October - December 2018: Tradition and Change

Welcome to Tradition and Change



One thing we can rely on is change. While we may be so busy with the changes in our own lives that we don't notice change happening in the world around us, be it religious, political, cultural, scientific, societal, environmental or anything else you can think of, changes is out there.

Sometimes change is messy. It's not always for the good. It many be so incremental that at first few pick up on it. It may come from the top down, or filter up in populist or revolutionary movements.

There are those who oppose particular changes; some with valid reasons, others for beliefs rooted in tradition and sometimes superstition.

Writers hold a central place in all this. They have often been the ones to first articulate new ideas and their books have then become instrumental in generating or reflecting change. Many have suffered for setting down their ideas, others have been feted.

Change and tradition are what this quarter is all about, so please bring suggestions from around the world of books that incite or reflect or oppose change. Much has been written in English, but this is a Reading Globally group. However, it seems like such a huge topic that a separate thread will be set up elsewhere for books originally written in English: http://www.librarything.com/topic/297625

For now, here are a few books, fiction and nonfiction, as well as some authors. This is only a start. Many of these deal with political change, so please add your own ideas and suggestions from other realms, or add to this one.

Non Fiction:

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Ninety-Five Theses by Martin Luther
The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Encyclopédie by the 18th century Philosophes
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
The Revolutionary Catechism by Sergei Nechayev
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
What is to Be Done? by V I Lenin
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Quotations from Chairman Mao (the little red book)

Fiction

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Blindness by Jose Saramango
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

Authors

Emile Zola for the injustices of just about any aspect of nineteenth century French life

just about any Russian author

from Africa:
Chinua Achebe
Mia Couto
Ben Okri
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Wole Soyinka

other thoughts:

Mario Vargas Llosa
Liu Xiaobo

What ideas can do:

All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing.
...

All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt is was the wrong thing.

All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there,
a line you don't cross here,
a line you better not cross there,
a line of beauty here,
a line dance there,
a line you don't even know exists here,
a line you can't afford there,
a whole new line of fire,
line of battle,
end of the line,
here/there.

from Autumn by Ali Smith

Hmm. Big topic! If you interpret it a little broadly, it's almost difficult to think of any non-trivial books that don't fit into it. But the real point is that we read interesting books and then talk about what they bring to the topic, not that we spend the whole of Q4 trying to refine what we meant when we voted for it. Leave that for the debate about the terrible idea Ali Smith is talking about... :-)

One random thought - having read The invention of tradition over the summer, it strikes me that we ought to keep in mind the slightly paradoxical idea that "tradition" itself is often something that comes into existence as a response to change. Achebe and Vargas Llosa are writers it might be especially interesting to re-read with that in mind.

Some random ideas from things I've been reading over the past few years that could be starting points for others:
- from the Caribbean theme: The black Jacobins, El Reino de este mundo, Amour colère, folie - Haitian revolution and after; Texaco, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal - postcolonial Martinique

- from the Nordic theme: The long ships, Kristin Lavransdatter - transition from pagan to Christian society

- just about any book from the Japan theme, from Kokoro onwards

- just about any book by the great German writers of the postwar decades: Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz, etc. And Thomas Mann, of course.

- there's a lot of very interesting work by (ex-)DDR authors dealing explicitly or otherwise with political and social change: not just Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf but also people like Werner Bräunig, Irmtraud Morgner, and in the younger generation Jenny Erpenbeck, Katja Lange-Müller, Monika Maron.

- French writer Annie Ernaux is fascinated to the point of obsession with the minute detail of the social changes that have happened in her lifetime and the way these work out in her own life.

- Javier Cercas writes very interesting non-fiction novels about the relationship between historical change and memory in modern Spain; Javier Mariás addresses the same sort of topics in a completely different way in his great trilogy Your face tomorrow.

- Herta Müller

...that's probably more than enough for now.

From the OP's list, I think I might read The Prince. It's somewhere on my shelves, but I last read it a good 25 years ago and do not remember anything about it. Possibly also something from the Enlightenment because I'm woefully under-read in that department. And from >3 thorold:, The Invention of Tradition.
I picked up Apatride by Shumona Sinha, Murambi, the Book of Bones by Boubacar Boris Diop and Petit Pays by Gaël Faye from the library. I think they'll fit the theme, but I'll only know for sure once I've read them.

