Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

 

Esther Perel belongs to a world of cultural rafinement and relationship knowledge hard to replicate. I´m following her on various social media channels, I receive her newsletter and I will always think about her wise advice. 

Wise doesn´t mean conform though, as the recommendations she shared to the couples portrayed in Mating in Captivity - the 20-year edition, I had access to in the audiobook format, read by the author herself - demonstrate. It shows the power and the limits of the therapist, as well as the freedom that we may not be aware of that we own in overcoming our own limitations while expanding and honestly acknowledging our desires and uniqueness. 

I think this is a book not only every couple should read and discuss about, but also people looking for a meaningful relationship or at least for understanding why some relationships are simply not worth believing in. 

Relationships are always very hard work, and what we don´t see behind the smiles of a happy couple it´s a lot of work, on yourself, on your own values and personal and couple aims. Sometimes it´s impossible to overcome the differences - hence the need of a couple therapist - sometimes we are too selfish to look deep into the other person needs. But it´s always worth trying a bit more. 

Mating in Captivity may answer many questions but will also let yourself search for the honest answers.

Rating: 5 stars

Heute ist Mittwoch by David Albahari, translated into German by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann

One of the biggest downsizes of my many literary intersts is that I often ignore the literary realms that used to mean so much to me long time ago. Authors from the Balkans is one of them, alongside with Hungarian authors.

But, step by step, this year I am trying to correct these omissions, aware nevertheless of the amount of literary information I have to catch up - while nurturning my relatively easy interests. 

My latest read - that happened earlier this July - was a short read by David Albahari, Heute ist Mittwoch - Today is Wednesday in my unrelated English translation - translated into German by the duo Mirjana and Klaus Wittman, who are translating from Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian into German. 

Wednesday is the day when the son is taking his ailing father to the checkup for Parkinson´s disease. Once an influencial member of the Yugoslav local administration, a dictator at home, the father is facing his mortality. It is a nostalgic and slow read, with a human perspective, and a philosophical take. It is nothing to like or don´t about this book, it has such a relatable human touch. 

I´ve read somewhere that for Albahari, who died three years ago, the family was the starting and ending point of understanding a society. I haven´t read anything by him - but would love to - and this take is clear in this short book as well. I may agree with it, especially when it comes to social and political interferences, although in other realms, this may not be necessarily true. 

I am having for a very long time a high interest in understanding at what extent we cannot escape the social and political causality, in democratic and non-democratic societies and I am not ready yet to provide a straightforward answer. Books like Heute ist Mittwoch helped me to advance my thoughts about it though.

Rating: 3.5 stars 

Random Things Tours: For Best Results Follow Instructions by Alastair Puddick

 

My friends and sometimes I too, we use a lot AI for daily decisions lately: when to buy, what to buy, is your life experience matching the job you want to apply, what colours are in fashion this season, where to spend vacations, what to do while on vacation...you name it. It feels safe and predictable having AI on your side, saving you from the trials and errors of late times. 

I am not a frequent reader of science fiction, but our times require a different literary approach. I´ve recently read that most of the AI minds nowadays do love science fiction, hence the futuristic take of our daily lives. Hence, my decision to also delve a bit more into the ambiance of this genre. 

For Best Results Follow Instructions by Alastair Puddick, an author I had the chance to introduce to my readers before, offered me a wise combination of thriller and AI excitement, against a philosophical background. 

Tom signs up for a AI Life coach that may help him have an easier life, as the artificial intelligence may take the most important decisions for him. It may be easy, indeed, and taking decisions doesn´t always come smoothly. But what defines us as humans better than our capacity - free will, some may say - to take decisions? In Tom´s case, the situations gets a bit more complicated, as it seems that the AI solution he was so much endeared to may actually act against his very interests.

I´ve got lost in the thoughts about a trend that I signed to willingly and by intellectual laziness. I loved how this book - through thrilling action and humour - may gently remind us about our human conditions, limited, indeed, but still operating within parameters of freedom. Unless, we willingly decide to limit our freedom. 

A recommended book if you are looking to think about AI and its consequences from a literary perspective.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own

Honey by Imani Thompson

That women can kill for fun, due to boredom or as a revenge, or all at once, it is no scientific wonder. Women can be as good or as bad as the male counter-parts and there is no need of feminist revolution or revelation to acknowledge that. But...it doesn´t mean that one gender or the other is supposed to enjoy a priviledge to kill. In real or literary life. Or that just killing is enough to make life more enjoyable.

Yrsa, the main character of Honey, the debut roman by Imani Thompson everyone is talking about, is initially starting to kill men for the sake of testing her PhD premises. She is a young Black woman, from a middle class family, studying to Cambridge, enjoying brunch with her girlfriends, no pressure to work menial jobs. Some of the men she is killing are exes, men who disappointed her or someone else, random dates. 

