Reading

I have given up, for the time being, on reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. I have, in short, let it go. The one thing I was trying to figure out, after a hundred pages or so, is Why in the world did they give this guy the Nobel Prize for literature? I mean, come on! Did they have too many brandies that evening? For one thing, it’s boring. I reckon that after 100 pages, a story should have sufficiently engaged the reader to the point where he would want to continue on, to find out where the story is going. But in this case, it was more like What story? This work was billed as a “dystopian novel”. Okay. For me, the first requirement of a dystopia is to convince the reader of the likelihood of said dystopia. The story here, however, hinges on a school where children are being groomed, ultimately, for harvest of their organs. What seems apparent to me is that most folks are aware that organs will soon be produced in the laboratory, through cloning and so on. In other words, the dystopian premise does not convince. One wonders as well why organs would not have been procured in the already existing manner. Perhaps some sort of sociological or societal statement was intended—but that would be just a guess, as the narrative itself gives no clue of this.

So I have begun to read instead Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in Indonesian.  This is an interesting exercise in language, to see how Hemingway’s spare but fully loaded prose is translated into the Indonesian language.

At the same time, I am reading, in English, a book called The Experience of God, by David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox Christian philosopher/theologian. Hart is superbly well versed in the whole tradition of philosophy, from antiquity to the present, as well as, of course, in the religious traditions he is addressing, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. It is an incredibly dense, meticulously composed exploration of what is meant by the word “God”, to be compared not with accessible "religious”, inspirational treatments, or even with the common sorts of Biblical exegeses, but more with the nearly impenetrable intellectual mazes of Aristotle or Plato or Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, or even Kierkegaard. This sort of stuff is, to me, like rich dark chocolate, which must be savored slowly in order to be fully appreciated. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea by any means. You’ve got to be a little bit odd to begin with.  And I guess I tick that box. I think, in any case, that I will never again argue religion with anyone unless they’ve read Hart—which they will not have done, and will not want to. But that’s okay, because religious arguments never turn out well anyway. But religious experience? Well, that’s another subject altogether—or rather, an experience, and thus not very subject to being a subjectJ