Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, by Eric Fromm

Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

Eric Fromm’s views on the Buddhist Philosophy

by Dr Ruwan M Jayatunge, Lanka Web, February 27, 2011

"Buddhism helps man to find an answer to the question of his existence, an answer which is essentially the same as that given in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and yet which does not contradict the rationality, realism, and independence which are modern man’s precious achievements. Paradoxically, Eastern religious thought turns out to be more congenial to Western rational thought than does Western religious thought itself" - Erich Fromm

Colombo, Sri Lanka -- The Social Psychologist and Humanistic Philosopher Eric Fromm was vastly influenced by Freud and Karl Heinrich Marx. He became a follower of Neoanalytic tradition.  In later years Fromm started reading Zen Buddhism in depth.  He saw Buddhism as a philosophical-anthropological system based on observation of facts and their rational explanation. (Buddhism and the Mode of Having vs. Being – Erick Fromm 1975). Fromm believed that Buddhism is a completely rational system which demands no intellectual sacrifice.

Fromm’s interest towards Buddhism was obvious. Among the Western scholars Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids was one of the pioneers to conceptualize canonical Buddhist writings in terms of psychology. Professor William James was making some comparisons between the consciousness and thought process that was described in the Western Psychology and what the Buddha had taught two millenniums ago.  Many former members of the Freud’s Psychoanalytic society were reading Buddhist philosophy and making evaluations. By this time Carl Jung had highlighted the mind analysis in Buddhism. Therefore Fromm’s interest towards Buddhism was not an abrupt event.

In his 1950 work Psychoanalysis and Religion Eric Fromm profoundly analyzed Buddhist Philosophy.  He made a distinction between the authoritarian and humanistic religions and interpreted Buddhism as an antiauthoritarian religion that provides for personal validation and growth.

As Fromm viewed, in the Buddhist philosophy there is no surrender to a power transcending figure and as a virtue; obedience does not play a key role.  Buddhism is   centered around man and his strength. Man must develop his power of reason in order to understand himself, his relationship to his fellow men and his position in the universe. Fromm further says that a humanistic religion like Buddhism is geared to achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest powerlessness; virtue is self-realization, not obedience.

Like Carl Rogers Fromm believed man’s ability for self growth. He refused to believe the Freudian concept that explains man is geared by innate primary destructive forces of libido. Fromm realized that unlike in the Viennese Victorian society   sexual repression plays no major part in the Contemporary Society. Fromm once stated that in the modern society people mostly repress their true thoughts and feelings rather than the sexual urges.

Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

The psychoanalytical components in Buddhism have been emphasized by many scholars like Martin Wicramasinghe D.Lit, Laurence W. Christensen etc. The Buddhist Jathaka stories from the Khuddaka Nikaya contain 550 stories and Rev Buddhaghosa, translated most of the Jathaka stories into Pali about 430 A.D.  In most of these Buddhist Jathaka stories a powerful psychoanalytical   fraction can be detected.

