20th century track

It was around this time I was in the library one day and I stumbled upon Introduction to Twentieth Century Italian Literature by Robert Gordon. It hadn’t been my goal in learning Italian to use it for literature, but here was a very practical guide that gives you a great overview of the most important works. I recommend the book; it has a thematic presentation so if you want to read about war, there’s a chapter on books about that, if you want gender issues there’s one for that etc.

Inspired, I read Gordon’s guide making a note of every book that seemed interesting. It was clear that it was going to take quite a while to read all those books, but I wasn’t in a hurry. And I thought what better way to learn about the Italian identity while simultaneously expanding my knowledge of the language.

It turned out to be a worthwhile pursuit, both culturally and linguistically. These books basically cover the 20th century canon (if it isn’t too early to use a big word like that). I’ve added a couple of my own, but for the most part they are from the guide.

Reading all these books is well and good, but how would I know if it’s “working”? Well, for one thing, reading books by many different authors, on various topics, and from different periods, ought to make it plain that I have certain blind spots if I have them.

Historical track

But I wanted to raise the bar and read some older works too, going right back to Dante, basically the gold standard of Italian literature. This would truly validate my strategy and answer the question of whether the 20th century reading was teaching me enough. It would also make my reading more well rounded.

My selection here is less deliberate, because I didn’t research the topic as much. I suppose I could do the same here, starting with the well known Storia della letteratura italiana by Francesco De Sanctis to get an overview of what there is to read and then make a selection. But since I’m more motivated by language than literature I was more curious to see how far back in time I could go and still read the books and I’m fairly satisfied with what I’ve covered. Besides, much of the influential early literature in Italian is poetry (eg. Petrarca), and I don’t particularly care for that.

Conclusions

So there you have it, a successful strategy and a nice way to spend the time. It took me about two years and while not every book was a hit, doing a broad survey like this put me onto many authors I would otherwise have dismissed because they didn’t seem like my thing. And if you are picking from a guide like this, even blindly, you can be reasonably confident that a certain amount of effort went into producing it, so you’re unlikely to encounter complete garbage.

The best of the best (of the best)

The credit goes to the indomitable Steve Yegge for making a strong recommendation for it. And boy did it check out.

Gödel, Escher, Bach ~ Douglas Hofstadter

GED is simply the most important book I’ve ever read. Hofstadter sets out to do one thing and do it well, namely to give a description of how consciousness works, or could work. He does this by way of countless enticing analogies across different fields, chiefly mathematics, art, music, computer science and genetics. It’s a challenging book and a very rewarding one. In order to get through it profitably I had to put myself on a relatively intense schedule to make sure I had enough context in mind at all times.

The better books

Looking back over the year there are quite a few that deserve a mention here.

Culture

Apocalittici e integrati ~ Umberto Eco

Economics

SuperFreakonomics ~ Steven Levitt

Literature

	Due di due ~ Andrea Di Carlo
	Il fu Mattia Pascal ~ Luigi Pirandello
	Il nome della rosa ~ Umberto Eco

Philosophy

	A History of Western Philosophy ~ Bertrand Russell
	Man is the Measure ~ Reuben Abel
	Religion and Science ~ Bertrand Russell
	The Moral Landscape ~ Sam Harris
	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ~ Robert Pirsig

Purely for fun

	Kruistocht in spijkerbroek ~ Thea Beckman
	The Broker ~ John Grisham
	The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ~ Douglas Adams

Socio-political

	Cose di Cosa Nostra ~ Giovanni Falcone
	La baia dei pirati ~ Luca Neri
	Lettera a una professoressa ~ Lorenzo Milani
	Se questo è un uomo ~ Primo Levi
	Todo modo ~ Leonardo Sciascia

Less compelling, but worth a look

Literature

	Il conformista ~ Alberto Moravia
	L’avventura di un povero cristiano ~ Ignazio Silone
	Le cosmicomiche ~ Italo Calvino

Philosophy

	Le Rire ~ Henri Bergson
	The Problems of Philosophy ~ Bertrand Russell

Purely for fun

Le Petit Prince ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Science

A Short History Of Nearly Everything ~ Bill Bryson

Socio-political

	Morte dell’inquisitore ~ Leonardo Sciascia
	Vaticano S.p.A. ~ Gianluigi Nuzzi

Classics that work

A special mention for Il principe which is quite fascinating, both for the time it was written, the frankness of the analysis and the efficacy of its insights.

