Sunday Books & Culture

This week’s reviews include 'The Bee Sting' and 'What’s Cooking in the Kremlin.' Also in this issue - Martin Davis makes the case for reading.

THE BEE STING 

by Paul Murray

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 15, 2023)

Hardcover $21.70
Kindle $14.99

Reviewed by Drew Gallagher

Today, November 26, the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize will be announced. The Booker prize is awarded to the best long-form work of fiction written in English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland in the prior year. Historically, I am dreadful at picking awards for literary works. I once predicted the winner of the Booker Prize after the winner had been announced. And I still got it wrong! (In my shallow defense, it was pre-internet so the winner was not simply a mouse click away.)

There were six novels short-listed for the prize this year, and I have read only one. Regardless, I am telling you to run to your nearest online gambling site and put a few of your hard-earned dollars on The Bee Sting by Paul Murray at odds of 7 to 1. Perhaps the Booker Prize judges are obligated to consider the entirety of a book, but if the Prize were based upon endings alone, then The Bee Sting would be the surest bet in the history of literary fiction. It is quite possibly the greatest ending of a novel I have ever read and quite possibly the worst ending I have ever read. If I had been with the author in a pub when I finished the book, I would have bought him a pint of Guinness, hugged him as my brother with tears in my eyes, and then shattered my pint glass over his head … after it was empty of course.

The novel is set in rural Ireland and centered around the Barnes family. The story is told from the perspective of the father, Dickie; the mother, Imelda; teenage daughter Cass; and younger brother, PJ. The way Murray weaves their individual stories into the greater fabric of the family is a brilliant means of presentation. They hate each other on some days, as only families can, and love each other a bit on other days, as only families can. The temptation is to say they are Irish, but their story is both interesting and mundane in a universal way. How nice it would be for Murray to shine a little light into our own world and pluck out the interesting parts. Then again, maybe not.

On the surface, the Barnes family is upper middle class, with the town and the occasional visit to Dublin as their oyster. Imelda is beautiful with a never-ending bank account to accentuate her admirable attributes as she strives to distance herself from her humble upbringing. Dickie, seemingly, just wants to make her happy and also wants his children to be as happy as they once were when they would play in the woods that buffer their estate. This tale, however, is set in Ireland, so happiness is only a fleeting distraction. Tragedy has visited both Imelda and Dickie and is in fact what has bound them together.

Ah, but the Irish certainly know more than melancholy, and Murray imbues this expansive novel with as much humor as sadness. Poor PJ is trying to figure out how to pay off a bully who feels that his mother was wronged by the auto repair shop that Dickie runs. In desperation, PJ remembers a prayer medal he once received from Imelda’s fortune-telling Aunt Rose. Unfortunately for PJ, he has lost the prayer sheet that came with the medal and tries to Google the prayer.

“It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.”

Many of my friends, as they’ve grown older, refuse to read Irish novels because they simply make them sad. One friend has sworn off all Irish-themed art entirely after watching The Banshees of Inisherin as an inflight movie (any airline movies with donkeys should only consist of said donkey kicking footballs and not kicking the bucket).  The Bee Sting would likely cement their stance against all Irish fiction, but the wonders that reside in these pages are not to be missed. Book it, even if the Booker Prize judges do not.    

Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second-most-prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 136-year history of the Free Lance-Star Newspaper. He aspires to be the second-most-prolific book reviewer in the history of FXBG Advance.        

WHAT’S COOKING IN THE KREMLIN: From Rasputin to Putin, how Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork

by Witold Szablowski

Published by Penguin Books (November 7, 2023)

Paperback $18.00
Kindle $12.99

Reviewed by Penny A Parrish  

Did you know that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was a cook?  Whether he prepared meals for Russia’s elite or had a more mundane job is open to speculation (and propaganda).  But it is one of the many stories in this fascinating book.  The writer is a Polish journalist who has won several awards.  He began researching this book before the war with Ukraine, and visited sights he would not be able to access now.  

We meet several cooks, each highlighting how food has always been more than sustenance for Russia.  It has also been used for propaganda, power and to defeat the enemy.  Ivan Kharitonov was a cook for the last tsar, Nicholas II.  When the tsar was removed from power, Ivan followed the family from place to place, trying to find food to feed them after the Bolsheviks cut off rations.  Ivan was delighted one day to find 50 eggs in his kitchen.  But that day he and the entire Romanov family were executed.  The eggs went to local peasants who dug the graves.

