A Schoolboy's Diary, by Robert Walser

I didn't know Robert Walser, and I bought this book in Zurich when looking for Swiss authors. I wasn't very impressed at first - nice stories, elegant writing, but not really engaging. But as I read on there were a few I liked very much, so I think it is worth reading. There was particularly a small text that I found beautiful and I transcribe it here:

Morning and Night

Early in the morning, how good, how blindingly bright your mood was, how you peeked into life like a child and, no doubt, often enough acted downright fresh and improper. Enchanting, beautiful morning with golden light and pastel colors!
How different, though, at night - then tiring thoughts came to you, and solemnity looked at you in a way you had never imagined, and people walked beneath dark branches, and the moon moved behind clouds, and everything looked like a test of whether you too were firm of will and strong.
In such a way does good cheer constantly alternate with difficulty and trouble. Morning and night were like wanting to and needing to. One drove you out into vast immensity, the other pulled you back into modest smallness again.

Or this other piece, so immediately familiar to anyone who loves to read:

Reading

Reading is as productive as it is enjoyable. When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don't do anything stupid. Ardent readers are a breed of people with great inner peace as it were. The reader has his noble, deep, and long-lasting pleasure without being in anyone else's way or bothering anyone. Is that not glorious? I should think so! Anyone who reads is far from hatching evil schemes. An appealing and entertaining thing to read has the good quality of making us forget for a time that we are nasty, quarrelsome people who cannot leave each other in peace. Who could deny this clearly rather sad and melancholy-inducing sentence? No doubt books often also sidetrack us from useful and productive actions; still, all things considered, reading has to be commended as beneficial, since it seems to be utterly necessary to apply a restraint to our violent craving for belongings and a gentle anesthetic to our often ruthless thirst for action.[...]

How I feel about the reactions to the present Gaza war

I'm getting so depressed about the subject of the Gaza war. War is always terrible, people die, get hurt, lose everything, hate runs loose. Unfortunately, as History repeatedly shows, there are and probably will ever be times when countries will have to use violence and go to war. It's pretty obvious that this is one of those times: Israel had no other way to protect its people from the Hamas repeated aggressions but to respond with a war operation to dismantle their capacity to attack it.

But, apart from the terrible violence that war inevitably entails, the loss of lives and the suffering on both sides, it's most disheartening to feel that this conflict, even if Israel succeeds in the short term (and I hope it will), will not be over in the foreseeable future, probably not in decades. The Palestinian problem, even if it receives a lot more press than other and much bloodier conflicts, is just a tiny part of the Arab / Middle Eastern quagmire - it's just a part, and far from the worst, of the terrible mess the Arab world is in since the decadence of the Ottoman Empire, much worsened since WWII - just look at Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the obscene oil monarchies...

And most depressing of all is looking at all the hate circulating, all the outsiders in the West taking fanatical stands, shouting insults and slanders or cheering, as if they were watching a particularly fierce football game between teams that awaken strong feelings. The amount of news, videos, facebook posts, nasty arguments, hateful lies, is appalling. It's known that "truth is the first victim of war", and one can understand the need by the belligerent parts to use propaganda; but the outsiders should be able to keep a cooler head and take a more dispassionate and rational view. As a Portuguese journalist wrote today on her column, "when the mere mention of the conflict makes people in Europe and the US start shouting insults and coming to blows, how can we expect serenity from the ones directly involved, in the terrain and with guns?". There are a lot of good analysis of this Western frenzy (like this one) but it doesn't make it any less depressing and obscene. It's obscene people shouting death to the Jews, it's obscene all the manipulation and fotoshopping of gory images (as if the true pictures were not horrible enough), it's obscene the stereotyping and demonization of one people or the other, etc. Makes one wish all these warmongers on the couch got a one-way ticket to the Middle East and be left there to fend for themselves.

In the meantime, I worry about the friends I have in Israel, who are in the middle of it all - and, tellingly, are far from being the ones with the most hateful speeches - and wish and hope they and their close ones will get through it all unharmed. And I'm sad when I see other friends, who I know are decent and humane people giving way to the warmongering hate frenzy, taking things at front value, disregarding the big picture and neglecting to remember that most people on both sides are ordinary humans caught in a terrible and extremely difficult to solve situation.

