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Mostrando postagens com marcador The New York Times Book Reviews. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador The New York Times Book Reviews. Mostrar todas as postagens

domingo, 22 de dezembro de 2013

Progressos economicos e sociais: um livro para os pessimistas - Angus Deaton


A Cockeyed Optimist

Angus Deaton’s ‘Great Escape’




Economic nostalgia can have a strong appeal, especially following more than five years of a financial crisis and its aftermath. In the United States, people talk longingly of the mid-20th century, when the middle class was growing and upward mobility was the norm. In Europe and Japan, many hark back to the 1980s, before the euro was born and the Japanese bubble burst. Even in China and India, two of the world’s more dynamic economies, some like to celebrate a time when life did not revolve around breakneck growth.
Matt Dorfman

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
By Angus Deaton
Illustrated. 360 pp. Princeton University Press. $29.95.
The biggest accomplishment of Angus Deaton’s “Great Escape” is to bring perspective to all this wistfulness. Deaton, a respected professor of economics at Princeton, does not stint on describing the world’s problems, be they income inequality in rich countries, health problems in China and the United States or H.I.V. in Africa. Large sections of the book revolve around such troubles and potential solutions. Yet Deaton’s central message is deeply positive, almost gloriously so. By the most meaningful measures — how long we live, how healthy and happy we are, how much we know — life has never been better. Just as important, it is continuing to improve.
Deaton is surely aware that many readers will view these claims with skepticism, especially coming from someone whose discipline often seems to elevate money over basic human needs. He addresses this skepticism with both sweeping and granular descriptions of how life has improved. Life expectancy has risen a stunning 50 percent since 1900 and is still rising. Despite the resulting population explosion, the average quality of life has surged. The share of people living on less than $1 a day (in inflation-adjusted terms) has dropped to 14 percent, from 42 percent as recently as 1981. Even as inequality has surged within many countries, global inequality has very likely fallen, thanks largely to the rise of Asia. “Things are getting better,” he writes, “and hugely so.”
Much of the most rapid change, of course, occurred long ago or — for Deaton’s readers in the United States and Europe — is happening far away. In the industrialized world, it can be easy to focus on bad news (like slow-growing wages and rising obesity) and dismiss the latest innovations (say, the newest iPhone) as materialist distractions. But this, too, would be a mistake. The pace of progress may have slowed in the West. For selected groups, on selected measures, progress may even have stalled. For most people, however, it has not stopped.
The digital revolution has allowed people to remain in touch with friends and family who once would have grown distant. The democratization of air travel, for all its indignities, has helped, too. The greatest progress against cancer and heart disease has come in the last 20 to 30 years. And although Deaton does not emphasize it, nearly every form of discrimination has become less common. When people talk gauzily of life in postwar America, they presumably are not referring to the lives of women, African-Americans, gays, lesbians, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Latinos, Asian-Americans or the disabled.
Most of us can find miniature versions of this tale in our families. Deaton’s grandfather returned from World War I to a Scottish mine and rose to become a supervisor. Deaton’s father, despite not graduating from high school, became a civil engineer and lived twice as long as his own father. My own grandfather escaped the Nazis, to New York, but succumbed to cancer as a fairly young man in 1950. Had modern medicine advanced only a few decades more rapidly, my father may well have grown up with a father. In the starkest terms, most of us today have at least one family member or friend who would not be alive absent the innovations of the last several decades.
