Tag: Ian McEwan

What We Can’t Know

Mark Davis2 Comments

I’ve been wandering in cities, unlocking the secrets of metros, funiculars, tipping expectations, museums, and ride-sharing services in languages that, despite several years of study, I know will never reveal the finer brocades and stitches of cultural subtleties reserved for the natives. The gestalt that lingers over Portugal and now Barcelona (Malta soon enough) is of palimpsests in crush and stone, accumulated over the centuries in a barely-controlled layering. There is an incompleteness to the spaces where boarded facades in gothic quarter alleyways carry neat signs promising renovations beside “Free Palestine” graffiti arcing imperfectly above the work of an artist with a careful touch. Banksy has imitators and challengers. I blended into a crowd this morning surrounding and cheering a socialist politician demanding support for “pensionistes” due to some meticulous failure of the current regime.

Maybe.

There is all this that I can’t know with any precision. Foggy barriers of time, space, language, culture, and even pulsing jet lag keep me from having the instant recognitions of motives and the occasional capacity to irony and winking humor that I drift along with in American culture.

I travel very light these days (“Eu sou minimalista” as I constructed and then confirmed via Google Translate) with just a 16 liter sling bag. Three shirts, three underwear, three pair socks, one pair pants…Everything in merino wool except the pants, which are in capable technical materials. I have a charger bag and a small toiletries kit. I have my phone and an iPad Pro with keyboard. I do laundry in my bathroom sink every other day or so, rolling clothes in my bath towel and then hanging to dry overnight.

And on those devices I just finished Ian McEwan’s newest novel, What We Can Know, read on planes and trains, at cafe tables, and in the crepuscular uncertainty before I am forced into the night for dinner.… Read the rest

Novelty and the Novel

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stillsuitMy 14-year-old is obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune right now, marveling over the complexity and otherworldly ornamentation that Herbert imbued in his strange hyper-future (or past maybe, who knows). Dune might read as an allegory about Middle Eastern oil or about psychotropic drugs or nothing at all, but regardless of any deeper layers in its palimpsest,  it is so surprising to a first reader—especially a young one—that it still has the power to fuel daydreams (I obsessed over building a stillsuit at my son’s age, imagining being able to spend days in the harsh New Mexico summer without the need for water).

So it may be surprising that I found myself agreeing with Ian McEwan in The New Republic where he calls into doubt the validity of fiction, though ultimately he rediscovers his love of fiction in Nabakov’s “Caress [of the] divine details” and in John Updike’s controlled descriptions. He comes back again to fiction but not at the expense of wanting nonfiction that brings him new ideas. We are information harvesting machines and the novelty generation rate of nonfiction (there is always the history you do not know much less the cosmology you can’t understand) is just much greater than that of fiction.

But perhaps there is a détente in the middle where fiction and nonfiction commingle. The historical novel is perhaps the best example. The only fear being that the history is too much bent to the requirements of drama and conflict to be at all accurate. Likewise, there might be modern hard science fiction that provides an accurate and deep glimpse into the hermeneutics of real scientific research, and possible scientific futures. Then, at least, there is information beyond the craft of writing embedded within them.… Read the rest