That's why I post and comment less and less on facebook posts about the war. My Israeli friends know I care and support them, and I really don't want to fight with the others, it's not only depressing but useless.

Du Côté de Chez Swann, de Marcel Proust

I finally read the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in French - and already ordered the second. I'm a little of a bookworm, read lots of books, and if I had to choose the BEST, it would be Proust's seven volume book. I'm reading it now for the fourth time, the first time in French, and the pleasure is always the same. Du Côté de Chez Swann is such a wonderful book. The first part, Combray, introduces one to its universe in a most delightful way; the second, Un Amour de Swann, is the best treatise on love and jealousy I ever came across, and the third makes you yearn for the next book... And reading it in French is a delight in itself, with such an elegant writing in such a beautiful language. Some people say "there's no time to read Proust in modern times". Wrong! He's timeless.

O Outono do Patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), de Gabriel García Márquez

An interesting book, not as good, in my opinion, as Cien Años de Soledad or El Amor n los Tiempos del Cólera, but still engaging. The loneliness and alienating character of dictatorship are very well depicted; the writing is a little too baroque for my taste, but I think the translator did a very good job.

Kafka à Beira-Mar (Kafka on the Shore), de Haruki Murakami

I read and enjoyed before a few books by Haruki Murakami, even if it usually I forget them completely not long after having finished. He is a great story-teller, and his books are always a very enjoyable read, full of twists and turns of a kind that has a long and honorable tradition in story telling, from the Arabian Nights until Paul Auster - the story flowing somewhat erratically and unexpectedly, without an apparent plan, making us turn the pages wishing to know what happens next, making us enjoy its sheer unfolding. Murakami is very alluring to a reader like me, who enjoys literature, music and cinema, he's cultivated and the books are full of references to the kind of culture I like.

And yet, sometimes - and this book is one of those - he overdoes it, and the result sounds somewhat shallow and pretentious. Too many cultural references, too many pseudo-metaphysical, pseudo-philosophical details, a story too baroque because in the end completely meaningless. It is an entertaining read, but often annoying, and more than a couple of times I almost put it aside. So, not a very accomplished book, I think.

How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, by Sarah Bakewell

A delightful book. I don't remember how I knew about it, probably read some review, and since I love Montaigne and like to read biographies, I ordered it from amazon, and then waited till finishing to read the Essais in French to read it. I liked it a lot; one can see the author loves her subject, and has assimilated a lot from him - guess it's impossible to assimilate everything. A most enjoyable read, very informative, and above all capturing what I think it's the essence of Montaigne's intentions in writing. I think it's an excellent introduction to Montaigne if you never read him, and also very interesting if you already did - it makes us want to go back to it right away!

O Livro Negro (Bring up the bodies), by Hilary Mantel

The second book by Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell, after Wolf Hall. Also a very good read, but I liked it less than the first - the historical plot is very interestingly and as accurately as can be told, but I didn't like much the writing, the flights of lyrical fancy that seem a little... far fetched. And I found Jane Seymour not very well accomplished as a character, hardly convincing and rather shallow.

Essais, de Michel de Montaigne

I had read a few excerpts of the Essais before, and found them immensely interesting, so the last time I went to Paris I bought the three volumes of the Folio pocket edition. I was amply rewarded! Montaigne had an incredible mind - observant, lucid, curious, tolerant, kind, ironic, funny... It's incredible how modern he sounds, discussing everything, from religion, justice, the New World (in this case with a clear-mindedness centuries ahead of his time) to love, friendship, jealousy and infidelity, to eating habits, clothing, illness and traveling. Never vulgar, he writes as if he was chatting over dinner, as he says he loved to do - stating that good company and pleasant conversation were the best dishes in a dinner party - and he takes us along his train of thought easily an pleasantly. Immensely knowledgeable and cultivated, especially on the classics he loved so much and quoted often, he surprises for his tolerance and good sense, which makes us realize how timeless great minds are. And above all, one is impressed by his love of life and living, and how he seems to have been able to grasp what was really important about it, what really mattered - to live, to enjoy every moment, not to pass through life worrying about the afterlife or the problems ahead (and this was in the 16th century!), and to accept death as a natural end to it all, not to be feared since it is inevitable. Actually, his thoughts about death and dying strikes us as remarkable for the time (even today, how many people have that good sense?): if there is an afterlife, he won't mind to be in the company of all those who died before, if there isn't, then there won't be any regrets because we won't feel anything anyway.