Perhaps most impressive — and, at the same time, most worrisome — is that progress is by no means inevitable. Humanity has spent most of its history not making progress, with neither life spans nor incomes rising. “For thousands of years,” Deaton writes, “those who were lucky enough to escape death in childhood faced years of grinding poverty.”
“The Great Escape” of Deaton’s title refers to the process that began during the Enlightenment and made progress the norm. Scientists, doctors, businessmen and government officials began to seek truth, rather than obediently accept dogma, and they began to experiment. In Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding!” The germ theory of disease, public sanitation, the Industrial Revolution and modern democracy soon followed.
Deaton’s writing is unfailingly accessible to the lay reader. At times, he repeats himself (he is definitely not a fan of foreign aid) or delves into technical subjects that will not interest everyone, like the calculation of exchange rates. But readers looking to learn some economics without picking up a textbook may enjoy these tangents. All in all, “The Great Escape” joins “Getting Better” — a 2011 book by Charles Kenny that concentrated on poor countries (and was more positive about foreign aid) — as one of the most succinct guides to conditions in today’s world.
The great, unanswered question is how rapidly the progress will continue. Deaton pronounces himself cautiously optimistic. But he also acknowledges rising threats, global warming being the most obvious of them. Beyond climate change, economic growth has slowed and inequality has risen in most rich countries, leaving the middle class and poor with only modest gains. The skew is so severe in the United States that a vast majority of Americans — the bottom 99 percent, he calculates — have done worse than a vast majority of French in recent decades, despite our reputation for economic dynamism. In China, meanwhile, a growth slowdown may just be beginning, and it could bring true political tumult, including war.
From a historical perspective, the most worrisome development may be the tendency not to heed the central lesson of the Enlightenment and, by extension, of Deaton’s Great Escape: Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.
Knowledge — which is to say education — is humanity’s most important engine of improvement. Deaton concludes, based on the data, that rising education is the most powerful cause of the recent longevity boom in most poor countries, even more powerful than high incomes. A typical resident of India is only as rich as a typical Briton in 1860, for example, but has a life expectancy more typical of a European in the mid-20th century. The spread of knowledge, about public health, medicine and diet, explains the difference.
Unfortunately, knowledge and facts are often on the defensive today. Fundamentalists of various stripes keep many countries from completing their own great escape. In the West, science still sometimes yields to dogma, on climate change, on evolution and on economic policy. Elites on both the right and left question the value of education for the masses and oppose attempts to improve schools even as they spend countless hours and dollars pursuing the finest possible education for their own children.
It is true that many of today’s biggest problems, including economic growth, education and climate, defy easy solutions. But the same was true, and much more so, about escaping centuries of poverty and early death. It was hard, and it involved a lot of failure along the way. The story Deaton tells — the most inspiring human story of all — should give all of us reason for optimism, so long as we are willing to listen to its moral.
David Leonhardt, a former economics columnist and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, is leading a new project for the paper that will focus on politics and policy.