The British Psychiatrist and a renowned Psychoanalyst Dr Douglas H. Burns writes that “The realization of Nirvana requires the maximum possible goal of psychoanalysis—a complete laying bare of the subconscious, the total removal of repression, rationalization and all other defense” (Buddhist Thought – Dr Douglas H. Burns P.155)
Some contemporary psychologists see parallels between the Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis.
The primacy of experiencing for both disciplines, particularly concerning the experiencing subject’s momentary state of consciousness, forms a central theme for both Zen and psychoanalysis. (Cooper 2001)
Eric Fromm saw a larger perimeter in psychoanalysis and did not limit it to neuroses. Fromm criticized Freud’s patriarchal attitude as limiting the development of psychoanalysis as a science. (Maccoby 1994). Eric Fromm suggests that Zen Buddhism has a prolific influence on theory and technique of psychoanalysis.
“…[W]hat can be said with more certainty is that the knowledge of Zen, and a concern with it, can have a most fertile and clarifying influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis. Zen, different as it is in its method from psychoanalysis, can sharpen the focus, throw new light on the nature of insight, and heighten the sense of what it is to see, what it is to be creative, what it is to overcome the affective contaminations and false intellectualizations which are the necessary results of experience based on the subject-object split” (Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Eric Fromm p. 140).
The psychoanalytical module in Buddhism is very much evident. Buddhism provides psychological methods of analyzing human experience and inquiring into the potential and hidden capacities of the human mind. According to Buddhism mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. The verse 37 of the Dhammapada   explains the dynamics of human mind thus
The mind is capable of travelling vast distances – up or down, north or south, east or west – in any direction. It can travel to the past or the future.
Gerald Virtbauer of the University of Vienna makes comparisons between the Buddhism and the Western Psychology.
The first approach is to present and explore parts of Buddhist teachings as a psychology. As many teachers of different Buddhist traditions point out, Buddhism is not primarily a religion based on faith and worship, but a system, or an art to inquire into the human mind. (Buddhism as a Psychological System: Three Approaches Gerald Virtbauer 2008)
Search for Meaning
In 1959 Eric Fromm co authored an incomparable book titled Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis with D. T. Suzuki and Richard de Martino.  In this book Fromm postulates distinct relationship between the Western psychoanalyses and Zen Buddhism. Eric Fromm argued that the human being needs to find an answer to his existence and this urge to search for meaning differs human from other animals. In addition he highlights that   human has an inner dynamism that directed towards personal growth.  He viewed that living is a process that starts at birth and does not end at death. Fromm states that most of the people   die before they are fully born. The notion of fully born according to Fromm is becoming fully functional as a human being.
Eric Fromm in his book   Escape from Freedom asks series of questions that were originally based on Talmud.
1)    If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
2)     If I am for myself only, what am I?
3)     If not now, when?
These types of questions were evident in the Buddhist Philosophy.  Once when the lord Buddha was delivering a sermon a young girl showed up. Then the Buddha asked a series of questions from her.
1)    Where do you come from?
She said I don’t know Venerable Sir, and then the Buddha asked
2)    Where do you go?
She said I don’t know.
3)    Do you know?
The girl replied – “Yes”
 Finally the Buddha asked
4)     Don’t you know?
She said “No”
It was an enigmatic type of answers but the girl was referring to her previous existence when the Buddha asked where do you come from? She did not know from where she came to the present existence. When she was asked where do you go? She replied I don’t know, because she does not know   where she would go after her death. When the Buddha asked do you know? She said yes because she knew that she was a mortal and   she would certainly die one day. When she was asked don’t you know?  Her reply was no. Because she did not know when she would be dead.
The search for meaning has become the main theme of religion and philosophy.  The meaning of life constitutes a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general.  Dr Viktor E. Frankl in his influential book Man’s Search for Meaning states that the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected. (Man’s Search for Meaning- p.157) In 494 B.C the Prince Siddhartha renounced his wealth and went in search for meaning. He spent six years travelling, exchanging ideas with different mentors and practicing meditation.  When he attained the Enlightenment he realized that the meaning of life has been obscured by universal suffering. The Buddha states that….
1. All of life is marked by suffering.
2. Suffering is caused by desire and attachment.
3. Suffering can be stopped.
4. The way to end suffering is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Buddha explained that life is permeated with suffering caused by desire that suffering ceases when desire ceases.
Human Suffering
The Buddhist Philosophy deeply explains the causes of human suffering and path for freedom. Therefore Buddhism is not based on pessimism. It is based on realistic principles. The mundane understanding of suffering is related to bearing of pain, inconvenience, and distress that connected with hopelessness. According to the Buddha the word suffering has a deep existential meaning. It is an universal explanation of the true human condition.
To explain suffering, the Buddha used the term “Dukkha” which has an universal meaning. Many Western Psychologists misinterpreted the word “Dukkha” or universal suffering and they viewed it as an agonizing human condition. This was due to the mistranslation done by the French Philosopher Anatole France in the late Centaury. Anatole France translated the word “Dukkha” in to French as souffrance and then in to English as suffering.  Ever since many Western scholars grasped the concept of “Dukkha” incorrectly. Therefore many thought Dukkha symbolizes the dark side of human existence filled with pessimism and despair.
However Eric Fromm was able to grasp the deep philosophical notion of universal suffering or “Dukkha” and he saw human suffering in personal lives, in the society and in the Civilization.
In 1960 Fromm wrote that “Psychoanalysis is a characteristic expression of Western man’s spiritual crisis, and an attempt to find a solution”(Fromm et al., 1960, p. 80). Although Freud stated that Psychoanalysis is a method of medical treatment for those who suffer from neurosis (Five Lectures delivered by 1909 by Dr. Sigmund Freud at the Clark University) Fromm did not want to limit Psychoanalysis to the neurotic patients. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Fromm believed in experience rather than interpretation.
Fromm’s psychoanalytic technique was essentially different from Freud’s psychic archeology. Fromm attempted to create what he called a more “humanistic” face-to-face encounter. He believed the analyst must understand the patient by empathy as well as intellect, with the heart as well as the head. (Maccoby 1994)
Freud assumed that hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain traumatic experiences. When Freud went in to individual level Fromm applied Psychoanalytic theory to social and cultural problems.
Eric Fromm saw the human suffering in the individual level as well as within the society. He saw the collective suffering. Fromm was on the view that psychological problems often result when an individual feels isolated from society. Describing individual suffering Fromm wrote…………
“The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless” (Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis- E. Fromm et al. pp. 85-86).
Fromm Further says that one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if man had no monetary or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
Fromm saw extensive suffering in the society that was resulted from centuries old socio economic systems and loss of meaning. Fromm’s book The Sane Society looks in to the dilemmas caused by the industrialization. Many Psychologists believe that Fromm’s publication The Sane Society was a respond to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. In the Sane Society Fromm looked in to a new form of human suffering and man’s escape into over conformity and the danger of robotism in the modern industrial society.
In his book Escape from Freedom Fromm describes how freedom can be frightening and therefore, many people run from freedom. For average men freedom is not an emancipation it is a burden. Fromm further postulates that man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Know Thyself
Eric Fromm strongly believed that “Know thyself” is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness. Fromm’s notion “Know thyself” was stated by the Buddha over 2600 years ago. The story of   Bhaddawaggiya Princes reveals the importance of knowing thyself.
The Bhaddawaggiya Princes where looking for a woman who stole their valuable possessions. When they met the Buddha the princes asked “Venerable Sir, did you see a woman? The Buddha answered “What is more important whether look for a woman or to look for thy self? (means know thyself). The princes replied that more important is to know thy self.
Knowing thyself or achieving self realization   is one of the virtues of Buddhism. The young apprentice Angulimala was ill-advised by his teacher and he became an addictive killer.  He killed nearly 999, men and collected the fingers of his victims.  When he saw the Buddha he thought that he could have his next victim. Angulimala ordered the Buddha to stop. The Buddha replied “ I have already stopped therefore you should stop too” The Buddha meant that he does not harm anyone and he was able to stop the cycle of Sansara or the continuous flow of birth, life , death and reincarnation. This phrase created a cognitive revolution in Angulimala.   Angulimala had a self realization that led to a dramatic transformation his personality. He renounced violence.
Finding thyself was one of the key ideas of Eric Fromm. Fromm once expressed that man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.  Fromm deemed that attempts should be made to create harmony between the drives of the individual and the society.
 Human Freedom
The idea of freedom was unique to Fromm. He assumed that freedom is the central characteristic of human nature.  According to Fromm often people escape from freedom. He described three ways in which people escape from freedom:
   1. Authoritarianism (either submitting power to others becoming passive and compliant or becoming an authority by applying structure to others)
   2.  Destructiveness.
   3.  Automaton conformity.
In his 1968 book  The Revolution of Hope Fromm writes that man has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.
Michael Maccoby in his 1994 article The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: the Prophetic and the Analytic points out that Fromm’s model of the healthy individual who transcends and transforms society is the “productive character,” the individuated person who loves and creates. Unlike his other character types – receptive, hoarding, exploitative and marketing – the productive character lacks clinical or historical grounding. It is a questionable ideal. (Maccoby 1994)
Eric Fromm believed that human is capable of determining his freedom. He saw Zen Buddhism as a way from bondage to freedom. In his own words Fromm explains………
“Zen Buddhism is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being; it is a way from bondage to freedom; it liberates our natural energies; … and it impels us to express our faculty for happiness and love (p. 115).
Eric Fromm introduced five basic needs and the 5th need he called -A Frame of Orientation – The need for a stable and consistent way of perceiving the world and understanding its events.
The Buddha explained that the virtuous man perceives the world and its events in realistic manner. He achieves self realization the highest plane in the human intellectual structure.
The Ven.Dr. Walpola Rahula explains this condition more gracefully in his book What the Buddha Taught.
 He who has realized Truth, Nirvana, is the happiest being in the world. He is free from all ‘complexes’ and obsessions, the worries and troubles that torment others. His mental health is perfect. He does not repent the past, nor does he brood over the future.  He lives fully in the present. Therefore he appreciates and enjoys things in the purest sense without self-projections. He is joyful, exultant, enjoying the pure life, his faculties pleased, free from anxiety, serene and peaceful.
Eric Fromm saw humanistic religion such as Buddhism could help people achieve self-fulfillment and understanding.  Fromm concluded that the Buddhism could see man realistically and objectively, having nobody but the ‘awakened’ ones to guide him, and being able to he guided because each man has within himself the capacity to awake and be enlightened.
 References
 1)    Cooper P.  (2001). The gap between: being and knowing in Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis. American Journal of Psychoanalysis
 2)    Fromm E.(1941)  Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart
 3)    Fromm E.(1955)  The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart
 4)    Fromm E.   Suzuki D. MartinoR. (1974)   Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.    Souvenir Press Ltd
 5)    Jayatunge R. (2005) Buddhism and Psychology . AHAS Publishers Sri Lanka
 6)    Maccoby .M (1994) The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic. Retrieved from