As an avid crime reader I would have expected some extra details about really preparing the crimes, and how she fails by being considered a main suspect. The writing flows, with some ideological intersectional snippets I may happen to feel where they are leading, but which I refuse to accept, from a simple non-ideological point of view.  Three years and I am sick to my stomach to digest the idea of ´those who we think are oppressors, are the legitimate tarket of individual violence´. IYKYK.

Seven years ago I´ve read My Sister, the Serial Killer and loved it for the sake of the story, without any ideological embellishments. This is how I love my fiction. 

PS: The cover is from the German edition of the book, and although I´ve read the book in the original English, I couldn´t resist to use this deliciously decadent image. 

Rating: 2.5 stars

My First Book in Portuguese!

Since several years I promised myself to finally advance my Portuguese, this year really happened. This time, I was not only watching some random movie or playing some random Duolingo or eventually advancing my pronunciation via Rosetta Stone, but I´ve succeed reading a book - with the help of a dictionary. 

My random choice - completely random, from a local library - was a very short book by a very prolific author and comedian, Ricardo Artur de Araújo Pereira featuring some random thoughts and anecdotic encounters happening during the pandemic. 

Ideias concretas sobre vagas - which I clumsily translate as Concrete ideas about job openings - is a collection of short chapters with or without a character, with a bit of humour, unequal in the degree of novelty. From my point of view, it was important to be able to read is step-by-step, trying to understand the context and sometimes translating word by word. 

One of the lessons learned from reading this book, from the perspective of language learning, was for the beginning - A2 to B1 - to rather focus on short stories, nonfiction, allowing to understand the short installments, instead of aspiring to read novels without properly following the plot. The relative success with this book encouraged me to continue with the reading, although I still have a lot to improve - the grammar, vocabulary and first and foremost the pronunciation - which right now is horrible, a combination of falsely accented Spanish and Italian intonation; but promise to improve it somehow...

In any case, I can only be proud of myself that this year, I finally kept my promises in terms of language improvement. With few more months from this year left, I can only wish myself to continue with my consistent progress. 

Récits de certains faits by Yasmina Reza

 

I love reading essays because this art of nonfiction is rooted in the literary life of the authors as well. And if those essays to have some drops of true crime, count me in for a long read. 

French playwriter, novelist and actress Yasmina Reza spent time in courts across France, assisting to trials of convincted murderers. With precision and high attention to detail, she focused on the human aspects of the crimes - well, the crimes always involve a human aspect, but in this case it dealt with the deep psychology of the stories - such as the relationships between the victim and criminal, as well as the tremendous role of childhood trauma. 

Récit de certains faits by Yasmina Reza - which I´ve read in the German translation, Die Rücksteite des Lebens, translated from French by Claudia Hamm - is partially an account of those experiences. The rest includes personal stories, memories from Venice, literary encounters. 

Clearly, the crime-related part was the most interesting, in terms of writing and intensity of the story and thereafter thoughts - how prevalent is the evil ? (as in ´evil doing´), how one can explain it? - , but the other accounts do have their own merits as well. 

Personally, I find the idea of taking part to murder trials, and trials in general, very appealing, and as I am writing, I already think about what possibilities are available for outside audience to attend such meetings - given the very strict German personal data protection laws. 

This short collection is a very interesting intimate exploration of human psyche, but don´t expect anything ´mild´ and ´sweet´ about it, but a lot of darkness.

Rating: 3.5 stars 

Astronaut! by Oana Aristide

It is hard to evaluate the amount of trauma one may get while growing up in a dictatorship. Of how getting used to live with fear as the only way of life perverts your self-awareness and trust in the others. How vicious are the lies for a normal mental and moral development. I want to stop now the amount of thoughts overwhelming me when thinking about this topic. With more books based in communist Romania, I may have the chance to talk about it on other occasions.

I better talk more about Astronaut!, the second novel by Oana Aristide instead. Lia is a 8-year old curious girl who loves colours. She notices how colours, including colouring pencils, are disappearing from her world. She is careless with what she talks with people, creating a lot of troubles for her parents. 

It is late 1980s, when the scarcity and repression of the Romanian dictatorship was doubled by a paranoid panic of the repression apparatchiks. Who are not tasked with a special mission: finding the criminal(s) killing various Securitate - communist ´intelligence´ apparatus - informers. Or maybe was rather a bear, or many of them at a killing spree?

Constantin, a policeman who loves stories - to write and read to his son - seems to be apparently untainted by the last jump of patriotic wave, observing the corruption of his co-workers and the kafkaesque bear-hunting. Lia and Constantin may be an unlikely anti-hero characters match, but in a world where people are running from one cue to another unable to figure out what is delivered that time, normality shall be re-defined.

Aristide´s take on the storyline and characters is full of empathic humour, successfully defying the need to lecture or complain. For a long time I felt that the Romanian dictatorship is rarely the pretexte of stories written in English while the Romanian writers are rather focused on the post-communist trauma. Astronaut! showed me that this shift is changing and cannot wait to read and review more such novels.

Rating: 4.5 stars