sábado, 20 de julho de 2013

A longa marcha da China para o capitalismo internacional - book review


Ben Wiseman

WEALTH AND POWER

China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century
By Orville Schell and John Delury
Illustrated. 478 pp. Random House. $30.

In “Wealth and Power,” their engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China’s modern rise, Orville Schell and John Delury note that the story of Goujian was a favorite of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who united China under his rule before being forced into exile in Taiwan. They might have called it the defining theme of contemporary China. From Wei Yuan in the early 19th century, the first major intellectual to insist that the mighty Chinese Empire had fundamental flaws, to Xi Jinping, who became China’s top leader last year, the humiliations China has suffered at the hands of foreigners over the past century and a half are the glue that keeps the country together.
Many nations revel in their victories. America has its War of Independence. The British still churn out documentaries about World War II. But even $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves has not healed the psychological trauma of 1842, the year of China’s defeat at the hands of the British in the first Opium War. After that conflict, China was dismembered, first by the European powers, then, more devastatingly, by Japan. Chinese troops expelled the Japanese, and the country was reunified more than 60 years ago. But it is determined to keep the memory of the abuses it suffered from fading into history.
Shame often acts as a depressant. But through the 11 biographical sketches that constitute their book, Schell and Delury argue that for generations of influential Chinese, shame has been a stimulant. In one sense, the evidence is not hard to find. The inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, splashily reopened in 2011, was called “The Road to Rejuvenation,” which treated the Opium War as the founding event of modern China. And it then told a Disneyesque version of how the Communist Party restored the country’s greatness. At the museum of the Temple of Tranquil Seas in Nanjing, the site of the signing of one of the most unequal of China’s treaties with foreign powers, is inscribed this phrase: “To feel shame is to approach courage.” Humiliation has been a staple of Communist Party propaganda.
Schell, a prolific chronicler of China’s reform-era politics and society, and Delury, an expert on Chinese and North Korean politics, acknowledge the cynicism behind the party’s use of shame as a nationalist rallying cry. But their book makes the case that such feelings represent a deep strain in the Chinese psyche, which the country’s current leaders have inherited as part of their cultural DNA. To love China means to share a passionate commitment to overcoming the loss of face suffered in the 19th century, to ensure that the defeats of the past will never be suffered again.
This is not the first book to explore the legacy of the Opium Wars or the origins of Chinese nationalism. But what it offers readers is the idea that the most important Chinese intellectuals and political leaders, from the Empress Dowager Cixi to Deng Xiaoping, were united in the national quest to avenge humiliation. They all felt shame, and used it as the path to “wealth and power.”
Many of the steps they took were disastrous. Over a century and a half China has stumbled through imperial rule, warlordism, republicanism and Communism. Its leaders have reigned through feudalism, fascism, totalitarianism and capitalism. But for Schell and Delury, none of those conflicting systems or ideologies in the end defined China, or even the leaders who imposed them. Instead, the constant through China’s recent history is the persistent search for something — anything — that would bring restoration.
The reformers of the early 19th century were the first to declare that China was “big and weak,” and though the statement was true, at the time it bordered on heresy. The solution the early reformers proposed was “to self-strengthen,” which would be achieved by adopting selective Western technologies and methods. By the turn of the 20th century, after a series of even more severe setbacks, prescriptions from scholars and advisers grew bolder. Liang Qichao, who founded the Sense of Shame Study Society, felt Chinese culture bred timidity. He wanted to destroy China’s Confucian “core” and rebuild the country from scratch with imported Western ideas.
That was the template China’s Nationalist leaders, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, followed for years as they struggled to figure out which Western political, cultural and economic formulas could reinvigorate their country. Schell and Delury are more provocative in arguing that Liang’s ideas of “creative destruction” also led, in a more or less straight line, to Mao Zedong.
Much of Mao’s brutally destructive legacy — the mass killings of class enemies, the famine-inducing Great Leap Forward, the catastrophic Cultural Revolution — should be viewed, they suggest, less through the prism of radical Marxism than as an attempt to exorcise Confucian passivity. Mao especially wanted to eliminate the traditional ideal of “harmony” and replace it with a mandate to pursue “permanent revolution,” an inversion of Chinese cultural traditions he believed essential to unleashing the country’s productive forces.
Schell and Delury do not say that Mao intended to pave the way for Deng and his acolytes, including Zhu Rongji, whom they present as the most successful implementer of Deng’s ideas. But they do seek to show that Deng’s pursuit of market-oriented reforms might well have met far more resistance if Mao had not bequeathed him a blank slate — that is, a ruling party exhausted by bloody campaigns and a people purged of their ancient notions of order. Deng’s tactics may have been the polar opposite of Mao’s, but their goals, realized partly under Deng and rather spectacularly by his successors, were precisely the same.
Despite the book’s title, this is not a definitive guide to China’s rise. Schell and Delury devote only a few pages to economics, the core of most other big works on China’s emergence as a great power. But their examination of how an unusual trait in Chinese culture worked its way through politics and intellectual life is a fascinating attempt to reconcile China’s current success with its past suffering. It also sets the stage for perhaps the biggest challenge facing a much wealthier and more powerful China today, since it cannot go on fighting its vanquished ghosts forever.
Joseph Kahn is the foreign editor and a former Beijing bureau chief of The Times.

A version of this review appeared in print on July 21, 2013, on page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Losing Face, Leaping Forward.

Banco de Compensacoes, da Basileia: uma entidade secreta? - book review

They’ve Got a Secret

‘Tower of Basel,’ by Adam LeBor


Erik T. Johnson


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Adam LeBor’s history of the Bank for International Settlements, “Tower of Basel,” reads a little like a financial version of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the Tom Stoppard play that places two minor characters in “Hamlet” in the forefront of the action while the drama’s major events unfold incomprehensibly in the background. In LeBor’s telling, the B.I.S., an obscure “bank for central banks” set up in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930 to facilitate World War I reparations payments from Germany, has been a critical, if secretive, actor in the global economy for more than 80 years. Today, he writes, it is “the most important bank in the world,” an institution with virtually no accountability, and yet “for decades it has stood at the center of a global network of money, power and covert global influence.”