The Tao of Walt Whitman, by Connie Shaw and Ike Allen

The Tao of Walt Whitman

Introduction

Walt Whitman was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, whose mysticism, lyricism, and great heart has made him beloved by many. He is the poet of the people: “The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy.” And he was—we would like to profess—Taoist in spirit, whether he called himself that or not.

We aren’t Whitman scholars, but we know a good poet when we read one. And Whitman has all the elements we love: gorgeous language, a fearless ability to dive into the center of mystery, and an all-embracing attitude toward life. Neither are we Taoist masters—rather, pilgrims on the bumpy path of insight who appreciate a hardy fellow traveler like our poet. Here’s how he describes himself: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He was a man exhilarated by the sublime beauty of nature, who celebrated eternity in the everyday—and this is why we call him Taoist.

Taoism is the ancient Chinese philosophical and spiritual tradition that emphasizes compassion, humility, and moderation. (Whitman had the first two in abundance; but the third, one could argue, was not his forte.) Tao is the energy of life, and so it encompasses both the practical and the mystical. The key is to find the balance between them, and this is our objective in The Tao of Walt Whitman.

Says the literary critic Harold Bloom, “If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson’s two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson’s, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”

So in this volume we have applied the Whitman scriptures to daily life, to Tao. We’ve chosen a Taoist principle for each week of the year, and a Whitman verse that expresses or comments on that principle for each day, Monday through Saturday. We’ve given you something to do or reflect on for the day with the aim of plumbing the depths of Taoist Whitman wisdom and fully experiencing the beauty and truth therein. On Sundays we offer our own experience of, or reflection on, the weekly adventures.

Please use this book in any way that is useful to you. It isn’t meant to be a taskmaster. Don’t feel as though you must proceed in a linear fashion if that is not your wont. Poetry, and Taoism, and most certainly Whitman, are agents of freedom above all. He was certainly one to shake things up; it is our hope that you will question the need for anything stale and no longer vital in your life as you contemplate his words and take these actions.

You can switch the actions around to suit your schedule, the seasons, or your whims. Sunday is a day to reflect on the week’s passages and actions. If you haven’t completed them, however, you can take the time to do so on Sunday. You can also go to dailytao.net to write about your own experience of the week and read what others have to say.

Feel free to extend any action, insight, or inspiration for another day, week, month…or the rest of your life. Whatever you do, we hope you enjoy, and find inspiration and benefit from the words of this great American poet.

Week 1 Truth

Monday

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

The insignificant is as big to me as any,

What is less or more than a touch?

If you’re open to the pedestrian moments along with the larger revelations as you go about your activities, perhaps you will discover some heretofore hidden truth. And you might try answering Whitman’s question as well.

Tuesday

Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so

What are the bedrock principles, truths, or realities you live by? Can they be denied by anyone? Do you think Whitman is right?

Wednesday

O truth of the earth! O truth of things! I am determined to press the whole way toward you,

Sound your voice! I scale mountains or dive in the sea after you.

How committed are you to the truth? To paraphrase Tracy Chapman, “If everything you think you know is wrong, would you change?” Write about 3 things that you’re lying to yourself about and what steps you can take to change things.

Thursday

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,

The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either,

They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,

They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly

Give a try at expressing one of “the truths of the earth” in some way other than through words. Perhaps paint a picture, dance a dance, create a melody…

Friday

All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world,

There shall be no subject too pronounced

Take one of your most firmly held beliefs and go through your day imagining that the opposite is true. For example, if you sincerely feel that someone in your daily sphere presents a challenge to your wellbeing, take every opportunity to notice ways in which this may not be so.

Saturday

What do you suppose creation is?

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God?

And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?

Spend time contemplating the meaning of this. Is this true?

Sunday

I spent this week continuously asking myself what I could actually say was true. What was true for me? I noticed that my truth was not necessarily true for others. By the end of the week, I noticed that the only thing it seemed everyone could agree on was that we were all having a common experience. Beyond that, it seemed we each translated truth in our way to support us in this experience. What is true for me is that I create my own truths and I choose to create ideas that make my experience here filled with joy by whatever name. I invite you to enjoy your truths and embrace the truth others share with you. –iKE

Connie Shaw is a publisher and poetry lover who lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Ike Allen is co-creator of the film Leap! and other movies about consciousness. He leads transformational seminars internationally, and also lives in Boulder.