The French he writes in is elegant yet picturesquely ancient, which adds to the pleasure of reading, even if sometimes it makes it a little harder. But even if one has to reread some sentences to apprehend its full meaning, it's never a waste of time.

All in all, a fantastic book, hope to read it again sometime. I always felt richer and more complete after each time I read a few pages each day.

The Emperor of All Maladies - A Biography of Cancer, by Siddharta Mukherjee

This is really a great book. Mukherjee tells the history of cancer as a story, almost like a thriller, extremely engaging and exciting, and never losing the human perspective. Very scientific, and I think easily understandable by lay people. It presents a very realistic and optimistic view of the near future of cancer medicine, and the narrative of past therapies - sometimes appalling - is extremely interesting and informative. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of cancer and medicine.

Exposure, by Sayed Kashua

This is an excellent novel, even better than Dancing Arabs. It's about identity, longing, jealousy; a very engaging plot that makes it a page turner, and very informative about the daily life of Israeli Arabs and their problems, with subtlety and intelligence. It's so good to find new authors and books, it's another of the joys of traveling. Looking forward to read more by Kashua.

Requiem for a beautiful girl

I remember seeing her in high school when I was in 9th grade, and thinking she was so cool - always smiling, her long dark hair floating in the breeze, always hanging with cool looking kids - and wishing to meet her and become her friend. Then, when I started 10th grade, she was in my class, which was really a piece of luck. We quickly became good friends, as one does at 15, and it was even better than I expected. She was indeed a wonderful girl - not conventionally pretty, but with such a contagious smile and bright eyes, long dark hair often braided Bo Derek style, funny and good-humored, and extremely clever, witty and intelligent, one of the brightest people I had met in school so far. She didn't care much about grades and being a successful student, and I remember several teachers wondering how come I, always the top of the class, was such a close friend with her. Little did they know that I was the one who had more to learn.

And we talked and talked, outside and inside the classroom, we were at the same desk in most classes, and kept on talking, about everything, but mostly music - we exchanged song lyrics and sang together Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Doors, Queen... Our favorite duo was Wish You Were Here, where we also sang the guitar and bass parts - usually at the Philosophy class. Many people thought we were going steady and we had fun sometimes pretending we did, but we were just good friends. Actually, later, I developed a crush on her, but I was too shy to make advances - I was such a nerdish kid - and then we got separated by circumstances.

Intense as teenage friendships are, they're also very fragile. I changed schools and we stopped seeing each other - we both thought too prosaic to plan and left to chance our meeting again, silly immature kids that we were. And so it was a kind of opposite of serendipity, we let things to chance and I lost her. Later, I knew through a common friend that she had gotten into serious problems with drugs, and I was very upset about it; I looked for her then but couldn't find her (it was before cell phones and the internet!).

And life went on. A couple of years ago, I was browsing my facebook wall and thought about looking for her. I typed her name, and suddenly there it was - her name, and a picture of a woman much older than the girl I used to know but with a unique and recognizable smile. I contacted her, and we talked again. More than 30 years had passed since we had last seen each other, but we felt as close as if we had just chatted last week. We told each other our lives' stories, so different, and I was so happy to hear about her children and her unorthodox but rich life - as it had to be, because a brilliant mind always makes things happen. We didn't meet, because we were living in different cities; after a time of much talk to get up to date we communicated from time to time. She didn't use facebook much, so I wasn't surprised for not seeing any posts or comments for a while.