	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ~ James Joyce
	I promessi sposi ~ Alessandro Manzoni
	Il principe ~ Niccolò Machiavelli
	Le comte de Monte Cristo ~ Alexandre Dumas
	Les Trois Mousquetaires ~ Alexandre Dumas
	The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde

Classics that don’t check out

For every batch of classics there are those that just aren’t particularly worth reading. Either because they are too boring (Kafka), the characters are so annoying that you never begin to care what happens to them (Karamazov), because the language is abstruse to the point of being near impenetrable (Nietzsche), because the reasoning is so dated it bears little relevance to present times (Descartes), because the events are so remote they are of little interest today (Discorsi), or because the author is simply a dullard narcissist (Thoreau).

	Beyond Good and Evil ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
	Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio ~ Niccolò Machiavelli
	Il piacere ~ Gabriele d’Annunzio
	Méditations métaphysiques ~ René Descartes
	The Brothers Karamazov ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
	The Castle ~ Franz Kafka
	Thus Spoke Zarathustra ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
	Walden ~ Henry David Thoreau

Žižek

Žižek is fascinating and great fun to read, although he tends to recycle his jokes and analogies quite a bit. This year I set out to read all his of books that I could find in Dutch.

	Actuele filosofie ~ Alain Badiou
	Conversations with Žižek ~ Slavoj Žižek
	Intolerantie ~ Slavoj Žižek
	Violence ~ Slavoj Žižek
	Welcome to the Desert of the Real ~ Slavoj Žižek

Scoreboard

It’s been a good year for Italian. And for Dutch. But I so rarely find anything worth reading in the Scandinavian languages, which is a bit of a shame. I’m about ready now to wind down with Italian next year, and have more time for Dutch and French.

As last year I managed to introduce some new languages.

1		*afrikaans
33		english
1		*español
16		*français
44		italiano
28		nederlands
3		polski
2		svenska
128		Total

* debut in 2011

Aside from the number of books, it has been notable for the languages. Previously I had only read in Polish, Norwegian and English, as those were the languages I successively had in my life. But as I embarked upon my first novel in Italian, the language I was actively learning, I also thought I should try Swedish and Danish. Later this year I also read my first book in Dutch, the second language I’m learning these days.

Perhaps I should make it a goal to read at least one book in each language from now on.