Here and Now, by J.M Coetzee & Paul Auster

The New York Times Sunday Book Reviews

Pen Pals‘Here and Now,’ by Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee

It’s an odd moment for literary letters as a genre. The proliferation of letter volumes published over the past few years (Beckett, Bellow, Wodehouse, Gaddis, with Calvino and Wallace on the way) might be considered post-mortem in more ways than one, putting to bed a form that is already effectively dead, along with its authors. For while the ­e-­revolution means changes in how we read any sort of book, the move from epistles to ­e-­pistles is, for better or worse, a fundamental redefinition of the genre itself. And while there are probably plenty of contemporary writers saving up their best e-mails on external hard drives for later publication, it’s difficult to imagine those looking or acting like a volume of letters. Since you will read these collected e-mails on your electronic device, there’s a fairly good chance they will look like, well, your in-box. 

Arriving at the end of the print-letter tradition, Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee’s collected correspondence, “Here and Now,” is all about new beginnings. The two writers met for the first time in February 2008, and shortly thereafter Coetzee wrote to Auster proposing an exchange of letters as a way to “strike sparks off each other.” The book’s inaugural letter, from Coetzee in July 2008, skips any preamble and goes straight to talking about friendship, a topic Coetzee says he’s been thinking and reading about. Auster responds with his own thoughts on friendship, and thus begins a three-year correspondence between Auster’s home in Brooklyn and Coetzee’s across the world in Australia. The letters range in length from a couple of sentences to several pages, sometimes sent in quick succession, other times with months between. They’re mostly mailed but occasionally faxed, even less occasionally e-mailed (to Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt, since Auster doesn’t use e-mail). The authors also see each other in person during these years, referring fondly in their letters to visits in Portugal, Italy, France. They write in passing about their families, their travels, various books and films, their own novels. But mostly what they do is pose topics for discussion and then see where those topics lead, from friendship to sports to ­Derrida to handbaskets to international politics and various points between.
For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not.
They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.” Auster takes off from this “need for heroes” to relate one of the book’s many anecdotes, about how as a child his mother bought him a complete football outfit that he never actually played in, but simply wore to pretend. His interest in football, he writes, “was all about the outer trappings.” The sports conversation continues on from here, the authors ultimately approaching this topic from five or six different angles and with stimulating results.

Other interests and opinions they find they have in common, and discuss with varying degrees of success, include: Kafka and Beckett; liberal politics; disappointment in American poetry since the 1960s; doubts that their own books will endure; the belief that humanity “would rather live through the misery of the reality we have created . . . than put together a new, negotiated reality”; that linguistic signifiers are essentially arbitrary (although not meaningless, Auster adds); that everyone’s relationship to the food we eat is more complicated than we generally acknowledge; that the German writer Heinrich von Kleist is an example (Coetzee writes) of “an A league of writers, which has very few members and in which the game being played is very different from the game in the more comfortable B league to which one is accustomed”; that novelists should not respond publicly to their critics; that being interviewed is far less engaging than having a real conversation; and that writers, in order to remain vibrant, must always attempt something new, which of all of the above seems the one shared belief most responsible for their embarking on this correspondence in the first place.
In fact, the sheer amount of agreement in the pages of “Here and Now” eventually becomes a problem for the book, as their dialogical back-and-forth starts to read more like a monologue. Perhaps two-thirds in, the general mood of the letters shifts from “striking sparks” to something more like commiseration, and for a while the discussion loses steam. It’s fine as far as it goes — yet when ­Coetzee starts romanticizing Aus­ter’s writerly struggles, and when ­Auster writes that “griping can be fun,” then offers, “Let the young roll their eyes when we speak. Let the not so young ignore what we say,” as a reader, I was tempted to take him up on it. Instead, I found myself wondering what “Here and Now” would have been like if each author had corresponded with someone he agreed with less often. That would’ve been a different book, of course, and perhaps more important for its authors, a different sort of friendship.
Because friendship is really the point of “Here and Now.” They did not set out to make a book, but to make a friendship, and this fact accounts for many of the book’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. Starting with their first letters — or ­earlier, with the decision to correspond at all — friendship is the book’s overarching subject, and the various topics that come and go are before all else attempts at finding that common ground upon which friendship can flourish. In the early pages, Auster writes that friendship offers “a position of absolute equality. You are both giving more than you receive, both receiving more than you give, and in the reciprocity of this exchange, friendship blooms,” and three years of correspondence later, the two authors do seem to feel they have realized some version of this ideal. They’ve come to occupy each other’s thoughts, Auster referring to ­Coetzee as an “absent other,” and ­Coetzee responding that he feels “a certain fraternal tenderness for you and your dogged, unappreciated bravery.” That “unappreciated” may be an adjective in need of a reality check; but taken as a whole, as a series of collaborative inquiries and an extended meditation on the processes of friendship, the book has something substantive to offer.

Martin Riker teaches English at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Baron in The Trees, by Italo Calvino

The Baron in The Trees 

The New York Review of Books

Effrontery & Charm
NOVEMBER 21, 1968D.J. Enright

Italo Calvino’s novel, The Baron in the Trees (Random House, 1959), concerned an Italian nobleman who took to the trees as a boy and never came down to earth again. Within the story’s charming premises there was space for Calvino’s highly developed and humanistic imagination to accomplish quite a lot. In the interests of credibility, we were shown how eminently possible it was for Cosimo to lead “a normal life,” all the way from performing his daily duties in a decent, hygienic manner to performing the act of love in a comfortable as well as sometimes a rather acrobatic fashion. (The blurbwriter was inspired to an unusual wittiness on this occasion, remarking that women were quite ready to go out on a limb for Cosimo.) Our hero studied the Encyclopédistes, fought a duel with a Spanish Jesuit, led successful campaigns against wolves, forest fires, and Mohammedan pirates, acquired a press and printed pamphlets composed by himself (such as The Magpie’s Gazette), became Master of an unorthodox Lodge of Freemasons (“he who had never wanted nor built nor inhabited any house with walls”), was visited by Napoleon (“Were I not the Emperor Napoleon, I would like to be the citizen Cosimo Rondò”), etc., etc. Cosimo forswore the earth as an act of rebellion against his family, and even when he dies, he does not return. The old dying man is swept out of the branches by the anchor of a balloon belonging to some English aeronauts and his body is never seen again. Between these two eccentric events, Cosimo has led a reasonably full life, it occurs to us, and a more than usually satisfying one. He has lived according to his lights, he has never compromised, yet neither has he renounced his species.