TOWER OF BASEL

The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World
By Adam LeBor
Illustrated. 323 pp. PublicAffairs. $28.99.
The B.I.S. has indeed had a fascinating and sometimes shady history on the front lines of major events, including the Great Depression, World War II and the formation of the European Monetary Union. But in reality it has been more of a witness to history than a maker of it, more Forrest Gump than Superman. Today the B.I.S. is less “the secret bank that runs the world,” as LeBor’s conspiratorial-sounding subtitle has it, than a clubby meeting place for central bankers. International finance is now largely dictated by global banking corporations, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the other major central banks that make up the membership of the B.I.S. More often than not, they base their policy on national or regional interest.
Even so, there are good reasons to tell the full story of the bank, and LeBor, a journalist based in Budapest, does a creditable job in this well-researched account. The B.I.S. offers up a lesson in the amorality of finance and the need for greater accountability in international capital flows — a lesson that surely resonates in an era when Wall Street executives have avoided culpability for their role in the subprime securitization scam.
Born in secrecy in 1930, the B.I.S. came of age in sin. It was partly the brainchild of Montagu Norman, the Depression-era governor of the Bank of England, who cut a somewhat Mephistophelian figure with his cape and Van Dyke beard, and who also played a starring (if disastrous) role in Liaquat Ahamed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 book “Lords of Finance.” Norman wanted a new bank that would serve as the “world’s first international financial institution,” LeBor writes. “It would be a meeting place for central bankers. Away from the demands of politicians and the prying eyes of nosy journalists, the bankers would bring some much needed order and coordination to the world financial system.”
Norman’s proposal gained an eager advocate in Hjalmar Schacht, another great Faustian figure of 20th-century finance. Schacht, the Reichsbank president, saw the new bank as a way of easing Germany’s reparations burden and later took part in junking the whole apparatus as the Nazis seized power, brilliantly outmaneuvering the Allied governments. In the 1930s, Schacht’s financial wizardry in helping to build Adolf Hitler’s war economy on the sly delighted the Führer, who remarked that his chief banker had showed that “even in the field of sharp finance a really intelligent Aryan is more than a match for his Jewish counterparts.”
The start of World War II ushered in the B.I.S.’s darkest period, and one of the most shameful episodes in the history of finance. Like Switzerland itself, neutral Basel became an “international oasis,” but one that served the Nazis far more than the Allies. As detailed in previous books, like Charles Higham’s “Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949”(1983)the B.I.S.’s directors helped to sell gold seized by the Nazis from occupied nations and culled from the teeth of death camp victims, and they acted as a conduit of hard currency that allowed the Third Reich to buy raw materials throughout the war — to the point where Emil Puhl, the Reichsbank vice president, described the B.I.S. as the “only real foreign branch” of the Reichsbank. Puhl’s friend Thomas McKittrick, the bank’s American president through the war, “repeatedly passed economic and financial intelligence to the Reichsbank leadership,” LeBor writes. McKittrick, seemingly untroubled by his role as “Hitler’s American banker,” as LeBor describes him, moved on to become vice president of Chase National Bank after the war.
The B.I.S.’s morally tainted wartime experience almost sank it at the 1944 conference at Bretton Woods, N.H., when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White, the lead American delegate to the conference, sought to liquidate it while setting up the postwar international system dominated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But the B.I.S.’s powerful friends, including John Maynard Keynes, intervened to save it.
Designed to buy and sell gold and foreign exchange for its clients and provide short-term credit and asset management to central banks (though it is no longer needed for that), the B.I.S. has somehow managed to survive its own checkered history as well as the disappearance of the other two main reasons for its existence: war reparations and the maintenance of the gold standard imposed at Bretton Woods. From the 1960s on, it helped to lay the groundwork for the European Monetary Union, although it was quickly eclipsed in importance by the European Monetary Institute and then the European Central Bank.
Today the B.I.S. has reached a kind of enlightened old age as a venue for the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which seeks to set voluntary global capital standards, and as a repository of financial expertise. The B.I.S.’s economic research staff has often been a prescient prognosticator of the debt overleveraging that has plagued banking from the Asia crisis of the late 1990s to the subprime mortgage disaster a decade later. The B.I.S. was one of the few financial institutions to warn repeatedly of runaway growth in the years leading up to the crash of 2008. Yet as LeBor concedes, “knowing there was a problem, however, did not mean the bank could always persuade policy makers to take preventative or remedial measures.” In fact, it has had little sway, and it is only as the host bank for the Basel committee, which is run by the heads of the national central banks, that the B.I.S. can lay claim to any influence.
Even now, the B.I.S. operates with less disclosure than the 18 central banks that make up its executive committee. Its assets are protected against seizure. Its process of establishing capital requirements for banks remains opaque and, many critics say, too mild in its prescriptions. Yet the B.I.S. lives on as enduring proof that while it’s often easy to create international institutions, it’s very hard to get rid of them. “The B.I.S. progresses through the 21st century with ever more confidence,” LeBor concludes, “even though there is no need for it to exist.”
Michael Hirsh is the chief correspondent for National Journal and the author of “Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street.”