	Against Intellectual Property ~ Stephan Kinsella
	An Introduction to Twentieth Century Italian Literature ~ Robert Gordon
	Anna Karenina ~ Lev Tolstoy
	Avenger ~ Frederick Forsyth
	Black Coffee ~ Agatha Christie
	Bokhandleren i Kabul ~ Åsne Seierstad
	Candide, ou l’Optimisme ~ Voltaire
	Children of Dune ~ Frank Herbert
	Code To Zero ~ Ken Follett
	Cognitive Surplus ~ Clay Shirky
	Compendio di psicoanalisi ~ Sigmund Freud
	Crime and punishment ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
	Dave Barry’s History Of The Millennium ~ Dave Barry
	De autobiografie van Kluivert ~ Mike Verweij
	Den hedervärde mördaren ~ Jan Guillou
	Dico tutto ~ Antonio Cassano
	Dune Messiah ~ Frank Herbert
	En landsbydegns dagbog ~ Steen Steensen Blicher
	First As Tragedy, Then As Farce ~ Slavoj Žižek
	Fontamara ~ Ignazio Silone
	Gli indifferenti ~ Alberto Moravia
	Gli invisibili ~ Nanni Balestrini
	God, The Failed Hypothesis ~ Victor Stenger
	How To Learn Any Language ~ Barry Farber
	How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere ~ Larry King
	I Am America ~ Stephen Colbert
	I Malavoglia ~ Giovanni Verga
	Il Gattopardo ~ Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
	Il contesto ~ Leonardo Sciascia
	Il deserto dei Tartari ~ Dino Buzzati
	Il giorno della civetta ~ Leonardo Sciascia
	Il male oscuro ~ Giuseppe Berto
	Il nome della rosa ~ Umberto Eco
	Il pallone nel burrone ~ Salvatore Napolitano
	Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno ~ Italo Calvino
	Infidel ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali
	Io non ho paura ~ Niccolò Ammaniti
	Io speriamo che me la cavo ~ Marcello D’Orta
	JavaScript: The Good Parts ~ Douglas Crockford
	Jeg forbanner tidens elv ~ Per Petterson
	King Rat ~ James Clavell
	L’Élixir de longue vie ~ Honoré de Balzac
	La coscienza di Zeno ~ Italo Svevo
	La fine è il mio inizio ~ Tiziano Terzani
	Le comte de Monte Cristo ~ Alexandre Dumas
	Les Trois Mousquetaires ~ Alexandre Dumas
	Life of Pi ~ Yann Martel
	Markens grøde ~ Knut Hamsun
	Moby Dick ~ Herman Melville
	My ~ Evgenij Zamjátin
	No god but God ~ Reza Aslan
	Nomad ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali
	Oceano Mare ~ Alessandro Baricco
	Per la verità ~ Diego Marconi
	Play ~ Stuart Brown
	Polyglot ~ Kato Lomb
	Shōgun ~ James Clavell
	Siddharta ~ Hermann Hesse
	Sult ~ Knut Hamsun
	Tao Te Ching ~ Lao Tzu
	The Cobra ~ Frederick Forsyth
	The Day of the Jackal ~ Frederick Forsyth
	The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ ~ Philip Pullman
	The Hades Factor ~ Robert Ludlum
	The King of Torts ~ John Grisham
	The Kite Runner ~ Khaled Hosseini
	The Lazarus Vendetta ~ Robert Ludlum
	The Loom of Language ~ Frederick Bodmer
	The Matarese Circle ~ Robert Ludlum
	The No Asshole Rule ~ Robert I. Sutton
	The Odessa File ~ Frederick Forsyth
	The Road to Omaha ~ Robert Ludlum
	The Shy Child ~ Philip Zimbardo
	The Sigma Protocol ~ Robert Ludlum
	The Stuff of Thought ~ Steven Pinker
	The Success of Open Source ~ Steven Weber
	The Time Paradox ~ Philip Zimbardo
	The Veteran ~ Frederick Forsyth
	Trevayne ~ Robert Ludlum
	Tribal Leadership ~ John King
	True Story ~ Bill Maher
	Tutte le barzellette su Totti ~ Francesco Totti
	Utilitarianism ~ John Stuart Mill
	Victoria ~ Knut Hamsun

3		dansk*
28		english
40		italiano*
3		nederlands*
5		norsk
2		polski
3		svenska*
84		Total

*debut in 2010

Go read it!

Dry and minute at times, but very rich. Don’t get discouraged by the wikipedia page, it doesn’t begin to do justice to the content between the covers. Neither does Pinker’s google talk where he’s selling the book and gives a superficial impression of it.

A non-exhaustive feature list:

• Why can you not interchange “give her a hand” with “give a hand to her“? Is there any logical explanation for these quirks? (Answer: yes. In fact, language is far more logical and far less arbitrary than we imagine most of the time.)
• Linguistic determinism. Is it really true that our language/vocabulary is the language of our thoughts, and thus it can empower/limit what we are able to think? (Answer: no.)
• Why do you say “the stars are out” when you can see them and “the lights are out” when you can’t see them? (Answer: don’t remember the explanation for this one, but it’s a neat example, no?)

And so on. But Pinker doesn’t just explain a whole bunch of riddles, he reaches deep into a whole range of topics, like how language routinely states time in terms of distance (and vice versa), how language expresses causation (and what this implies for our perception of causation) and many more such topics. In short, he does exactly what he’s promised to do, he shows how language codifies our human nature.

If I never read a second book about linguistics, I still think this one will have been a pretty good choice.

