In search of new writers
Archive for July, 2009
Pompeii by Mary Beard
Jul 28th
Mary Beard’s exposition of Pompeii was undoubtedly one of the best books that I read last year. Indeed, so enamoured was my father of the book that he bought 3 copies, as he’d recently been on a field trip to Pompeii, and knew that my uncle and I are also greatly enthused by classical history. I very much love Mary Beard’s sublime narrative style, so it did not take me long to consume Pompeii at all. So I was already very familiar with the text before Profile sent me a review copy of the paperback.
Mary Beard skilfully dispels many of the myths that have built up around the destruction of the city, and casts a shrewd eye on how the surviving evidence may have been corrupted by restoration attempts. For example, there is the famous example of the bodies of a family found trapped in a house, one of whom was a heavily pregnant woman: one of the bodies had its lower premolars incorrectly glued into the sockets of its upper incisors during restoration, which other observers could have mistaken as botched Latin dentistry. Skeletons found on the site may well have been later looters trying to break into buried houses, rather than their owners perishing in an attempt to escape. The fact that there was so much decorating going on the city at the time of the eruption may have been due to tremors in the days leading up to the volcanic explosion, rather than a hangover from the large earthquake recorded in Pompeii 17 years earlier. Even the actual date of the eruption, and the closeness of Pompeii to the sea at the time still seem to be up for debate. There’s also the fact that much of the site was devastated by Allied bombing in 1943, so many of the ‘remains’ we see today have effectively been rebuilt. Indeed, many of the remains originally discovered in the mid 18th century have now given way to entropy, so what’s left is gradually being lost. A lot of the houses were named after their supposed inhabitants, but some of the evidence, such as the discovery of signet rings inside them, forms quite flimsy evidence.
One thing is for sure though: that Mary Beard has brilliantly brought the city and its inhabitants back to life. Pompeii is also superbly presented by Profile: there are many lavish colour plates along with grayscale illustrations of art and artefacts from the city. Mary Beard’s Pompeii is undoubtedly one of the best books of this or any other year.
Violence by Slavoj Zizek
Jul 27th
This is a fantastic treatise on the subject of violence, very much aided by the fact that Slavoj Zizek’s prose is always very lively and informative. Zizek also employs examples from popular cinema to illustrate his work, which very much adds to its readability. You can’t really argue against a book that draws sublime parallels with Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Walter Benjamin’s famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. My favourite section of Violence was Antinomies of Tolerant Reason, which very ably deals with the intricacies of the Israeli/Palestinian debate, and which should, in my opinion, be read by all parties in this dispute. Zizek also discusses the concept of violence in reference to the current wave of terrorist attacks, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the demonstrations held to protest against the caricactures of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Zizek believes that violence originates in the fear of the Neighbour, and that violence is inherent in language itself, ironically the tool we use most to dispel violence. Thankfully, one of Zizek’s conclusions is that it is difficult to be really violent.
Whenever I read a book, I put a slip of paper into pages that I thought were very important – needless, to say, my copy of Violence is now filled with said slips of paper.
This is a fantastic treatise on the subject of violence, very much aided by the fact that Slavoj Zizek’s prose is always very lively and informative. Zizek also employs examples from popular cinema to illustrate his work, which very much adds to its readability. You can’t really argue against a book that draws sublime parallels with Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Walter Benjamin’s famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. My favourite section of Violence was Antinomies of Tolerant Reason, which very ably deals with the intricacies of the Israeli/Palestinian debate, and which should, in my opinion, be read by all parties in this dispute. Zizek also discusses the concept of violence in reference to the current wave of terrorist attacks, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the demonstrations held to protest against the caricactures of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Zizek believes that violence originates in the fear of the Neighbour, and that violence is inherent in language itself, ironically the tool we use most to dispel violence. Thankfully, one of Zizek’s conclusions is that it is difficult to be really violent.
Whenever I read a book, I put a slip of paper into pages that I thought were very important – needless, to say, my copy of Violence is now filled with said slips of paper.