>1 SassyLassy: I am a frequent lurker here but you have prompted a suggestion from me. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I think of it as, The Prince meets P.R. and spin. It is set in Sicily at the time Garibaldi was doing his thing.

For everything to stay the same, everything must change.

You've given me a lot to google, as I hadn't known that some of the books listed led to change. I'd not known that Zola's novels did, e.g., but did know that one of his works did: J'accuse!--to me it's the work that most markedly of all wrought change. For books written in English The Jungle, of course, but I don't know whether it no more than Uncle Tom's Cabin is worth reading for anything other than historical significance.

I’ve been reading Joseph Roth’s Die Kapuzinergruft (The emperor’s tomb), which was written as a direct response to the Anschluss in 1938 (and shortly after Roth himself had been involved in a quixotic last-ditch attempt to save Austria from itself by restoring the Hapsburgs to power). It’s interesting as a kind of counter-example for this theme, because it’s - ostensibly at least - a profoundly anti-change book, in which Roth gets his narrator to argue that everything was much better under Franz Joseph. Meaning that all the different peoples of the empire were managing to live together mixed up as they were, and not all trying to carve out exclusive national spaces for themselves. No-one had everything they wanted, but they all had a reasonable degree of peace and security.

Of course, Roth is being at least partly ironic and knows perfectly well that there were plenty of things wrong with the empire: if there hadn’t been, there wouldn’t have been a war in 1914. But there does seem to be an underlying big yellow taxi theme - if you try to change the world you risk making room for the bad stuff to come in. And for an Austrian Jew in 1938, especially one as politically aware as Roth, there was no doubt that things had got about as bad as they could. No wonder he drank himself to death.

I posted this in the intro thread yesterday, but it would probably be more useful here: The Chronicle of Higher Ed recently posted a piece on The New Canon. And while I'm not sure all of them are absolutely canon-worthy (though what is?), it's an interesting selection.

Last year I read Väinö Linna's "Under the North Star" trilogy. This is a classic of Finnish literature and depicts the changes wrought in Finnish society from the 1880s through the 1950s, including the relatively brief but very bloody Finnish Civil War through the wars against Russia during the World War II era. The story is told primarily through the point of view of several generations of a Finnish tenant farmer family. And shows the evolution of the relations between the landed and tenant farming classes. The books are very well written and the storytelling is extremely moving.

Iʻm hearing for the first time of a "relatively brief but very bloody Finnish Civil War". At the time of the Finno-Russian war, I was eight years old, and just starting to follow International (at that time and place,* (the U. S. Northeast) news).
Can you give me the date(s), and the "sides" of the civil war?

*In the Northeast, "international" news (manly newspaper, some radio) was mainly European. I remember hearing back in the mid-30s that two wars were going on -- "the war in China" and "the war in Spain". "China" faded out of the news (I donʻt remember hearing of any "end" of it); but "Spain" stayed there up through the dismal end in 1939.

I likewise have never heard of the Finnish Civil War. News to me. What are the details?

>10 rolandperkins:
>11 varielle:

Here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War

>10 rolandperkins: I think that awareness of the Finnish war suffered from lack of material about it translated in English, as well as possibly some lumping of it in as a sidebar to Soviet history by American and other historians.

>10 rolandperkins: "China" faded out of the news (I donʻt remember hearing of any "end" of it);

That's kind of a horrifying thought that the news ended that way. Maybe because the American State Department officials thought they "lost" China, which was never theirs to begin with, they stopped writing about it, and once the country was closed to them, they were unable to do any research. Now that it's easier to study once again, it's
a catchup game.

>8 lisapeet: Interesting list, thanks for that link. I wonder what books would appear from other countries. Suggestions anyone?