After discussing the concept of god in the most general sense, Smith proceeds to show that Christianity is stacked high with self contradictions in its various doctrines, all of which makes it even more absurd (if one can say such a thing) than merely the idea of a god itself. The central problem in knowing god is that of assigning attributes to an inherently supernatural and transcendental (that is to say unknowable) being. Either a proposition is unknowable or it isn’t. It makes no sense to accept the premise of unknowabability only to then assign attributes that are contingent upon knowability. Christianity attempts to jump the fence by making all attributes infinite. Instead of temporal he is eternal. Instead of finite he is infinite. The obvious problem is that the meaning of such attributes is predicated upon finiteness. To make an attribute infinite is to make it meaningless. So all that can be accomplished is to assign unintelligible attributes to an unintelligible being. This is most characteristic of the Christian doctrine, which essentially drapes layers of rhetoric in order to create the illusion of a god that is effectively not distinguishable from nothing at all.

Legacy

Nevertheless, The Bourne Legacy certainly does add to Jason’s life story, as the title no doubt implies. Sadly, Van Lustbader kills off the lovable characters Alex Conklin and Morris Panov right off the bat. I suppose after three stories we’ve had it with them? This sets the stage for Jason, who is implicated as the suspect through a set up. Strangely enough, the CIA takes the bait without ever considering the possibility that something is amiss. What’s mind boggling about these people is that they never seem to know what the people working for them actually are capable of. First they train a Bourne, and then they’re astonished that a simple hit squad can’t take him down. The agency director, a long time friend of Conklin’s, puts a price on Jason’s head without thinking twice about it.

It’s odd that a man with no connections into the agency is able to execute such a plot, sending the whole agency after one of its agents. But that’s what Stepan Spalko, on the face of it a well respected leader of a humanitarian organization, has done. His hired gun is a man called Khan, a superb assassin whose main asset is to never betray his emotions, no matter the situation. Van Lustbader lets it slip quite early on that Khan is actually Jason’s long lost son Joshua, presumed dead, from his first marriage. But it takes us until the end of the story for Jason to accept this truth.

In the meantime, there is a scheme to execute a bacteriological attack on the participants of the terrorists summit in Iceland, that is leaders from the US, Russia and Arab states. Naturally, the plot is Spalko’s, with the help of the puppeteer’s favorite puppets: Chechnyan rebels. In the end, Khan has an unlikely soul cleansing moment with one of Spalko’s betrayed Chechnyans, Zena, through which (although Zena is dying) he’s able to gain some fresh perspective on his father who supposedly abandoned him back then in Phnom Penh.

Betrayal

I’m starting to resent Van Lustbader. He is systematically destroying everything Ludlum built up. First he killed off Panov and Conklin, and now Marie. Marie was shockingly absent from Legacy, and now she’s met her end in the most trivial and un-Bourne like way, to pneumonia. Imagine, the strong and resourceful Marie to wither like this? It’s absurd. I can think of two reasons. Either Van Lustbader doesn’t like Marie or he doesn’t have it in him to write her part.

The more I think about it, there’s something bigger going on here. You don’t just kill off the second most important character without reason. But it isn’t just her. Van Lustbader’s characters are different. They are exaggerated, caricatures almost. Conklin first appeared every bit the single minded, firing from the hip kind of guy, but he turned out to be a wonderfully nuanced character. And Panov had great personal warmth. Then it was Marie, the most complicated of all of Ludlum’s characters. She was never a flat character instructed to repeat the same concerns in the same words. On the contrary, there was much growth, and you could always sense that Ludlum had a lot more in store for her, he was never finished with her. A wonderful aspect of the Bourne stories was precisely the unpredictability of Marie.

Contrast Conklin, David Abbott and Peter Holland to the nameless director of the CIA. Ludlum’s characters are flesh and blood, they feel guilt and remorse. Van Lustbader’s director, in contrast, is Pointy Haired Boss. And he barely has a handle on the job, consumed in the struggle to maintain his political position and that of the company. He knows little about the ongoings and understands even less, least of all about Bourne. It struck me how odd this was. Surely the CIA chief would be a highly sophisticated character, surely he’d be clever enough both to protect the agency and run it, or how else would he have risen to the highest position? Strangely enough, Van Lustbader uses him a lot, but then he doesn’t bother to build him a decent character.

