Louis Althusser was a charlatan and a wife-killer. Why his work is being reissued is baffling to say the least: “Louis Althusser sounds like an anagram, which is fitting because his books read like clues to a crossword so cryptic it would have defeated Alan Turing. In the introductory note to History and Imperialism its editor and translator, G.M. Goshgarian, talks of ‘a certain carelessness of expression’ in Althusser’s work, adding that ‘Marx and History’ ‘is the only one of these writings to have been seriously revised’. Revised? Seriously? Here is a sentence from that essay: ‘The dialectic is the play that the last instance opens up between itself and other ‘instances’, but this dialectic is materialist: it is not played out up in the air, it is played out in the play opened up by the last instance, which is material’ . . . Where Sartre and Co had argued that existence precedes essence — basically, that there’s no such thing as human nature and that we make ourselves up as we go along — Althusser went the whole hog and denied the existence of essence. There was, he said, no such thing as human nature, and therefore no such thing as the human condition. Human beings, he wrote, ‘are not “free” and “constitutive” subjects’. Rather, ‘they work in and through the determinations of the forms of historical existence of the social relations of production and reproduction’. The idea of human agency, in other words, is just that — an idea. Forget false consciousness — consciousness itself is a falsehood. It follows, he said, that history is ‘a process without a subject’. If this sounds familiar, that is only because Althusser did not invent determinism. He invented a lot else. He had to. He’d done precious little of the donkeywork required of a professor of philosophy. As he admitted in that posthumously-published memoir, though he’d been the École’s go-to guy for counsel on the most abstruse philosophical ackamarackus, he’d actually been winging it for years.”

The lost pianos of Siberia: “An obsession with finding ‘washed up and abandoned’ pianos leads to an impressive exploration of Siberia’s terrifying past.”

Poor Folk is not a great novel, Patrick Maxwell writes, but it “displays the first inklings of Dostoevsky’s genius, literary prowess, and even terror of his later novels”: “His figures are slowly picked apart, demoralised, traumatised, belittled and in some cases saved. They are always scrutinised to the closest degree, and drawn towards the most immoral of situations, exposed to the most pernicious of mindsets and ideas. In Poor Folk, the slow degeneration of Devushkin’s wealth and character is treated as an inexorable outcome and feels destined to be from the start, from his obsequious tone towards Dobroselova. His love for Dobroselova is wholesome, and his financial salvation (vividly imagined in a scene where he kisses the hand of His Excellency, the head of the department he works in). This contrasts his emotional morass, as Dobroselova goes out of the city to marry a harsh but wealthy landowner named Bykov. Dostoevsky is asking a simple question: What is better for humanity, to be poor and happy, or unhappy and rich? It is for us to assume that he thought the Russian spirit better suited to the former and that it was always suited to it.”

Jeremy Black recommends British crime classics: “My favourite is E.C. Lorac, and it is a delight to see so many of those in print, although there are still many to go. A writer of the middle decades of the century, she has a fine sense of place, as she shows with London and Devon: Bats in the Belfry and Fire in the Thatch. The Fell Murder, set in rural north Lancashire and published in 1944, reflects her feel for the pressures of a farming family in wartime. The detective, Inspector Macdonald, is deliberative and far from flashy. Plenty of space is left for the reader to try to work it out (I failed). Her Crossed Skis. An Alpine Mystery is due out in April. There are also less familiar detective writers. Richard Hull’s The Murder of My Aunt is a work of comic delight, with the protagonist wonderfully captured. A good work to give those who feel low. The series has now brought out another fine study, a courtroom drama, Excellent Intentions, although the cover blurb is mistaken to claim that Anstruther Blayton is the Attorney General. I very much hope they can press on to tackle some of his other works, notably Keep it Quiet and Until She Was Dead.”

German Gothic reimagined: “Many of our favorite folk tales have lost much of their original Gothic horror in later versions. By contrast, Daniel Kehlmann’s retelling of the legend of Ulenspiegel, moved to the 17th century, is full of nightmares . . . Historical events — the Reformation and its consequences, the Gunpowder Plot, the Thirty Years’ War — underpin the narrative, which includes the story of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, with flashbacks to her girlhood in England.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Review of Books, Martin Dumont writes about the “transport” of books and sailing:

“I haven’t always been fond of sailing boats. Not that I hated them, I was indifferent. When I wandered around a port, my gaze would rove over the yachts, their tall masts and their sets of white sails. I loved the seaside only for the beaches, the blue skies, salt water, and the whiff of vacations. The horizon was a distant frontier, a line that held little promise other than sunsets.

“I was born in Paris. A city-dweller, a landlubber. I relished the bright lights and noise. My earliest memories of sailing are gray, rainy, and cold. When I was a boy, my grandfather used to take my brother and me to a sailing club near Saint-Malo. We’d clamber into a tiny single-seater shell fitted with a rudder, a mast, and an almost square sail, and we’d spend hours on the water trying to obey the instructors’ yelled commands. I was freezing cold, I understood nothing about the wind, nothing of the subtle techniques for maneuvering between the waves and the currents. Sailing didn’t interest me at all.

“But the sea is everywhere, including in fiction. As an adolescent, I devoured Jack London, Hemingway, Conrad, Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Through their stories, I sailed on The Cruise of the Snark, fished for giant marlin, hunted sperm whales, and explored the ocean depths. I discovered I was a sailor even before returning to the water. The writers who took to the sea were my role models. I went back to it to experience similar adventures for myself.

“One July day, I embarked on a small sailing boat with some high-school friends. We set out from Lorient, in southern Brittany, and sailed up to the western tip, below the Bay of Brest. We moored in the middle of the Glénan Islands, slept at Concarneau, and cruised past the Eckmühl lighthouse. As we racked up the miles, I tried to make this universe—so well described in my bedside books—my own. The spray, the swell, and the tides. The coast sharply delineated and perilous. The mesmerizing open sea with its shifting moods. And, of course, the boat. Its hull, its rigging, and its sails that took us everywhere—providing there was a breeze. I came back changed, passionate, obsessed.”

Read the rest.

Photos: China’s empty streets

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