It is cheering to deduce from the modest success of The Baron in the Trees that there is still interest in something quite other than the Great American Novel (and smaller British one), the Apocalyptic-Excremental or Sexual Variations without a Theme, that there is still interest in an art which is more concerned with life and growth than with decay and death. Calvino’s reviewers were forced to dip into a new (or perhaps old) word-hoard: “mellow,” “graceful,” “beautifully written,” “delightful,” “antique ease and enjoyment,” “a lovely book.”

Some of these epithets, I imagine, will be applied to Calvino’s new book, a collection of linked stories, or “evolutionary tales.” The narrator, old (indeed remarkably old, or ageless, or even young) Qfwfq, tells of his experiences at various stages of evolution, as a young vertebrate who is in process of deserting the sea for the land, as the last of the dinosaurs anxiously concealing his identity from the New Ones, for whom his sort are doubtfully mythical figures of dread, like giants in later history (“You looked as if you’d seen…a Dinosaur!”), and as a mollusk knowing love and jealousy. The opening story, which makes the film 2001 look about as …

The Voices of Marrakech, by Elias Canetti

          The Voices of Marrakech

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

The New York Times Review
 Jonah Lehrer strikes me as one of those young people who turn up in articles on how life is now so competitive that children no longer have time for jump-rope or adolescents for baby-sitting. At 25, he has already been a Rhodes scholar, worked in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and been a line chef in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He writes a blog on science issues affiliated with Seed magazine, where he is an editor, and now has written “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” a precocious and engaging book that tries to mend the century-old tear between the literary and scientific cultures.

In college, Lehrer did a double major in neuroscience and English. One day, during a break in molecular experiments on the nature of memory, which involved “performing the strange verbs of bench science: amplifying, vortexing, pipetting,” he picked up “Swann’s Way.” “All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences,” he writes. What he got instead was the surprise Virgil gave Dante: Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew 1) that smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) that memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual remembering. These were facts scientists didn’t establish until a few years ago. And here was Proust making the same point in 1913.

Quick as an ion opens a potassium gate, Lehrer began re-examining his favorite artists to see what they could teach us about the mind. He found that writers and musicians consistently lead the way to new theories with inspiration, while scientists mop up with hard data. Gertrude Stein’s experimental writing presaged Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar, while Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” anticipated discoveries by neurologists that what the mind at first rejects as ugly it later perceives as beautiful, once the underlying patterns have been recognized.

Here’s Lehrer’s take on how the process works in the case of Proust and memory. Proust’s goal in “Remembrance of Things Past” is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists,” he writes, “after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone ... bear unflinchingly ... the vast structure of recollection.” Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory. This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.”
Similarly, Proust beat neuroscientists to the punch in discovering that memory is faulty and always changing. To remember is to misremember. For instance, in his narrator’s recollection, the location of Albertine’s beauty mark moves from “her chin to her lip to a bit of cheekbone just below her eye,” as Lehrer notes. Recently, researchers at New York University proved that Proust got the mutability of memory right. First they conditioned rats to fear a loud noise by associating it with an electric shock. Then they gave them a chemical injection to stop their memory of the shock just as they were about to hear the noise. With their access to the memory temporarily blocked, the rats went on to lose the memory itself entirely. Their brains had reset. “A memory,” Lehrer writes, “is only as real as the last time you remembered it.”
Lehrer is smart, and there are some fun moments in these pages. But while he is good at showing that Artist A’s work preceded Biologist B’s, he only rarely shows that A influenced B. So what he’s written is not quite intellectual history, more like intellectual patterning. At the same time, I’m not sure all his conclusions follow from his data. What the N.Y.U. memory researcher showed, it seems to me, is only that memories fade when they are not used, which we hardly need Proust to confirm. And Herz herself did not think she had proven the accuracy of Proust’s proposition: she found that smells produce emotionally intense memories but not particularly intricate ones. Proust’s “confidence in the precise contents of his odor-cued recollections may have been ill founded,” she concludes in her 2002 paper.
In 1959, C. P. Snow asserted that there were now two cultures in the educated world, the scientific and the artistic, separated by “mutual incomprehension.” Artists did not understand — or care about — science; physicists and biologists paid no attention to art. Today, scientists are making border raids. There is a literary-scientific movement called biopoetics, led by the Harvard professor E. O. Wilson, that wants the humanities, as he wrote in his 1999 book “Consilience,” “rationalized.” Biopoetics wants to know why literature is necessary. What is its evolutionary function? And what does it mean to say one book is “better” than another? They’d like to wire a reader with “Madame Bovary” on a gurney to see what parts of his brain light up when Emma Bovary has sex with Rodolphe and which when she commits suicide. Now here comes Lehrer, pushing back. You don’t need Newton’s Third Law of Motion to tell you that turnabout is fair play.

D. T. Max is the author of “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery,” which has just been published in paperback.

Here is Where We Meet, by John Berger

Here is Where We Meet

theguardian Review

If Alain Tanner's haunting In the White City is one of the best Lisbon films, John Berger's equally evocative "Lisboa" is one of its truly great stories. On a hot day at the end of May in Lisbon, John - Berger, we are implicitly invited to assume, since another story in the collection features his daughter Katya - sees an old woman walking across the park towards him. He recognises her walk as that of his mother, who has been dead for 15 years. "The dead don't stay where they are buried," she advises him.

