered, plus, you know, she violently hates the rapist. The man she goes to for abortion drugs instead gives her a placebo, telling her the truth only once it's too late for her to safely have an abortion. He then uses her dilemma to force her into accepting his proposal of marriage. This plot would fit in just fine with all the grimdarkness above, except that we're apparently supposed to see it as a good thing. The man's actions are repeatedly described as his redemption, and the woman, instead of being furious, is grateful and happy, decides she really does want the baby after all, and even finds her trauma over the rape and the rest of her past healed by her continued pregnancy. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
And in a minor detail apparently just thrown in for fun, Winge sets free a man who murdered his wife. There's no particularly redeeming features about this guy – he and his wife fought repeatedly, one night he got drunk and hit her harder than usual – but he's less bad than the central murderer of the plot, which I guess I agree with? I don't think that justifies Winge's decision to set him completely free to live his life as though he never murdered anyone, though.
Just an awful book all around. I cannot believe the good press and huge marketing push it's getting.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
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That's the second highly acclaimed novel I've run into recently with radioactively high levels of anti-Semitism. It's just rising, worldwide, and the people who could stop it are not the Jews, and they aren't stopping it.
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Don't read Simon Ings' The Smoke. [edit] I saw all the problems this reviewer saw and then some and I did not find it a provoking thought experiment; I found it the sort of thing I would have expected from neo-Nazi fringe literature, not a major British publishing house.
[edit edit] I'm sorry to keep editing this comment. I know someone who's considering an in-depth mayday review of this novel and I don't want to anticipate it. I just also happen to have read the thing.
Essentially, Ings takes anti-Semitic conspiracy theory as if it were a neutral model for an alternate history: Jews really aren't human and they really control the world and they really are intent on wiping humanity out. Everything is worked out from there. And while I might have been willing to give a Jewish author some leeway with power fantasy gone monstrous, I am relatively confident that Ings is not Jewish, because in my experience only goyim writing Jews think we refer to God as "Jehovah." Some of his dogwhistles are specific to British anti-Semitism and some of them are recognizable worldwide and some of them are so loud they aren't dogwhistles at all. There's not even a fig leaf of fantastic racism. It's just the Jews. (Communist Jews, too—textually, canonically, the Jewish Labour Bund.) It is astonishing to me that the novel was published in our current climate and it is distressing to me. Even if the author was blinded by his own cleverness in the way of people who believe they are subverting stereotypes when in fact they are only reinforcing them, someone in the chain of publication from first reader to copyedits should have noticed and called it out. Instead it made it to shelves, which is how we got here. He has a nice prose style, which makes it worse.
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[edit] I mean, the answer is obvious, but sometimes you need to see for yourself that it really is that bad.
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God be between you and all the dark things you must read. I did not enjoy it.
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That sounds incredibly awful. From the quotes in that tweet thread, there doesn't seem to be any twist or new take or anything to distinguish it from straightforward hatefulness; I'm very surprised more people haven't called it out.
I'm sorry to keep editing this comment. I know someone who's considering an in-depth mayday review of this novel and I don't want to anticipate it.
I hope you link the review when it's done! As awful as it sounds – and I feel no need to read it myself – I'm always interested in analyses of both terrible books and the current upswing in antisemitism.
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There really is no twist: even the possibility that the human narrator is just a bigot and the narrative is just his lens is undone when the Bundists actually initiate genocide, disingenuously claiming existential self-defense. I have to conclude that people haven't called it out because on some level they accept its premise, the alternate history makes sense to them, they think that's just what the Jews would do to the rest of us unchosen people (oh, how the novel leans on the normalcy of non-Bundists, authentic humanity, not some cold clannish wizard brilliance that's crackerjack with figures but never quite understands a joke) if they got the chance. The only article of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory I couldn't find in this book was blood libel and I feel like the general body horror of Bundist science might make up for it. And this is just the plot-level. Not the characterization, not the similes, not the little worldbuilding details that go the extra mile to Other and exclude (perpetual, ineluctable foreigners, aliens even to the planet they live on). I haven't even gotten into the other post-human species, the chickies, who are a different can of weird-ass racist tropes all their own. I don't understand why the novel got any traction except for reasons that really worry me to contemplate.
I hope you link the review when it's done!
I will. I think it would be a community service and it would mean I didn't have to throw myself on the phosphorus grenade of re-reading the damn thing.
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I'm really very unhappy about it. It's a partial retelling of the Aeneid! I should have been able to love it! Not with all the other stuff in there.
[edit] You know, I'm starting to think it's just this year's flavor.
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I'd heard the Yiddish problem with Umbrella Academy a few days ago, but I hadn't realized until reading that post that Gerard Way was involved in it, which is very sad because I used to like him back in his pop music days.
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I'd be fine if people stopped trying to find out.
I'd heard the Yiddish problem with Umbrella Academy a few days ago, but I hadn't realized until reading that post that Gerard Way was involved in it, which is very sad because I used to like him back in his pop music days.
I hadn't heard anything about it. I was just reading the handful of Tumblrs I read while not actually being on Tumblr, and, welp.
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