Then last week, they told me she had died, that it was on her facebook page. I checked, and it was true. I can't quite express how I felt - shocked, upset, sad, mad at myself that I didn't meet her again... But mostly I felt sadness and a sense of loss. Yes, I know that we hadn't met for years, that we seldom talked. But whenever we did it was always easy, friendly and warm, we always felt connected, our friendship had never died - real friendships are like that, you can be years apart but you pick it up as if those years were but a moment. Above all, I knew she was there, somewhere, smiling and brilliant as always, a joy to the world. And now she isn't. And I wish she was here, or somewhere.

A Journey to the End of the Millennium, by A. B. Yehoshua

An extremely interesting book. I read Mr. Mani a few months ago, and liked it very much, so when I saw this one at a bookstore during my last trip to Israel, I was curious and bought it (I love historical novels). And I was duly rewarded. This is a dense novel, historical because it's set in 999, but actually it could be anytime, since it deal with conscience and timeless moral issues. I think it is, in a way, a very Jewish book, as Mr. Mani was, which is good, since one can learn about other cultures from books - like I learned about Islamic culture from Naguib Mahfouz or Orhan Pamuk's books, for instance. And I like Yehoshua's writing, very elegant and intelligent.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

A very interesting book. At first I didn't like it much, maybe because I read it in a Portuguese translation, and I'm growing to dislike translations, they seem so faulty, I sometimes wonder if translations were better when I was young or if it's just I'm more aware of the faults since I got used to read in English. But then it grew on me as the plot unfold, and I came to like it very much. I like History and historical novels, and the Tudor period is very interesting. I particularly liked the way the Author conveyed great historical changes in a progressive, almost imperceptible way, like things do happen in reality - in this case, the ascension of Cromwell to power and the separation from Rome. I still find it a little hard to understand the long time it took for Henry VIII to have Anne Boleyn - how did he wait years to take her to bed? Historical mysteries, I guess. I'm looking forward to read Bring Up the Bodies, and I think I'll read it in English, then I'll have a notion of how Mantel's writing is really like.

The Last Letter Home, by Vilhelm Moberg

A beautiful ending to the Emigrants saga. Bittersweet, with some very sad scenes, always convincing and real. A true hymn to life, endurance, resourcefulness and change - and a kind of permanence too.

April Witch, by Majgull Axelsson

Another very good Swedish book, about family relationships and the welfare state in Sweden. The characters are extremely believable, and the dreamlike writing intertwines the fantastic in the prosaic in a smooth way that makes the fantasy stuff blend perfectly in the narrative.

A Secret Country, by John Pilger

This book was suggested to me by an Australian friend; he said “This a good book to help you understand this country.” And I did find it extremely interesting, especially after having been there. In a way, it’s a grim reading, and, having spent such a pleasant time sightseeing in Australia, I couldn’t help but having the recurrent thought “so much darkness in Paradise!”. But I think it helps to understand the country, in particular the first chapter in what regards the Australian character and the fourth about its history. The appalling account of the Aborigines’ treatment wasn’t new to me, but it’s always chillingly shocking. The chapters about politics are less interesting, because unfortunately the situation is not much different in the rest of the Western world – what the author mentions in the preface,"What is happening today in Australia is no more than a warning that liberal societies are being returned to passivity, obedience and secrecy and that the subjugation of people's minds and pockets has a new set of managers and a new vocabulary.", can be said of all the Western democracies since the early ‘90s. And I think he lingers too long on the details there, sounding a little obsessed with CIA conspiracies – that are perfectly credible, but the tone comes out a little paranoid.



In short, I think it’s a very interesting reading, especially if one wants to know more about Australia, which is mostly an unknown country to us Europeans.

Titans of History, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

A disappointing book, after having read the excellent Jerusalem biography. It's very superficial, and not only the selection of historical "titans" is sometimes odd (Montefiore seems particularly to revel in the lives of dictators, the more barbarous the better), as the historical appraisal of some of them is extremely questionable, especially the modern ones (like Gandhi, John Paul II or Thatcher, for instance). It's a pleasant reading, but these faults make it often annoying. I think it's more suitable for children, as an introduction to history, like we used to read in the 70s collections of texts in the series "15".