"Lisboa", the opening story in Berger's new collection, Here is Where We Meet , is a magical evocation of the White City, its seven hills, labyrinthine streets and endless steps. The trams pass so close to people's homes, he writes, that you could reach out an arm and give a birdcage a gentle push. "Perhaps Lisboa is a special stopover for the dead," muses John, "perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city." But as the reader will discover, the dead show themselves off in many other locations, too - Krakow, Islington, Madrid. What's special about Lisbon, it's subtly suggested, are the trams. "It's not any place, John, it's a meeting place," his late mother tells him. "There aren't many cities left with trams, are there?" Berger then remembers the tram they took when he was a boy growing up in Croydon, the number 194. "We took it every day from East to South Croydon and back." The tram is more than a madeleine or a mnemonic; it's a spiritual medium.

In the collection's longest piece, "The Szum and the Ching", a river performs a similar function. Having travelled to a remote Polish village to open up a friend's house, John sits by the Szum river. He thinks of the River Ching, which ran at the bottom of the garden where he lived in the east London suburb of Highams Park until the age of six. "The Ching was my father's river." It eased memories of the trenches and brought son and father closer together, as John's father built a drawbridge for the boy. "When he lowered the drawbridge, he could borrow my innocence and so recall his own ..." By the Szum, John hears birdsong, yet there are no birds to be seen, as if the foliage itself is singing, an impression identical to one formed in Highams Park. "The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season." What in another writer's work might be the associative work of memory becomes, in Berger's fiction, virtual alchemy. "A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum."

"Islington", a tale of lost love, recovered memories and the end less flux of passing time and its effects on houses, gardens and people, appears in New Writing 13 and is by a long stretch the best piece in the anthology. Sad, reflective and peppered with unforgettable images, "Islington" does what all great short stories do: it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh. Makes us do a double-take. "Yet the density of the foliage was not like that of a jungle, but like the density of a closed book, which had to be read page by page."

A season of talks, exhibitions, readings and performances, bearing the same title as the collection, takes place in London from April 11 to May 18. It's hard to think of an author more deserving of this level of attention.

To The Wedding, by John Berger

To The Wedding, by John Berger 

theguardian Review

In the days, indeed weeks, before I meet John Berger, we speak on the phone several times. We talk about his aversion to interviews, which he articulates in such a charming and considered manner, that, before I know it, I find myself sympathising with him. Nevertheless, he agrees to meet me and see where our conversation might lead. It will, he says, be 'a kind of collaboration'. My heart sinks - but it needn't have.

The interview/collaboration duly takes place in Paris, in the home of one of his many actual collaborators, Nella Bieski, a Russian writer. Berger has travelled there from the Haute Savoie, high in the French Alps, where he has lived for three decades. His voice has an odd lilt to it, suggesting that English may now be his second language.

'John,' Nella tells me, while we sit down to a lunch he has prepared from ingredients bought that morning at the local market, 'is utterly unique.' Even if you had never read one of his books, you would not not have to spend too long in Berger's presence for this to become apparent.

From the off, he sweeps you off your feet. Here is Berger on smoking, which he does with the fierce enjoyment of a true addict. 'A cigarette', he says, inhaling deeply, 'is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.'

For the first time in a long time I wish I was a smoker, but, fagless, my side of the proscenium arch teetering, I listen, slightly mesmerised, trying to keep up with his free flow of ideas and the oddly illuminating tangents he keeps going off on. He shows me a strange-looking fish, given to him by the local fishmonger, who knows he likes to draw them: 'See, a collaboration that emerged from a conversation.'

He looks a good 15 years younger than his age, which, unbelievably, is 78, and possesses the kind of contagious energy and creative curiosity one usually encounters only in the very young or indefatigably idealistic. In this, he reminds me, of all people, of Bono: the same hunger for stimulation, the same easy grace, the same seemingly undimmable optimism about a world that seems for ever to be testing the limits of that faith.

Berger is one of the most influential British intellectuals of the past 50 years, still best known for his seminal book of art criticism, Ways of Seeing, which was published in 1972 and has shaped the thinking of at least two generations of artists and students. From as far back as 1958, though, when he wrote his first novel, A Painter In Our Time, he was dealing with exile and displacement, which, has since become one of the defining political and social issues of our time. His writing ranges across forms and his subject matter varies from Picasso to world poverty, from photography to the plight of landless peasantry. He seems, even in old age, to have retained the curiosity and energy that drove his younger self.

'If you think of many of his contemporaries,' says author Geoff Dyer, whose first book, Ways of Telling, was a homage to Berger's seminal work of art criticism, 'say, Kingsley Amis or John Osborne, they grew old into grumpy, twisted, unhappy people, forsaking completely the idealism of their youth. In avoiding that awful journey to the right his peers took, Berger has also avoided the contemptuousness that often marks intellectuals in old age. His capacity for hope and enjoyment and renewal remain undimmed, because he has insisted on living up to all the values he has expressed in his work.'

How, though, to enumerate, never mind measure, that life's work? As a novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, essayist, poet, film-maker and art critic, Berger has consistently eluded neat compartmentalising, and, though born and bred in England, has always possessed, in his free-roaming gaze, a distinctly European sensibility. As Dyer notes, 'no single bit of his huge body of work really represents him'. His most comparable contemporaries are Umberto Eco or the late WG Sebald, but it is difficult to compare him to any English author of the past 50 years. 'In contemporary English letters,' wrote Susan Sontag, '[Berger] seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.'

Berger's profile, though, has waned of late in his homeland, partly because of the decline of the old Marxist left, of which he was such a vital and singular presence, and partly because of his sojourn in rural France. He has been writing and engaging all the while, of course, and now he will briefly return as the country in which he made his name puts on a month-long celebration of his life and work.

'Here Is Where We Meet' stretches over five weeks at various London venues from 11 April. There will be readings, some by Berger himself, discussions, exhibitions of art and photo- graphy, a retrospective of his films and television work, and panels featuring many of his collaborators, including the novelists Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels and the theatre director Simon McBurney, whose company, Complicite, staged an acclaimed adaptation of his novel The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol.

'His work came into my orbit in much the same way as it came into everyone else's of my generation,' says McBurney. 'I was studying English Literature in the late Seventies and early Eighties and Ways of Seeing was one of the key texts we looked to for elucidation. It was that heady time when everyone was in thrall to Barthes and the French structuralists, this whole new way of looking at art and literature, and Berger, in retrospect, stood out because his voice was absolutely direct, and practical and clear. It was his clarity and, of course, his compas sion, that entered my consciousness and has stayed with me ever since.'