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sábado, 6 de abril de 2013

Bolivar: o contraditorio - Book review

Um comeco de resenha de um livro sobre o heroi do Chávez, num perfil mais conforme às suas verdadeiras características (borradas pelos atuais bolivarianos), mas cujo texto integral só está disponível aos assinantes do WSJ. Vou postar aqui a resenha do NYT (mais abaixo).

BOOKSHELF
The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2013

A Rebel Against Nature
Simón Bolívar praised liberty and imposed tyranny, excelled in battle but failed in government.

By Felipe Fernández-Armesto
A Rebel Against Nature

Simón Bolívar praised liberty and imposed tyranny, excelled in battle but failed in government. Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviews Maria Arana's "Bolívar: American Liberator."
==========

Founding Father

‘Bolívar,’ by Marie Arana

Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Engraving of Simón Bolívar by W. Hall.

BOLÍVAR: American Liberator

By Marie Arana
Illustrated. 603 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.

Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, was the George Washington of South America, or so he was regarded by sundry eminences in the United States during a large part of his extraordinary career. Grandeur was his nature. He aroused adulation. He dealt a few preliminary military defeats to the Spanish imperial army, and in 1813, he entered victoriously, for the moment, into Caracas on a chariot drawn by white-gowned daughters of the leading families, as if he were a god or a Caesar. And he assumed the magnificent title of “Liberator and Dictator.” The chariot and the daughters deviated, it is true, from the austere Washington style, and the dictatorial honorific has hovered a little ominously over his reputation ever since, as you can see by reading Marie Arana’s admiring and rueful biography, “Bolívar.”

