Sincere Books 12/3/2020

 I have just read a series of books I can only think of as sincere. One was Amelia Pang's Made in China, a novel about the homeless in San Francisco whose title I have forgotten, and now Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, I call them sincere because their subjects are the all right thinking people should be reading: prison labor camps in China, the homeless, and anti-Nazis. What bothers me is this question: why are they so indifferently written?

Which might akin to asking why are vegetables so good for you cooked to be bland. For all Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives having blurbs describing the book as a thriller, I am left wondering if anyone providing the blurbs ever read Philip Kerr or John Le Carre or, even Alistair McLean. I did not find a thriller until I got to their arrest and trial. I was left feeling I was to be interested because these were avant garde artists/lesbians even though one claimed not to be an artist and they did not live as lesbians. when what should be interesting me is how the writer tells the tale. That is what makes a thriller. Even Ian Fleming could hit that mark. Otherwise, it is overcooked vegetables - good for you but not exciting to the palate.

Yet, the book  resonated with me in a different way; more thoughtful than thrilling. In these days of Trump the book reinforced my thoughts that the pro-democratic forces must fight back with a constant and consistent message. The far right never stops its propaganda.

I did find this paragraph interesting:

Lucy and Suzanne's ability to empathize with soldiers who serving an abhorrent ideology may seem difficult for us to understand today, and we have a hard time following their logic. Yet by trying to liberate the island of Jersey, Lucy and Suzanne also yearned to liberate ordinary German soldiers from Hitler and Nazism.  This work to save the Germans from themselves exemplifies the communal bond across time and space that Susan Sontag describes as one of those who engaged in principled resistance: "You don't do it just to be in the right, or to appease your own conscience; much less will because you are confident your act will achieve its aim. You resist as an act of solidarity with communities of the principled and the disobedient; here, elsewhere. In the present. In the future."

p. 275; Epilogue

 Jackson gives the source for the Sontag quote as The Nation, April 17, 2003; her Oscar Romero presentation in 2003.

We cannot afford to rely on a politics based solely on the mechanics of elections when the anti-democrats mean to permeate the whole of society with their ideas.

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