Jinn of Quality and Risk

At the end of February, I tried, and failed, to read Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children — which I found extremely boring, mainly because it was written in a dull, pompous style.

I then read Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, which surprised me in being a 21st-century apology for communism in the guise of hyper-metaphorical condemnations of fascism (plus some vivid tales of horror). Communism is systematically presented by McEwan as a great vision, the fountain of progress, especially suitable for rational people (while irrational mystics should and do retreat from the world). Thus when the Berlin Wall falls, the reader is presented with an icon of idealism and courage in the form of a young lone man waving a large red flag at Checkpoint Charlie — and the ones assaulting him are of course racist proto-fascists, because of course no one else could be opposed to communism, right? How anyone can still write such apologies for an ideology that has directly led to the murder of tens of millions of innocents in the 20th century is beyond comprehension. And how such a writer still uses the old trick of equivocating between being opposed to communism and being a fascist is a marvel of dishonesty. But words have clear meaning. Fascism is, by definition, a form of socialism, i.e. state-control of the means of production and the denial of individual freedom. Communism is a totalitarian form of statism, i.e. the systematic negation of private property and individual rights. Both communism and fascism are evil recipes for collectivist oppression and mass-murder. Any sane person with a modicum of interest in and knowledge of history, economics, and politics can easily see why these ideologies are thoroughly evil and both should be opposed.

Next, I read half of Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'enfant du sable which turned out to be as self-referentially boring and pompous as Rushdie's book. I have no tolerance for this type of writing, where the storyteller is addressing an audience and plays game with them (and tortures the reader) while telling stories about other storytellers and their stories and their audiences, et caetera ad nauseam. In this book's case it gets even worse when the "hero" reportedly does it in a private journal and in letters sent to an unknown correspondent! The author offers no plot, no particular characterization, no theme; further he adopts a laborious, self-referential style, filled with flowery language, as if telling obfuscatory stories about people who are telling dull stories of imaginary sources of someone's mystic fate were a form of art. Far from fuel for the soul, such text is shifting sands for the mind.