But like Washington, Bolívar was a man of the Enlightenment. Reason and republicanism drove him forward. Arana tells us that he tended his white horse first thing in the morning, read Montesquieu and Voltaire before breakfast and issued edicts after the meal. He knew how to wield political and military power in a single gesture, as Washington used to do, but he also knew how to weather the ghastliest of conditions, one Valley Forge after another, in versions that were tropical, Andean, wildly remote and beyond anything that Washington had to endure. Only in the mid-1820s, after 14 years of war, did he manage to achieve international recognition for various new independent republics of South America; and even then, post-victory, warfare never seemed to stop. Arana judges that carnage and destruction in the course of South America’s struggles for independence added up to a calamity so great as to be demographic: in some regions population dropped 50 percent.
Bolívar coped with impossibly complicated racial and ethnic circumstances. The man himself was fabulously wealthy, the owner of slaves and estates, capable of raising his own armies for a while, though his struggles ultimately impoverished him. And yet, because a strain of ­non-European blood was thought to run through his otherwise European veins, even he, the Caracas aristocrat, was obliged to fend off the skin-tone prejudices of the age. “Sambo,” he was called in Peru, not by his admirers. Indian warriors with bows and arrows made up a portion of his armies, and Indian women a large portion of his camp followers. Slaves and the descendants of slaves from Africa played a central role in the war, sometimes fighting on the Spanish royalist side, ultimately on Bolívar’s republican side; and the spirit of conspiracy being what it was, he executed the finest of his black republican generals.
Unfortunate executions apart, Bolívar’s positions on slavery and race were in every respect superior to Washington’s. At a moment when the anti-Spanish struggle seemed hopeless, the president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, came to Bolívar’s aid (as no president of the United States ever managed to do, which is pitiful to see), and Bolívar responded in 1816 by ordering the abolition of slavery, not merely for strategic reasons. Arana quotes a speech from 1819: “Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe.” He continued, “It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong.” And more: “We all differ visibly in the color of our skin” — which is the kind of straightforward acknowledgment that no leading figure in the United States would have uttered in those benighted days, or for many generations to come, even if, in the United States, epidermal monochronicity has never been the norm.
On the other hand, Bolívar figured that South America’s racial mishmash ruled out any experiments in libertarian or democratic self-rule. “We will require an infinitely firm hand,” he said, “and an infinitely fine tact to manage all the racial divisions in this heterogeneous society, where even the slightest alteration can throw off, divide or undo its delicate balance.” He ended up in command of the countries that are nowadays known as Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia (whose name derives from his own) and Peru, all of which he hoped to unite, together with still more regions, into a grand Latin American federation. And the constitutional system that he proposed made provision for a presidency-for-life, like a Supreme Court appointment in the United States, except with a further, faintly monarchist clause allowing the president to appoint a vice president who would be his successor.
Among Bolívar’s fellow freedom-­fighters and republicans, not everyone looked with admiring eyes on this dictatorial tendency. In 1828, a group of his associates, who styled themselves “liberals,” hatched a tyrannicidal assassination plot. The plot was foiled by Bolívar’s mistress, a married lady named Manuela Sáenz, who, Arana tells us, was notorious for her libertine panache — her probable lesbian affair with one of her slaves, her delight in costuming not only herself but her female slaves in masculine clothes and her tolerance for Bolívar’s many affairs. But Sáenz’s most salient trait, historically speaking, was an ability to think quickly. She heard the assassins breaking into the house. She instructed Bolívar to leap out the window to safety, which he did, wearing her shoes. And with the conspirators about to burst into the room, she greeted them at the door for the purpose of giving Bolívar extra time to make his escape — “a strikingly beautiful woman, sword in hand,” according to the description of one of the plotters, whom Arana wisely quotes.
The conspirators were not alone in regarding Bolívar as a tyrant in the making. In the United States, his greatest admirers — Henry Clay chief among them — lost faith in the man after a while. The Marquis de Lafayette, who was the world’s greatest expert on the question of George Washington comparisons, sent Bolívar a letter objecting to the idea of a president-for-life. Arana rejects the notion that in our own day, Hugo Chávez, the late president of Venezuela, was justified in assuming Bolívar’s mantle — though in dismissing Chávez’s presumption, she appears mostly to have in mind Bolívar’s liberal ideals, and not his anti-liberal penchants. She does concede that in the centuries after Bolívar one Latin American dictator after another has taken inspiration from his example.
Her purpose in “Bolívar,” however, is not to come up with weighty observations about Latin America’s political tradition. Mainly she chronicles Bolívar’s military and political exploits, which makes for a mighty river, coursing through more than 600 pages, of too many names and battles. But she brings an agreeable affection to this task. She is a writer with Peruvian origins, the author of “American Chica,” and her background appears to have endowed her with a pleasing and romantic nostalgia for the southern continent. Horse hooves drum like a heartbeat on a sun-dappled forest floor and a black cape flutters from Bolívar’s shoulders on the very first page, and by the middle of the book, “snow-capped peaks glisten against azure skies.” All of which may be corny but, like a Technicolor swashbuckler, is dreamily entertaining.

Paul Berman, the author of “The Flight of the Intellectuals” and a senior editor of The New Republic, is teaching this year at Princeton.

sábado, 9 de fevereiro de 2013

Premio Nobel de Literatura 2012: Mo Yan - Ian Buruma (NYTRBooks)

Folk Opera

‘Sandalwood Death’ and ‘Pow!’ by Mo Yan

Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, has a deft way with similes: salty, sometimes gross, usually unexpected. Comparing women’s breasts to “ripe mangoes” is almost a cliché, but to describe the nipples as “rising gracefully, like the captivating mouths of hedgehogs” is arresting. Passengers disembarking from a train do so “like beetles rolling their precious dung.” A rich meal of pork lies on a man’s stomach, “churning and grinding like a litter of soon-to-be-born piglets.”
Yuko Shimizu

SANDALWOOD DEATH

By Mo Yan
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
409 pp. University of Oklahoma Press. Paper, $24.95.