Published in 1972, with an accompanying TV series, Ways of Seeing remains Berger's most famous and widely read work, a slap in the face of the art establishment and an almost sacred text for the two or three art generations of students who grew up under its immeasurable influence. 'It was revelatory,' enthuses Dyer, 'he opened up the world of painting for me. Here was someone who made these boring old paintings of men in ruffs seem suddenly interesting and relevant.'

With his groundbreaking mix of polemic and scholarship, Berger more or less invented what we now call cultural studies, and the provocative political thrust of the book made it, in the words of an aggrieved art critic of the time, 'like Mao's Little Red Book for a generation of art students'.

The young Berger, though, seems to have been more natural outsider than iconoclast. He was brought up 'in an ordinary, middle-class home in southern England', but, from the age of 12, remembers 'feeling like I belonged somewhere else, somewhere not so stifling'. His mother was a working-class woman from Bermondsey, south London, while his father was head of a public department with the Pythonesque title of the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants. It was Stanley Berger who insisted on sending his son to board at St Edmond's school in Oxford.

'My childhood from six to 16 was spent in these monstrous institutions,' he says, looking pained. 'That school in Lindsay Anderson's If was the Côte d'Azur compared to those places.'

He suddenly stands up and beckons me out to the hall, where there hangs a rather severe portrait in oils of his father which he painted, aged 18. 'You can see,' he says, sincerely, 'the great respect I had for him.'

In 1944, Berger was drafted into the army, where he was immediately considered officer material because of his schooling. He refused the commission, to the considerable chagrin of his superiors, and, for his sins, was dispatched to Ballykelly barracks in Northern Ireland. 'I lived among these raw recruits,' he says almost wistfully, 'and it was the first time I really met working-class contemporaries. I used to write letters for them, to their parents and occasionally their girlfriends. It was the first time I wrote publicly in a way and though it was a pretty awful year, I can see now that it was a very, very formative experience for me.'

After the army, he went to Chelsea School of Art, another formative experience spent 'painting, drawing, writing, and talking to Henry Moore'. Suddenly, he had found a place to belong. 'Life,was suddenly so full.' He subsequently taught drawing part-time and began writing art criticism for the New Statesman. 'Until 1954, I'd only ever thought of being a painter, but I earned my money when and where I could. You could say I drifted into writing'.

Though he was a consistently provocative critic, writing about art from an avowedly Marxist perspective, it was not until the publication of his first book that Berger realised he was still an outsider, even within the broad church that was the British Left in the Fifties.

Written in 1956, A Painter of Our Time concerns a Hungarian emigré who returns to Budapest during the uprising of that year. It ends with the narrator, also called John, admitting that he had no idea on which side the protagonist pledged his allegiance, though he probably fought against the rebels. Such was the furore that this political heresy caused among the left of the time that the book was withdrawn just two weeks after publication. Writing in this newspaper, Stephen Spender claimed that it 'stank of the concentration camps' and could only have been written by one other person - Josef Goebbels.

'Incredible!' says Berger now, smiling ruefully. 'I mean, the book emerged out of the experience of living among a group of European political refugees from fascism who each had their stories from Budapest, Berlin, and Vienna. Suddenly, I was seen as justifying the Red Army tanks as they moved into Europe.' He shakes his head. 'The irony is, of course, that in '68 I was actually in Prague when the tanks rolled again, with some messages of support from the West for supporters of Dubcek.'

The experience left the young Berger chastened to the point where he was unsure if he would ever write another book. In 1972, though, he came into his own in spectacular fashion. The controversial success of Ways of Seeing was followed by his sole excursion into post-modernist fiction with G, an experimental novel that won him the fledgling Booker Prize. Long before the stage-managed hysteria that now surrounds the Booker, Berger created a storm of controversy by using his acceptance speech to castigate Booker McConnell for their historical trading interests in the West Indies, then announced that he was donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. One of the Panthers accompanied him to the event, he admitted later, and, ironically, seemed rattled by the passionate intensity of Berger's speech, whispering 'Keep it cool, man, keep it cool' throughout.

In the wake of all this outrage, Berger briefly enjoyed - endured might be a better word - a brief infamy as the undisputed king of a certain kind of British radical chic. Bruised by the experience, he decamped to rural France, where he has remained ever since. He rejects the term exile: 'For me, it was a choice. I have never had any of the homesickness or suffering that goes with exile, not even an echo of that experience.'

He seems to welcome everyone into his world on an equal footing. Dyer recalls a dinner chez Berger where he was sat between the local plumber and Henri Cartier Bresson. 'When critics refer to John as a democratic writer, they are only touching on a bigger truth: he is a democratic person. The notion of a hierarchy, social or otherwise, is anathema to him, which may be why he left England.'

I ask if he had decided, back then, to retreat from his own reputation, which, for a brief time, seemed to have burgeoned beyond his control. He gives this some thought. 'Well, lots of my friends and political comrades thought that at the time. I remember one person in particular literally grabbing me and saying, "What the hell are you doing? You're not even old".' He laughs. 'But it was never that at all. It was more to do with finishing A Seventh Man, and suddenly realising I didn't know enough about the people I was writing about, about the actual experience of what you might call poor village life. In fact, the kind of conditions of which I was ignorant were the kind of conditions the majority of the people were living in. Still are, in fact. And those conditions have worsened considerably. Reading does not really help you understand those conditions, or find out how these people live. One has to experience it first hand.'

There are those on both the left and the right who viewed Berger's move to rural France to immerse himself in peasant life as a kind of inverse social climbing, the epitome of a certain kind of posh lefty slumming. His champions, though, see it as another example of his commitment to, as Dyer puts it, 'hacking the truth from the earth with his bare hands'. Berger, typically, is more matter-of-fact: 'I went there to learn and to listen in order to write, not to speak on their behalf. I wanted to touch something that had a relevance way beyond the French Alps. Far from retreating, I was homing in on a point that touched a nerve bud about a very important development in contemporary world history.'

