Euthanasia

My country is presently discussing the passing of a law allowing euthanasia, and as always with touchy issues, al demagogy and self-righteousness is running amok. The media are as usually in these cases stoking the flames of intolerance and radicalism, which makes me sick. But of course euthanasia is a serious issue, and I feel like I should as well give my opinion.
I’ve been a physician for 30 years, and treating very sick patients, with a great deal of suffering. And what I have watched is that the overwhelming majority don’t want to die. They don’t want to suffer. And often, when they’re in great suffering at the end of their lives, they ask to be left alone, to just die in peace.
And that’s what I think is the main problem – the insistence on futile care when people are dying, driven by our culture of “doing everything possible” and the families and caretakers’ sense of guilt. That’s really the big problem with terminally ill patients.
That said, I think euthanasia should be approved and regulated for the few people that request it. But most of all, I think we should question futile care, and let people die from their illnesses when we cannot make them better.

Viagens, de Olga Tokarczuk

I had never heard about Olga Tokarczuk until she won the Nobel last year; I was curious when a friend said she was reading Viagens and that it was a "strange" book; she lent it to me after she finished, and I'm glad to have read it. I didn't find it strange at all, I found it fabulous, and was happy to discover such a great writer.

I absolutely love this kind of book. It's a collection of short stories, essays and random thought, all connected by a common theme - travelling, both around the world and inside the mind, an insatiably curious mind, gifted with a keen sense of observation and always haunted by the eternal questions "what am I doing here?", "what's on people's minds?", "what / who are we really?". It reminded me of Chatwin for the love of travelling and details like the wunderkammers (thinking of The Songlines and many of his essays); it reminded me of Marguerite Yourcenar's Zénon, for his endless curiosity about the outer and inner world.

The writing is beautiful and elegant - at least it looks so in the translation, which reconciled me with translating after a terrible experience with a Donna Tartt book; the stories succeed each other smoothly like a modern Sherazade telling engaging tales.

So I highly recommend this book to all my friends, I'm sure they will love it.

The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu

An excellent sequel to the outstanding The Three Body Problem - I'm really enjoying this series. The plot is extremely clever, the characters engaging, and the scientific base most sound - sometimes I have to reread a passage struggling with my basic knowledge of astro-physics, but it always seems plausible. I felt childishly happy to have guessed the Wallfacer Luo Ji's strategy, I remembered a great book by Asimov I read many years ago, The Gods Themselves, where a similar ruse was used. I wonder if it inspired Cixin Liu? He's a reader of Asimov, he mentioned Foundation in The Three Body Problem. Anyway, I'm looking forward to read the next book in the series.