And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

A nice book, about a family in Afghanistan from the late 40s to the present. Well written, it depicts family emotions fairly well, and the sense of loss and lost opportunities and time, but also the resilience and hope in human nature. Some interesting characters and engaging plot, but I would have liked to know more about the relatives who stayed in Afghanistan, and whose experience is just hinted at, instead of the long passage about the Greek doctor, that seems a bit superfluous. But all in all a nice read.

The Settlers, by Vilhelm Moberg

The Settlers is the third book in Moberg's series about a group of Swedish emigrants to America in the 19th century. As the others, it's a beautifully written book, that makes us feel the trials and tribulations of the emigrants in a plentiful but hard and often dangerous land, their courage and tenacity. Karl Oskar, Kristina, Robert, Ulrika, are vivid and believable characters that we feel we come to know and love. I would still like to be able to read it in Swedish... There is still one fourth part, that I hope to read soon.

Missing an old patient

When I met this patient, more than 20 years ago, she was in her middle-forties - a thin, wide-eyed, anxious looking short woman (as any young doctor, eager to make clever diagnoses, I was disappointed to find she didn’t suffer from hyperthyroidism). I came to know her very well and cherish her as one of my best patients: curious and inquisitive, but sensible and capable of understanding – a rare bless to a physician – and extremely responsible and aware of the importance of her behavior to her well-being.

She had several serious problems over the years, and faced them all with tenacity and optimism: always inquiring and trying to understand what was happening, braving her chronic anxiety and doing what it took to get better. And, being unusually careful and compliant with treatments, she kept a fully functioning and active life. Short and thin, with systolic blood pressure seldom above 100, she was actually very resilient.

I got to know her quite well over the years; I liked her cunning of a poorly educated but very clever woman, the way she engaged in patient support groups, her witty and insightful critiques of the medical flaws she shrewdly learned to detect (and over more than 20 years as a renal patient, she had multiple opportunities to come across all kinds of doctors and nurses – and patients, of whom she was equally critical when they were unreasonable, tedious or aggressive), the way she used to spend the long hours on dialysis reading to be better informed and instructed. I witnessed her worries about her daughter’s first boyfriends, later, the joys of becoming a grandmother.

For many years, her deepest frustration was not getting a kidney transplant. She was in fairly good general health and a very compliant patient; apparently the ideal candidate. But she also had a very reactive immune system – allergic rhinitis, several drug allergies, allergic dermatitis – and soon became hypersensitized, which prevented her from receiving a transplant – the cross-match with every donor was positive. She witnessed many of her contemporary patients being transplanted, many more dying, and after a number of years she was one of the few remaining patients of the early nineties. Sensible as always, she eventually resigned herself to a life on dialysis, and philosophically concluded that maybe it was for the better, since after all she didn’t do that bad (she was one of the few patients that never forgot how hemodialysis got better over the years). She kept going to the pre-transplant appointments out of habit, though.

Then, shortly after the pre-transplant appointment that we agreed would be the last – she had turned 69 and, although doing still relatively well, the risks of transplantation were becoming greater than the potential benefits – she unexpectedly got a call: there was a compatible donor. And she took the no longer expected opportunity; I heard the news a few days later and was sincerely happy for her – if anyone deserved a successful transplant, it certainly was her.

The first week went rather smoothly – the kidney worked, she was finally off-dialysis. But then, the heavy immune suppression used in hypersensitized patients took its toll, and she caught pneumonia. As it often happens, the combination of a hospital germ and the effects of age, chronic illness and immune suppression soon led to a downward spiral: worsening clinical condition, ICU, mechanical ventilation, acute kidney injury, multiorgan failure and ultimately death.

It made me feel so sad. What if that call had never come? What if we had given up on transplant 1 year earlier? Maybe she could have enjoyed another 5 or 10 years, who knows. Then, maybe things could have turned out well with the transplant (I actually had another patient with a very similar case that has been living with her transplant for more than 5 years now and doing well), and she had never quite given up the dream of leaving dialysis. Yes, I know we can never know for sure. But it is sad anyway, and today, doing the round in the dialysis room at the time when she used to be here, I missed her.