If, like his friend and collaborator, Sebastião Salgado, the great photographer of the exiled and landless, Berger is both a chronicler and witness on behalf of those whose lives would otherwise go unrecorded, the one subject he has consistently avoided is himself.

We know that he lives with his second - or is it his third? - wife, Beverley and that his youngest son, Yves, lives in the same village. His other son, Jacob, is a film-maker and his daughter, Katya, a film critic. They sometimes feature in his books as travelling companions, voices to bounce off, but one could not imagine John Berger writing a straight memoir or autobiography.

'The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life. I suppose I have always followed my instincts, and my instinct has led me to these people's stories. Or, perhaps, their stories have found me.'

So you are a receptor for other people's experiences? 'Yes! That's it. I think I'm very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine.'

Berger's new book, Here Is Where We Meet, is a series of stories about the dead, in which his mother returns to haunt him in playful fashion in the first chapter. Mortality is a late theme, most poignantly articulated in 'To The Wedding', published in 1995, which he was writing when he discovered his daugher in law was HIV positive.

Simon McBurney, who is collaborating with Berger and Anne Michaels on a forthcoming performance, Vanishing Points, says: 'Everything John writes comes from experience. He has a capacity to go somewhere very deep in his work, to go very far into whatever experience he writes about. That journey is often made at considerable cost to himself and can cause him to go into very dark places, from which he finds it difficult to return. It's an attachment to the subject, a kind of creative immersion that is unique. I believe he is the most compassionate writer of our time.'

If he had to be judged, Berger says, it would be on A Seventh Man, which remains his most prescient work. 'A moment of satisfaction that stands out for me as a writer,' he says, 'and has nothing to do with prizes or anything like that, that moment was in Istanbul, when I went to a shanty town with some friends to visit someone they knew. In the shanty, we had tea, and there were about 20 books on a shelf made out of rough planks and A Seventh Man, in Turkish, was among them, and I thought how lucky I was to be a writer. The experience in the book had reached the experience of life, and was accepted, and gave word to it'.

There is a sense, though, that much of Berger's work stands as a testimony to what we have lost. Not just with the break-up of the British left, which provided the key oppositional context for his early provocational writing, but in the sense that we have no one younger writing with the same clarity and such compassion about art and politics and culture, and the mess we are in as party politics has congealed around the dull consensus of the centre-right. The drift towards specialisation has also meant that writers no longer tend to embrace such a range of forms in order to express the full breadth of their vision, the full weight of their beliefs.

'What seems to have been abandoned of late,' he tells me at one point, sounding, for the first time, regretful, 'and what is absolutely fundamental to all we have talked about, is the notion of solidarity. And it is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a meaningful quality, that is to say, a quality that gives meaning to life, which makes sense of life. So, I hope it's there in my work.'

It's there of course, in abundance, a reminder of what those of us who still adhere to a liberal-left world view have lost, have surrendered, and must surely rediscover if only in order to be heard.

Slow Man, by J.M. Coetzee

Slow Man, by J.M. Coetzee

                                                        The Observer Review

This is the first novel JM Coetzee has written since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. It displays all his expected pitch-perfect restraint, the language diamond clear, his attention always revealing a great deal more of his characters' intentions than they know themselves. He seems at pains here, though, to examine the nature of these gifts; to dismantle the mechanisms of his storytelling; to let the reader pull back the curtain a little and see him at work on the levers of his fiction and witness his practised pressing of all the right buttons.

Slow Man starts as a simple enough story. In an Australian suburb, a man is knocked off his bike. Paul Rayment enjoys the sensation of his body flying through the air. 'Relax!' he tells himself, as if he knows already that this is the last bit of lightness he will ever feel. He's right, too. When he wakes in a hospital bed, it is to give his consent to doctors to remove his leg above the knee.

The novel, thereafter, examines his reluctance, in the familiar phrase, to come to terms with the loss. To begin with, he can't cope with his nurses and, in particular, the one who calls 'the bedpan the potty; [and] his penis his willie'. When he hires a woman who can talk to him without embarrassment, who can bathe his stump and help him to his lavatory and rub some of the frustration of his new condition out of his back he, not surprisingly, falls in love.

The woman, Marijana, is a Croatian immigrant, married with children and an unfulfilled history that seems part of her attraction. Deluded, a little, Paul believes he can find ways to make her love him, despite his old, knobbly fingers and his singularity - he is a retired, divorced man who collects photographs of old Australian mining towns - and his new circumstances. He tells her of his love and she promptly disappears. It is at this point that into his life, and into the novel, comes Elizabeth Costello.

Readers of Coetzee will know Costello from his previous book. On that occasion, she acted as a kind of crabby alter ego, a novelist in her late sixties, invited to give a series of lectures on her - and perhaps his own - preoccupations, 'The Novel in Africa' and so on. At the heart of Elizabeth Costello, to further confuse matters, was a series of lectures Coetzee gave, partly in her persona, to the grandees of Princeton University in 1999, called 'The Lives of Animals'. In these, Costello argued controversially, fictionally that in the industrial production of meat for food 'we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end ... ' Costello, you might say, therefore comes into Slow Man with a bit of baggage.

For Paul Rayment, this is literally the case. The novelist, now a couple of years older and more frail, of whom he has heard vaguely, arrives on his doorstep with her things, brusquely introduces herself and moves into his spare room and his story. She explains her presence by quoting to Paul the opening section of his novel, the bike and him flying through the air and so on. Far from intruding on his novel, she suggests, he has intruded on hers: '"You came to me [Paul], that is all I can say. You occurred to me, a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion ... where we go from there I have no idea. Have you any proposal?" He is silent.'

From then on, as we are invited to believe she has all along, Costello dictates events, setting up rendez-vous, examining Paul's motivations for him. She has a novelist's sense of always moving things along, without ever quite knowing what will happen next. Her interventions into what, until then, has been a story of some compulsion might threaten, you imagine, to collapse any plausibilty and identification in Paul's predicaments. In fact, even as she reveals her manipulations, they prove what a consummate writer of fiction her creator, Coetzee, can be.