But that’s the thing about Van Lustbader, he can’t do characters. Ludlum would never motivate killing or terror with anger or hatred. Hatred is a complicated emotion, with forays into many other states of mind. Furthermore, a character who’s hateful is not hateful all the time, he undergoes moments of weakness, of shame and doubt. Meanwhile, the CIA chief orders Bourne’s execution more or less because he’s sick of him. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Van Lustbader’s one honest attempt at creating a character was Kahn who, agonizingly, doesn’t reappear.

Van Lustbader’s villains are also altogether different. They go under the common banner of “terrorists”. First Chechnyan rebels and now Saudi jihadists. Their objective is a rather vague scheme to disrupt US-Saudi relations. Compare that to the mesmerizing plot of the Taiwanese magnate who wanted to seize control of a fragile Chinese state, now that was a plot! Van Lustbader’s villains can said to be more or less “crazy”, but in a more shallow sense than, say, Carlos. There is endless rhetoric about Western decadence, but what exactly are they trying to achieve? At least Carlos had his reasons, and there were reasons why he had them. Spalko too was a stronger character. If nothing else at least it was clear that he was a puppeteer, and a puppeteer never reveals his cards to his puppets. But Fadi and Karim spend 20 years planning a “Face Off” reenactment only to detonate a nuke in Washington DC. Well, so what? What does that accomplish?

Ludlum believed that life can twist you every which way, but it does not ultimately possess you. He used a lot of older characters, he believed in redemption and forgiveness. With Van Lustbader, there are three options. You are corrupt from the start and eventually meet your end. You start out good, then become corrupted. Or, you remain good, but you’ll be put through the very harshest episodes in life. That’s the complete set of human experience with Van Lustbader.

A final, smaller, matter is Van Lustbader’s courageous stab at computer security. I understand his motive, but he should keep it to a minimum. That scene where Karim runs a virus on the mainframe and brings down the entire network is quite sad. So the CIA, one of the most technologically advanced organizations (as every spy fiction writer insists) only has a single mainframe? He completely betrays his ignorance of the computer networks present even in small businesses, let alone huge organizations. The insistence on portraying “the firewall” as some kind of fantastic artificial intelligence is also rather tedious.

Sanction

As much as the previous Van Lustbader novels were sub par, this one just didn’t grip me at all. His lack of imagination is tiring.

Tiring is also his reliance on recycling the same themes again and again. CIA gets a new female director. None of the men respect a woman in charge. Yadayadayada. And it drags on and on. Come to think of it, this feminist angle has been present in all of his books. Yes, we get it, don’t you have anything else?

The plot this time is convoluted without being especially interesting. Which is an odd thing to say for a Bourne story. But lo and behold, another Van Lustbader favorite theme: muslim fundamentalism. A group calling themselves the Black Legion is planning a large scale attack on the continental US. Their motive is typically weak. “We can not accept the Western way of life so we must strike.” Another pointless motive that can’t possibly accomplish anything, this is starting to feel familiar. Let’s see, all of Van Lustbader’s villains are muslim terrorists.

The other half of the story is the CIA vs NSA power struggle. This is what Van Lustbader loves to write about, the hard man in charge. Again in stark contrast to Ludlum’s characters. Yes, Luther Laval is clever, but he’s not as sophisticated as Ludlum’s characters. He’s simple minded, one sided, flat. At least the two agencies fighting it out is somewhat interesting, but Van Lustbader completely fails to imprint Veronica Heart’s character on the story.

So how does it go? Pick some tried and true themes. Add a few locations, some exotic names (preferably Russian or Turkish), shallow characters and wrap it up with Bourne. Oh, and add a lot of politics. Yeah, that seems to work well enough.

A compelling example is the study of crack dealers, based on field data supplied by Sudhir Venkatesh. There is a certain public perception that drug dealers wield a lot of power and consequently enjoy much wealth. In reality, it turns out, much like any corporation, the foot soldiers live on minimum wage level incomes, while only the fat cats cash in. But then why would people subject themselves to such high risk for little reward? The answer seems to be that this is the only career that seems plausible to their lives.

While Levitt’s case studies are generally informative, Dubner’s presentation is often dull and publication-like.

