Daniel Larison, senior editor: I’ve been reading Alex de Waal’s important and timely Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine by Alex de Waal. His work has been especially helpful to me in contextualizing and understanding the ongoing mass starvation committed against the civilian population of Yemen by the Saudi coalition, but the real value of the book comes from his effort to link the broader history of famine with the modern history of genocide and atrocity. Famine is something that one group of people does to another, and as such it should be considered and treated as a crime. Modern famine is not simply or even primarily a matter of food shortage, but represents the culmination of specific political and military acts that governments and armed groups take without regard for how they will harm the civilian population. De Waal makes a compelling case for why famine became extremely rare by the second half of the twentieth century, and that makes his warning that famine is returning to our world after almost being eliminated all the more alarming. He explains that creating famine in the modern world is a political act that requires great sustained effort, but it is an effort that an increasing number of governments may be willing to make in the future to achieve their political goals. It is an outstanding piece of scholarship, and anyone that wants to understand the history of famine would benefit from reading it.  

♦♦♦

Scott Beauchamp, contributor: Having just reviewed Gabriel Josipovici’s most recent novel, Cemetery in Barnes, for the Winter 2019 issue of Modern Age, I decided to go back and do something of a deep dive into his work. It was like doing a cannonball into a crater lake.

I’d read him before, the Nice-born, Egypt-raised, secular Sephardic Jew who might be the greatest writer and critic current living in England; but completely immersing myself in his decades of fiction and critical output was something on another scale. For the sake of brevity I’ll just limit myself to one recommendation: his 1994 novel Moo Pak.

Moo Pak is structurally very simple. Two men walk together around London’s Moor Park, with the character Jack Toledo, a lightly fictionalized representation of Josipovici himself, monologuing about fiction, history, society, and popular culture. There are many walks over what might be decades, but Josipovici compresses them into a single stroll and a single conversation, reflecting the coherence and continuity of the observations themselves. What does he talk about? Swift’s failing eyesight. America’s quest to teach Chimpanzees to speak. The self-degradation of higher education. Saul Bellow. Mindless sentimentality.

In short, the book is about life itself. Not the “grittiness” that we so often confuse as being more real than reality, but the joy, aesthetic and otherwise, which comes from quiet reflection with a trusted companion. I’ll end with a long quote in which the novel seems to explain itself, as so often happens in Josipovici’s work:

What I am trying to say, Jack said, is that the modern imperative to immerse yourself in the filth and despair of life, the filth and despair of so much present-day London and New York and Bogota and Rio, the modern insistence that life is to be found down there with the cops and robbers, the addicts and the bums, the terrorists and the Mafiosi, and that to read Raymond Queneau under a tree in Kew Gardens on a summer afternoon is to cut yourself off from reality – this must not go unchallenged. It is nothing but Romantic claptrap and sentimental nonsense, he said, fueled by guilt and nostalgia and by a terrible confusion at the heart of our culture. Why is Webern less real than rock? he said, and darted through the tombstones and away from the main path. Why is An Ordinary Evening in New Haven less real than Naked Lunch?