POW!

By Mo Yan
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
386 pp. Seagull Books. $27.50.
Yan Bo/European Pressphoto Agency
Mo Yan
What gives Mo Yan’s novels their highly idiosyncratic tone is the combination of a great literary imagination and a peasant spirit. Howard Gold­blatt’s translations catch this atmosphere brilliantly. The prose reads well in English, without losing a distinctly Chinese feel, but it is very far from the classical Chinese tradition. There is nothing mandarin, or even urbane, about Mo Yan’s work. He has retained the earthy character of rural Shandong, where he grew up in a farming family.
Like most of his stories, both “Sandalwood Death” and “Pow!” are set in a rustic place resembling Mo Yan’s native village in Gaomi County. Of “Sandalwood Death,” he has written that it might be less suited to sophisticated readers than “to hoarse voices in a public square, surrounded by an audience of eager listeners.” In fact, it is artfully written in the style of a local folk opera called Maoqiang, now almost defunct. One of the main characters is an opera singer. The rhythms, idioms and narrative techniques of ­Maoqiang are ­woven into the text in a seamless way that only a master storyteller can pull off. The art of telling stories is actually the main theme of both novels.
The narrator of “Pow!,” Luo Xiaotong, is a young man who has a horror of growing up, of entering the corrupt adult world where the powerful prey on the weak. As Mo Yan explains in his afterword, Luo is the reverse of little Oskar in Günter Grass’s “Tin Drum,” the boy whose body stops growing even as his mental age progresses. Luo has a child’s mind in a grown-up body. He is the sort of wise simpleton, a kind of Chinese Soldier Schweik, that often turns up in Mo Yan’s novels. When Luo looks at Aunty Wild Mule, his father’s mistress, he feels “like a boy of 7 or 8,” and yet “the pounding of my heart and the stirrings of that thing between my legs declare to me that I am that child no longer.” By observing the adults, Luo realizes that sex can lead people into some very dark places. And so he clings to a kind of innocence. But, as so often happens when the strain of growing up in a corrupted world becomes intolerable, innocence explodes in an act of extraordinary violence. “Pow” can mean two things: It is the bang of an old Japanese Army mortar, used by Luo to blow the adult world to smithereens; it also means to brag, to tell stories, and even, in Beijing slang, to have sex.
Luo’s bizarre story of his childhood is told to a monk in a decaying temple dedicated to the worship of a lecherous idol named the Horse Spirit. Greed, lust and the abuse of power are the main features of the world observed by Luo. The greediest, most lecherous, most powerful figure in the story is also his benefactor, a man named Lao Lan, scion of a landowning family, who sleeps with Luo’s mother and exploits human greed by monopolizing the production of meat in a village dedicated to animal slaughter.
In this fantasy world of meat-eating gluttony, there is even a Meat God Temple and a Carnivore Festival. Lust for meat isn’t really condemned (nor, for that matter, is sex); it’s the natural response of people who have gone hungry for too long, a grotesque binge after a history of famines. Mo Yan himself was born only a few years before Chairman Mao starved China’s rural population in his monstrous Great Leap Forward.
Luo, the meat-eater, is a highly useful asset to Lao Lan’s business. He has a limitless capacity for food. The champion of a meat-eating contest, Luo adores meat and meat loves him back, to the point of speaking to him in voices. He is an artist of meat-eating, the best in China. Eating, sex and power are closely related in Luo’s fantastic tales, as they are in other novels by Mo Yan, including “Red Sorghum,” made into a much-praised film by Zhang Yimou, and indeed in “Sandalwood Death,” to my mind an even better novel than “Pow!”
Indulging our appetites for food and sex is one way of asserting our individual freedom. Perfecting an art, even of meat-eating, is another. The two artists in “Sandalwood Death” are Sun Bing, an opera singer, and Zhao Jia, his executioner, whose son is married to Sun Bing’s daughter. Zhao is a master at his trade, a genius at administering the slow death by a thousand cuts, the greatest artist of the sandalwood death, able to keep his victim alive for five days while spliced on a sandalwood stake.