His story is appealing on many levels. What strikes me first is the cozy nostalgia of Serie A in 2001. That Verona team had a lot of players who went on to bigger things. The Verona of Frey, Adailton and Mutu. With players who would make a career at Parma: Gilardino, Bonazzoli, Morfeo, not to mention Prandelli. With Laursen, who would sign for Milan. With Camoranesi, the oriundo, who would lend creativity and dribbling to Lippi’s all winning Italy; and keystone of present day Juventus, of course. With Oddo, the most abused of all players, who allegedly had secured a transfer to Lazio in mid season and didn’t seem to try very hard. With the Parma veteran Apolloni, his last season before hanging it up. With a young and hopeless Cassetti, present day Roma.

The Bari of Yksel Osmanovski and Daniel Andersson, and the very young Antonio Cassano. Luca Toni playing for Vicenza, long before his rise to fame. It was the start of Parma’s sad demise, they had sold Crespo and Veron, brought in Ariel Ortega. They were still impressive, however, with Buffon, Thuram, Cannavaro, and a goal hungry Di Vaio. There were the lacklustre Inter and Milan, the latter would appear in the Uefa Cup the following season. Lazio, champions, had the most expensive squad in the world, way before their financial collapse. Eriksson had done it with Nesta, Nedved, Veron, Almeyda and Sergio Conceicao. Up front they had, no less, Boksic, Salas, Roberto Mancini, Kennet Andersson, Simone Inzaghi and Fabrizio Ravanelli. Roma had brought in Emerson, Batistuta and Nakata, and clinched the title.

And finally it was the Juve of Ancelotti, the man who came so close, but couldn’t seem to win anything. Davids ruled the midfield with an iron fist that of Montero in defense. Conte would supply crucial goals when the chips were down, but the sole responsibility for offence was on Zidane’s shoulders. It was Trezeguet’s first season, after that golden goal at Euro2000. He made short process of Pippo Inzaghi, who was promptly sold. And it was still a time of struggle for Del Piero, who would strike up a golden partnership with Trezeguet the following season, in an improbably league triumph.

And so this is the world in which the story is told. Hellas was fighting for survival just as Chievo was on the brink of promotion to Serie A. They did stay up, but only for a year. Today we find Chievo in Verona’s place, and Hellas at the bottom of Serie C1. How time flies. Parks sets out to write a book about Hellas, and the Brigate Gialloblu. Out of all the supporter groups in Italy, they are infamous for being the most racist of them all. By reputation, at least. As it turns out, they are not so much racist, complete with their monkey chants, as just plain antagonistic. But this is Italy, where everything is politicized. And Verona is cast as the racist town.

What matters, above all, in Italy is pretense, theater. It is not so much that rules are bent, they just don’t exist as rules, merely as guidelines. And there are always grounds for appeal. In one incident, the police state in no uncertain terms that noone will be let into the stadium without a ticket. But then they are allowed in anyway. One must always be seen to play one’s part, that is the crucial thing. On a different occasion, there is heavy rainfall during a match, and by half time the pitch is flooded. The rules state that the ball must be thrown up in the air and made to bounce on the surface, or else the game must be abandoned. But neither the referee nor the teams wish that to happen, so the man in black boldly goes around the pitch trying to get the ball to bounce until he finds a spot where it does. He repeats the test a few more times and now, clearly, a pretense to the rule has been made, the match continues. (Incidentally, that explain’s Collina’s Perugia in 2000.)

Parks gives us a broad description of Hellas. Both the supporter culture he participates in, and the inner workings of the club. He relays conversations with fans, players, coaches and administrators. What’s really interesting is that it would seem everyone in that world, down to the president of the club, is victim of circumstance. The fans are the mercy of the management and the players. The players are at the mercy of the resources the administration has available, the coach, the fans, and public opinion. The coach is at once the most empowered person of all, deciding who will play and where, but then every single decision he makes will be scrutinized. And the president, supposedly all powerful, can do no more than to balance the budget by selling the most valuable players, while facing pressure from fans to spend more and spend wiser.

All in all, a book for a Serie A fan. Humorous in part, revealing to a point, but also padded with a lot of relatively boring storytelling.

