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Musings: “We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia” : Future-Proofing The News

         

 

The Monster Kid tells me he is writing a dystopian alternate history, beginning in 2012, where there is perpetual war.  “You know, like in the book where we have always been at war with Eastasia but then they change the news.”

In case you aren’t familiar with it, this is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, in which the main character works in the “Ministry of Truth,” destroying or rewriting past news that doesn’t reflect the current reality the government wants people to buy into (in this case, an ongoing war with Eurasia ends and a new one with Eastasia begins, and history has to be rewritten to erase the war with Eurasia). Creepy, but in a fictional way, right?

Reality is so much worse. In M.T. Anderson’s YA biography of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, Anderson has to return to the reader again and again, to explain that there is no good way to untangle the contradictions in the stories about Shostakovich’s life, even the ones he told himself, because of the contortions the truth had to go through to be acceptable to the Stalinist regime and prevent him from suffering a truly horrific ending. Reading this, I realized that 1984 is a pale shadow of the reality of repression and brutality under the Soviet regime and its effects on the arts, literature, and the press, especially under Stalin (and that doesn’t even begin to cover the horrors of the siege of Leningrad). I can’t recommend this book highly enough– it’s an outstanding, if horrific, book for both older teens and adults.

In The Infernal Library, Daniel Kalder asserts that dictators have not only repressed the press and the arts,  in some places they even managed to completely erase history. Many of the little provinces and countries that were drawn in to the U.S.S.R. at the beginning of the 20th century had a limited number of literate people, and when the U.S.S.R. dissolved, the president of Turkmenistan completely invented a history and religion for his country, complete with his own cult of personality, and with no press and few additional books available for comparison (I don’t recommend this one for purchase, but the chapters on dictator literature from some of the lesser-known dictators are fascinating, so see if your library has it. Did you know Saddam Hussein wrote romance novels?)

So how can we keep this erasure and rewriting of history from happening, especially in our era of  “fake news”? Honestly, it’s pretty hard to do. History usually gets written by the winners, and, just like in 1984, it’s not that difficult to destroy and rewrite the version you want, or to make it impossible to report on anything that could make you look bad.  In Future-Proofing the News: Preserving the First Draft of History, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul report that even when nobody is deliberately trying to prevent the news from being accurately reported, time and environmental conditions can destroy it.  Many of the formats news has been recorded were ephemeral or are now obsolete. Newspapers and magnetic tapes get brittle, hyperlinks break, devices used to record and play back break down. And there is such a quantity of news that many places are unable to store it or make it accessible. Just as a concerted effort needs to be made to repress the press, concerted efforts need to be made to save the news of the past for the present and future. If you are a historian, journalist, archivist, librarian, or otherwise interested citizen, this is worth reading.

We can’t guarantee that primary sources will always be accurate in their reporting. Both in the past and present there have been a multiplicity of sources and points of view, although I’d say that’s truer today than ever before. But sometimes there is only fear shaping the reported facts, as was the case under Stalin, or there is nothing there at all, as in Turkmenistan, and that is terrifying. The free press is not an enemy: it is essential to keeping civic discourse, the arts and literature, and democracy, alive. When you vote tomorrow, keep that in mind.

 

And please, do vote. Regardless of what you think, your vote matters.

 

Posted on November 6, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: The Crate: A Story of War, A Murder, And Justice by Deborah Vadas Levison

The Crate: A Story Of War, A Murder, And Justice by Deborah Vadas Levison

Wild Blue Press, 2018

ISBN-13:978-1947290693

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Two survivors of the Holocaust. A vicious murder.  A family navigating the ordeals depicted with brutal detail, and yet, with heart.

There are true crime stories and then there are books that delve so much deeper that they embed themselves under the skin and burrow into the psyche. The Crate is the latter: there are terrors between the covers.

Levison may be new to the writing world, but she has been at it for years as a journalist, which shows in prose that’s cut clean and yet conversational in tone.

The story concerns events in her own life. Her parents, Holocaust survivors who have built up successful, happy lives, purchased a house on a lake in Canada; a beautiful, serene getaway from the craziness of the big city. Debbie and her brother enjoy their years at the house, despite anti-semitic acts by their schoolmates. Once grown, the siblings bring their own children, allowing them to enjoy their escape without suffering the pain former generations have endured.

Their idyll doesn’t last. One day Debbie receives a call from her brother, who tells her that a body has been found underneath the house, hidden in a wooden crate. Immediately, their sanctuary is shattered. Police and media descend on the lake town and family, thrusting everything and everyone into chaos, and suspicion.

What ensues tests the resolve and mettle of the Vadas clan, as the investigation whirls and dives deep into the lives of those close to them. Levison transports the reader back to Nazi-era Hungary, where her parents relive the darkest parts of their lives. In doing so, she fortifies their characters and gives heft to a true crime story that could have been another run-of-the-mill documentary. The emotions Levison brings to the table scaffold the stories, both past and present, ratcheting the fear up to new levels, in both timelines, as the family struggles to cope with the new reality the crate has thrust upon them.

The payoff here isn’t who killed the victim and left the crate– it’s the entire package, constructed slowly but with precision that will leave most readers changed. Highly recommended for readers of true crime and Holocaust-related stories.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

 

Posted on August 23, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

Pegasus Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1681777528

Available: Hardcover, used paperback, Kindle edition,

 

We know Mary Shelley as the daughter of revolutionary writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and muse and wife to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who as a teenage girl who wrote Frankenstein, but beyond the anecdote of the challenge to write a ghost story issued one night at the Villa Diodati. But we don’t really KNOW her, beyond the facts of her life.  Somehow, her own life and thoughts have been passed over in favor of her companions, and we have been mostly left with the myth of Frankenstein’s creation, and the many permutations of her novel that have capitalized on it.

In this biography, Fiona Sampson aims to capture the “real” Mary, through her letters, journals, and publications, those of her friends, family, and colleagues, and recreating the context of the time she lived in and how that affected her, from the reading she chose, to the effects of changing climate and the development of electricity.  During the short time she was with Shelley, Mary was pregnant five times. Three of her children died at a young age, and she miscarried a fourth. During the same time period, her half-sister Fanny and Percy’s legitimate wife Harriet both committed suicide.  Intense and intellectual to begin with, Mary dealt with difficult emotions like grief and guilt as well as physical problems while still taking responsibility for the mercurial Shelley’s welfare, and completing and publishing a book. These are the facts of Mary’s life with Shelley, but Mary’s life did not end when Shelley’s did– and throughout her life, she was a survivor. Sampson has taken an unusual and effective approach to her subject, taking a “close-up” of who Mary Shelley was and how she became that person, a young woman who, surrounded by great men, “forced open the space for herself in which to write” and because of that, was later able to establish a literary life of her own.

While not a complete look at the Shelleys and their friends and family, the zoom-in focus on Mary Shelley makes this a worthwhile, and fascinating read. Recommended for adult library collections

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on August 22, 2018 by , Reply
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