Sun Bing has been sentenced to this agonizing death because he dared to attack German soldiers involved in crushing the Boxer Rebellion in 1901. A heroic local patriot, Sun Bing hates these arrogant foreigners for strutting about his native region, building a railway line that will change its ways forever. Like many tales of peasant rebellion, Mo Yan’s reworking of the Boxers’ war with the foreign devils is deeply anti-modern. Loyalty to tradition is part of Mo Yan’s peasant spirit, yet he is not sentimental about the past.
Maoqiang opera is the symbol of Chinese tradition in the novel. But so is the art of inflicting cruel punishments “beyond the imagination of any European.” Chinese executions could be seen, in the words of one of the narrators of “Sandalwood Death,” as stage performances “acted out by the executioner and his victim.” At the end of the novel, the two types of theater come together when Sun Bing sings his last aria while spitted on the wooden stake. His fellow actors defy the German soldiers and their treacherous Chinese helpers by performing an opera on the execution ground to honor their dying master. The theater troupe is mowed down by foreign bullets. Sun Bing dies, stabbed in the chest by a compassionate Chinese official who can no longer stand to witness his suffering. In the last words of the novel: “The opera . . . has ended. . . . ”
In sum: Without art, myths, stories, imagination, life isn’t worth living. And that brings us to Mo Yan’s politics. He has been widely criticized for not being more politically outspoken. Salman Rushdie called him “a patsy of the regime.” According to Mo Yan’s fellow Nobel laureate Herta Müller, awarding him the literature prize was “a catastrophe.”
Mo Yan is certainly no dissident. He might even be accused of cowardice. He could have used his prestige to speak up more forcefully for Liu Xiaobo, the brave literary critic who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while imprisoned for advocating democracy in China. Defending censorship, as Mo Yan did in Stockholm, was also an odd, not to say craven, act for a writer who sets such store on the freedom to tell stories.
Indeed, he refuses to speak out almost as a matter of principle. He has said that his pen name, Mo Yan, meaning “Don’t Speak,” was chosen because his parents warned him not to say things that might cause trouble. “I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology,” he writes in the afterword to “Pow!,” “especially when I’m writing.”
Mo Yan does in fact have some strong views. The targets of his satirical barbs are clear: the gross materialism of contemporary China, the venality of government officials, the abuses of political power, the abject opportunism of Chinese collaborators with foreign invaders. But these are rather easy marks. Party leaders are forever denouncing corruption and materialism. It is also a tenet of Communist propaganda that only the party can protect China against foreign depredations.
Perhaps Mo Yan really is in tune with the current Communist regime. Perhaps he simply wants to play it safe. But the political perspective of his fiction is also a reflection of his peasant spirit. To a villager, all politics are strictly local, especially in China, with its vast distances. The capital is far away. National politics aren’t the peasant’s concern. What counts is food on the table, fertility, sex and staying out of trouble, if necessary by appeasing the powerful, be they local or foreign.
This narrow perspective has its advantages. By concentrating on human appetites, including the darkest ones, Mo Yan can dig deeper than political commentary. And like the strolling players of old, the jesters and the public-square storytellers he so admires, Mo Yan is able to give a surprisingly accurate impression of his country. Distorted, to be sure, but sharply truthful, too. In this sense, his work fits into a distinguished tradition of fantasists in authoritarian societies: alongside Mikhail Bulgakov or the Czech master, Bohumil Hrabal.
To demand that Mo Yan also be a political dissident is not only what the Dutch describe as “trying to pluck feathers from a frog.” It’s also unfair. A novelist should be judged on literary merit, not on his or her politics, a principle the Nobel committee hasn’t always lived up to. This time, I think it has. It would be nice if Mo Yan were more courageous, but he has given us some great stories. And that should be enough. 


Ian Buruma is Henry R. Luce professor of democracy, human rights and journalism at Bard College. His most recent book is “Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.”