When I saw the title I was struck by how contemporary it looked. And it is indeed contemporary. Unlike historical novels that are set in the past, background has to be established, and the reader only knows the world in the novel from what he is told. The Afghan is quite different. Forsyth takes a stab at fitting a story in the world of today, the world we know from tv and the news, and with historical persons in central roles. He takes on the Middle East conflict, treating us to a guided tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also to a less severe look at the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Peshawar, Quetta, Kandahar and Jalalabad are some of the venues.

We follow in the footsteps of a young Afghan, Izmat Khan, a boy from a village in the mountains. As a boy he bears witness to the Soviet invasion, deemed too young to participate. His family is evacuated to a refugee camp in Pakistan, where he enters a madrasah, the one flavor of education offered to the refugees, funded by the Saudis who are intent on spreading wahhabism. By the time he grows up, the Soviets are still in Afghanistan, and he joins in with the Mujahideen. Soon, 1989 rolls around and the struggle is over, but the country is by no means at peace. Warlords fight among themselves for dominance, to which the Taliban rises up in opposition, eventually taking control of most of the country.

With the Soviet Union in ruins, the West eventually wakes up to the threat of religious radicalism. Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden continues to enjoy the hospitality at the hands of Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Under Bill Clinton there are air raids on his training camps. A cruise missile launched from a US ship in the Gulf misses its target and strikes the mountain above Khan’s valley. He happens to be visiting a neighboring village that day, but he returns to witness his entire village buried under rock. His whole family wiped out. That is the day he pledges to join in the jihad against America. First in the Taliban, he fights the Northern Alliance, US sponsored. Then, he is to become a part of the single biggest terrorist attack to date.

This is all background for the events to take place, established so that the story told in the current can be told effectively. The key is a plot that has been uncovered from an Al Qaeda high official who escapes capture, but his laptop is taken. The plot has a name, but nothing points to what it consists of. Noone knows what it means, because noone knows about it, save a small circle at the very top of the organization. Their communications are under constant scrutiny, but the intelligence services of the West are powerless to tap into them. Messages are often delivered by messenger, recited from memory. And unlike the impatient West, Al Qaeda is in no hurry, things take time and that is way. Their operatives have spotless records, highly educated in the West and above suspicion.

The novel is an intriguing mix of contemporary reality and literary license for plausible additions.

The Bourne story has seen a big revival since. The first movie starring Matt Damon came out in 2002, and Ludlum was willing to work on the movie and turn his creation into a motion picture. Unfortunately, he died in 2001, before the movie was premiered, and probably never got to see the end product. But for what it’s worth, I think the movie and the ones to follow were done very well. There is too much complexity and substance in the story to put on screen, so they decided not to try to follow the story in the book, just make a good movie instead. Which I think they did.

Consequently, Damon’s Bourne is very alike Ludlum’s Bourne, but not quite the same. And the movie epic has the same starting point, but swiftly departs from the story in the book, while grabbing many key details that make a Bourne story what it is. If you’re a Bourne fan, then, you’ll find three parts of a story that are completely new and captivating.

Interestingly, the Bourne story is not like a tv series, where you find the same characters a week apart in their lives, with the same concerns and outlook on life. Ludlum puts 5-10 years in between each story, and Bourne’s life (and he himself) will have changed a lot from one to the next.

Identity

It all begins with a small fishing village somewhere near Marseille. The drunk of a doctor receives the man who’s been found floating in the water, multiple gunshot wounds in his body, a severe one in the head. At once a gentle introduction to the man without a name (who shall be known as Jason Bourne) and a crucial peg in the story – the six months he spends recuperating, off radar; noone knows what happened to him.

The story is played out first in Zurich, then Paris. A thrilling account where little by little, bits and pieces of Jason’s life are recovered, and yet the struggle to find himself never stops. In Zurich he takes a hostage in a moment’s reflex to blend into the crowd. Her name is Marie, she’s an economist from Canada. Everything in Jason’s life is unexpected and uncontrolled circumstance. Including Marie, who is to become first his ally and at last his wife.