I'm currently (gradually) reading my way through The Apostle by Sholem Asch. Written in Yiddish (translated into English), this is an historical novel of the spiritual and physical journeys of Saul (who becomes Paul) in spreading the word of the coming of the Messiah. First it is a message of Jews to Jews. Eventually, however, Paul sees his mission as spreading what he believes to be the message of redemption among all the region's population. Certainly, this is a novel about "change." The subtext is that Asch was a well-known Yiddish/Jewish writer. While still in Europe, he wrote about the Jewish stetl experience. Once in the U.S. in the early 20th century, he wrote movingly and very successfully about the Jewish immigrant experience. However, when he began publishing books about the beginnings of Christianity, he was seen as a turncoat and his reputation suffered. His stated intention was not to turn his back on Judaism at all, however, but to show how Christianity was really a Jewish phenomenon and to stress the commonality between the religions. It's not too hard to imagine why that might have been a tough sell among the Jewish community of the time.

Yeah I can well imagine that reaction, esp at that time. Now tho it would be much more accepted. And you are right, that is a change that one doesn't nec think about, but it was a big one

BTW another book that shows christianity starting off as a Jewish phenomena would be The Zealot. While I did not agree with all of his conclusions (of course Jesus would have been literate as were most Jews), I think he does an excellent job showing not only the affect that the destruction of the 2nd temple had on the speed of that change, but also how and Anti Israel attitude of the Romans was continued in the writings of the early Christians - hence the start of anti semitism.

A few more that I've read recently that seem to be relevant to this theme:

Pantagruel (1532) by François Rabelais (France, 1483-1553)

- Any writer who qualifies for his very own adjective obviously had an important influence on later generations, but I thought the interesting thing about this book was the direct way it engaged with the changes going on in the intellectual world around it. Rabelais is telling his readers to wake up and smell the Erasmus - it's the renaissance, whether we like it or not, and we should toss out all that nasty old scholasticism and astrology, together with the rest of the medieval relics that are still cluttering up the Sorbonne. OK, so it's also a giant-story with a lot of fart-jokes, and some of those are still quite funny, but it's really a book challenging the establishment of the time, and the establishment didn't very much like it...

Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1668, The adventures of a simpleton) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (Germany, 1622-1676)

- Naturally, the earliest major work of prose fiction in the German canon confirms all our prejudices about Germans by being a satirical anti-war novel! Of course, it's a lot of other things as well, but the popularity of Grimmelshausen's book made sure that the Thirty Years' War would become a kind of universal metaphor for the cruelty, randomness and destructive power of war. No-one in the world of this book really knows what the war is about, or has any kind of ideological commitment to either side in the conflict, least of all the narrator who is forever being taken prisoner and made to change sides by his captors, until we lose track entirely. And we never get to hear who "won". All we see is the way that the war is destroying the country in which it has been raging back and forth for decades. And the moral values people have tossed out during the war years aren't magically brought back to life by the Peace of Westphalia - the devils let loose in Germany are still there, trying out new tactics to cause maximum trouble...

Die Letzten : Aufzeichnungen aus Udo Posbichs Druckerei (2000) by Katja Lange-Müller (Germany, 1951- )

- East Berlin in the late 70s. The decline of the traditional craft of printing is in a race with the collapse of the DDR, whilst a typesetter engages in a painstakingly slow act of sabotage, using only white-space...

Así empieza lo malo (2014; Thus bad begins) by Javier Marías (Spain, 1951- )

- Madrid, 1980, and people are only just beginning to get to grips with the idea that they are living in a democracy again. Catching up with the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll they missed under Franco turns out to be much easier than working out how to handle the moral legacy of the crimes committed during the War and the forty years of dictatorship. Marías cleverly builds this complicated social background into the story of the disintegration of a marriage.

Arab Jazz (2012) by Karim Miské (France, 1964- )

- Paris, 19th Arrondissement, 2010, just at the point when it was shifting from colourful multi-culti neighbourhood to potential fundamentalist flashpoint. And of course this crime story became an international success when the publishers started marketing it as background to the subsequent Paris terrorist attacks. But Miské doesn't see the trend towards religious fundamentalism as irreversible (his story features hardline Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses as well as Moslems). As long as there are young people with common-sense and the determination to stand up for their liberal values, there is still hope.