In 1932 and 1933, Stalin starved more than six million Ukrainians to death.  The author finds two women, then in their 90s, who survived those horrific days.  We learn how they ate mold, tree bark, and dead animals if they could find them.  The book contains a recipe for soup made of pine needles, bark, and cones which Ukrainian students made and served in 2019 to remind the world about that famine.  

One chapter deals with scientists who worked on the first space missions.  The early missions used dogs – hundreds of them.  The scientists found that mongrels fared better than purebred dogs and set out to capture hundreds of strays roaming about.  The most famous dog, of course, is Laika.  We learn that her automatic feeder in space contained poison so that she would not suffer when the capsule overheated at the end.

Many women were forced to cook after Chernobyl to feed workers who had to clean up the nuclear disaster.  Geiger counters buzzed as the women were exposed to radiation levels that proved fatal to many of them.  But they continued to make their kitchens and dining rooms festive places for those who needed food.  The government even sent musicians to entertain everyone.  Only later did the cooks find out that the performers were forced to perform.  Later, those in the clean up crews got extra pension money.  The cooks we meet – Olga, Valentina, Raya, and Luba - did not.

Readers will learn what the famous – Stalin, Khrushchev, Lenin, Gorbachev – liked to eat and what their cooks prepared.  Some enjoyed feasts, others simple peasant food.  The menu from the final supper prepared before the breakup of the USSR is detailed.  Richard Nixon makes an appearance.  Some chapters were a delight to read (often the characters had imbibed some vodka).  Others were heartbreaking.  

As we pick at our turkey and pie after the Thanksgiving holiday, these stories remind us of the power of food.  Szablowski writes with emotion, sensitivity, humor, and insight.  It is one of the best books I have read this year.  

Penny A Parrish is a long-time book reviewer and artist. Learn more about her by visiting her page at Brush Strokes Gallery, which is in downtown Fredericksburg.

Why Reading Matters 

by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

A sampling of the books I've read this year - baseball, Asia, history, and poetry are always on my list.

“Just give me the facts, and I’ll decide for myself the truth.”

Talk about journalism with people, and it won’t be long before you hear some version of the above-said ideal. We want the where who, what, where, when, and why - not the how or how come. This type of reporting - the Five Ws - has been anointed both inside and outside the profession as the ideal of what journalism should be. “Objective.”

It is true that over the past 60 years, objective journalism has been sharing more and more time with “contextualized” journalism - pieces that provide the Five Ws as well as the hows and the whys that define the story. Research by Katharine Fink and Michael Schudson shows that the growth of contextualized news began in the 1950s, and by 2001 had become as popular as just-the-facts journalism.

Straight journalism sans interpretation hasn’t been killed. Objective journalism still accounts for about half of news stories in major publications. And organizations such as the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters, and MarketWatch are recognized and celebrated for their objective reporting.

Rather, the need for contextualized reporting has increased over the past 70 years.

A More Complicated Place

It is not cliche to observe that the world has become an increasingly more difficult place to understand. Polymaths - individuals who excel in numerous areas of scholarship and research - are less common today than they were a century and more ago.

The reason why boils down to the speed with which information is being generated.

Both scientific invention and academic research have grown exponentially every decade since the 1940s. And with the advent of the internet, the demands on us to keep up with it have accelerated.

As the flow of basic information has grown, we have become mass consumers of facts and factoids.

In so becoming, however, we’ve lost something vital. Wisdom.

Isaac Asimov realized this decades earlier when he observed: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

As late as the mid-20th century, polymaths - though increasingly rare - were not unheard of. It was possible to master several fields in one’s lifetime and speak authoritatively on each.

That has become nearly impossible today. And the result is we have become a people consumed with processing information, not mastering it and growing wisdom as a result.

Contextualized journalism aims to apply wisdom to the overly complicated world that we live in. Reporters who’ve spent their careers enmeshed in one or two areas of reporting have the knowledge and the experience to not simply report what’s happening, but to help us understand why.

In the right hands, this type of journalism moves our discussions and understanding of the world around us, forward. (See the writings of George Will, E.J. Dionne, Thomas Friedman, and Glenn C. Loury nationally. Here in Virginia, read Dwayne Yancey and Michael Paul Williams.)

Unfortunately, our understanding of the relationship between objective journalism and contextual journalism is being lost. Today, people are as likely to revere Will and Dionne, Friedman and Loury, as they are to brand them “just opinion writers” with “bias.”

They reason why we’ve lost this distinction? I would point to one reality …

… people no longer read.

Our Reading Problem

The national survey data on Americans’ reading habits is unambiguous. Gallup is recording the sharpest decline in reading in its history.

Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.

The news from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is no better.