His identity comes into view slowly, through a haze of disinformation he must fight off. Nothing seems to make sense. Until he learns at the very end that noone knows who he really is precisely because that is how his identity was crafted. As a cover. A fake assassin dispatched to lure the real assassin. Carlos. So well concealed that no intelligence unit can get to him, even locate him.

Carlos becomes his mission, because that is all he knows, all he can remember. But not his real objective, which is to find himself, find the people who cast him in this role. The people who haven’t heard from him in six months and think he’s turned on them.

The story is so thrilling precisely because he has this terrible disadvantage. Everyone is after him, but he doesn’t know their various motives and interests. And yet he has the intuitive skills to hide from them. But there is a symmetry in the situation. Since he doesn’t know what he’s doing, neither can they predict his actions. He is as incomprehensible to them as they are to him. Except Carlos. Carlos knows him. Not personally, but he understands the thought process, the method of an assassin. And in the end, Bourne lures Carlos to him, but fails to defeat him, nearly losing his life.

Supremacy

Many years have passed since Paris. David and Marie Webb reside in a small town, courtesy of a government protection program. David’s memory has not been fully restored, but his mind is whole again, he can live a normal life. Flashes of his life under the name of Jason Bourne still haunt him. And flashes of his even more distant past as the clandestine operative Delta in the Vietnam war do too. But they do not dominate him anymore. Under the supervision of psychiatrist Morris Panov he has recuperated mentally, and his horrible recollections are now a matter of exception.

The happy existence is brutally disturbed. In Hong Kong there is an assassin on the loose, a pretender calling himself Jason Bourne. A kidnapping is staged. Marie disappears. David is forced to chase after her to Hong Kong. He enlists the help of Alex Conklin, an ally from the distant past, and an influential officer in the CIA. But not even Conklin is sufficiently well placed to uncover the plot. A plot hatched by the government to take down this fake Bourne and pump him for information.

David is forced to set aside his quiet life and become Jason again. The chase in Hong Kong, Macau and China is thrilling. At the center of it is one of the most powerful men in China’s economy, and government. A Taiwanese who wants to see China’s downfall, and the man he has enlisted to propel Hong Kong into chaos, thereby giving China the necessary pretext to make a play for annexation, is the new Jason Bourne. A play that will inevitably put China at conflict with the Western world. In the chaos he perceives a coup, a victory for Taiwan.

The title “supremacy” is descriptive. Bourne is at his best, his body and mind at full throttle. He not only speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese well enough, he navigates the underworld of South East Asia with fluency. And yet he is so utterly alone, not even Marie to guide him with her analytical mind.

Ultimatum

David has aged, he’s 50. With a wife and two children now. It is odd that Ludlum has let Carlos rest for a decade since the events in Paris. Now, suddenly he’s back, and gunning for Bourne. David’s loss of physical athleticism is balanced out a bit, at least he has support from the agency this time. But Carlos out-thinks and out-schemes them all, Bourne is constantly on the defensive.

What was once a political objective to bring down Carlos is now a desperate struggle to protect his family. Bourne isn’t as sharp anymore, or as quick. Ludlum has brought him back more desperate, more careless. More people get caught in his crossfire. In the distance there is a group of powerful men conspiring to take control of big business and government. They are the survivors of the once notorious Medusa in Vietnam, the Medusa the man known as Delta was part of. Decades later, they are highly placed officials and businessmen; their operation becomes an imperative for the agency. But their link to Carlos, as Bourne perceived it, is vague.

For Bourne there is only Carlos. They squre off in Montserrat, then in Paris, finally Bourne lures Carlos out of his safe Paris haven and into the Soviet Union. The Soviets want Carlos as badly as everyone else, they still suffer the stain of having trained him as an operative before it became clear to them that he’s a psychopath. In Moscow, Bourne enjoys some unprecedented and strictly off the record co-operation with the KGB, courtesy of Conklin’s contacts.

Marie is desperate. Not about the threat of Carlos, but about David’s mind. He must not let the past take hold of him. And yet she can see how much more it drains him now, the stress and the pursuit. The terror of a strike on his family. But the ultimatum has been thrown down, he doesn’t have a choice. Go after Carlos or Carlos will destroy what’s most dear to him.