As of 2017, Americans spent an average of almost 17 minutes per day reading for personal interest (as compared to almost three hours watching television and 28 minutes playing games and using computers for leisure). The average is down about five minutes since 2003.

And that’s the average number. A survey by WordsRated reveals that roughly half of Americans have read no books in the past year.

I routinely ask students at both the K-12 level and the university level what they read, and who they read. Far too often, not a single hand is raised to answer the question. Asked more bluntly, how many of you read a reliable news source, or read a book other than what is required for your coursework, and the response rate is no better.

Before blaming “those kids,” however, remember who they learned their lack of respect for reading from - their parents and other adults.

Ask a coworker or neighbor what book they’re currently reading, and my experience is that people often struggle to come up with an answer.

There are many reasons we don’t read as much as we once did. Reading takes time, for example, and many of us are time-pinched.

Legitimate or not, however, our collective lack of reading is harming us.

We are drowning in facts, with no mental framework to understand the data we’ve become enslaved to. And that is having a deleterious impact on our democracy. (For more on this, read the Executive Summary of the Reading at Risk report put together by the National Endowment of the Arts.)

Of Books and Ballots

Democracy is messy and complex. To act effectively requires an ability to hear from a range of opinions and views and learn to work collaboratively. Reading, deep reading in particular, is what prepares us for this reality.

Memes may well capture how we feel, but books and books alone force us to wrestle with all sides of an in issue in-depth, and then spark the debates that move us forward.

Without deep reading, our public arguments become a vicious game of Trivial Pursuit, with opposing sides swapping one set of “facts” for another. The underlying issues and dynamics, however, continue to tear at the fabric of our communities, because “facts” are superficial. They alone can’t move us to deeper understanding.

Consider our recent elections.

In Spotsylvania County, flipping the School Board may bring a temporary end to the talk of book-banning, but it won’t put an end to the fears and concerns many parents and students in Spotsylvania, as well as throughout our region, feel about the books that are available in public schools.

The debate itself is worth having — it’s one we should always be having. There’s a lot of gray between banning whatever a small group of people want banned and placing anything and everything on the shelves.

The debate, however, has to be a serious one.

In Spotsylvania County, the debate was unserious from the beginning.

“Pornography,” as defined by the critics of school library books, would have meant the ultimate removal of most anything of value from library shelves. Chaucer? Shakespeare? Morrison? Ellison? Catullus? Frost? Hardly a writer of note could survive the eyes of parents who find lasciviousness wherever they look.

Now that those voices are powerless, however, what happens to the broader debate about how we choose what goes into the library? And how do we respect the wishes of those who wish to limit access to certain materials? It’s something that deserves a spirited debate, and workable solutions.

As disturbing as the book banning debate has been, however, what has been more disturbing has been the absence of a full-throated defense of literature’s value and the importance of broad reading in education.

Will we get that debate? Are we as a society even capable of making that argument?

Given the decline of reading and the lack of respect for its value, we’d better.

Then there is the issue of fake sample ballots. As one individual passing out blatantly false information at the polls on Nov. 7 told me when I pointed out that they were misleading voters by saying Republicans and Democrats were endorsing candidates they objectively had not, his response was startling.

“It doesn’t matter.”

The people on these misleading sample ballots, he said, were “running for office.” The parties are endorsing candidates. So we can say what we want.

Syllogisms were never my strong suit, but even I can detect the fallacy in that line of thinking. If Candidate A is on the ballot. And Party B is endorsing candidates. Then B must have endorsed A.

Only in the worlds and minds of the culturally and functionally illiterate. And increasingly it’s the culturally and functionally illiterate who are driving our debates.

We see it in the push for single-issue elections, the rampant misinformation spread at polls, and the unwillingness, or inability, of candidates to move off talking points and actually have a discussion when they are in the public square.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 don’t happen anymore. And given our poor state of literacy, there’s an argument to be made that we’re incapable of having such a debate any longer.

Literacy Matters

The lack of civility we see in our region; the anger, and the politics of personal grievance, are all symptoms of a greater ill.

The decline of literacy.

Reading books won’t solve our problems. Reading books will, however, teach us to be still and listen to the complexities of the world that we live in, and bring wisdom to the problems we face. It will force us to demand more of those who run for office.

Most important, reading deeply will teach us that the quest for definitive answers is a fool’s errand. That it’s the questions that we ask, and the conversations we have, that truly matter.

When we close a book and move on to another, we realize that the problems themselves will continue. Definitive answers will not emerge.

And when we come to see that, we appreciate our need to continually sharpen and refine our ability to reason together with wisdom.

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-Martin Davis, Editor