Book review

I read three books recently that most people have read a long time ago.

1. The Kite Runner by Khaled Khosseini. Not bad, but I found the plot way too predictable. I couldn’t shake off the impression that the author has taken writing classes at some point but shouldn’t have. The book is a particularly sad reading today: it has a happy ending with the fall of the Taliban as the background, but twenty years later, the Taliban is back and ain’t any better. The book kind of shows (probably unintentionally) why the Communist government was surprisingly successful (it survived for a few years after Soviet withdrawal despite massive support of the mujaheddin by the US), and why so many Afghans supported the Taliban against the traditional elites (sure, the Taliban was originally a Pakistani project, but its foot soldiers are Afghans). As a side note, the book contains a couple Hodja Nasreddin stories I don’t remember hearing before.

2. Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. Totally brilliant, although the language was sometimes a bit too British for me to follow easily. One thing that I found remarkable was the degree to which British intelligence officers who fought their Soviet opponents day in and day out treated the whole thing as a gentlemanly chess game. Even today too many people fail to understand that it is a fight between good and evil with everybody’s survival at stake. No wonder there were, and still are, so many Eastern moles in the West.

3. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. This lengthy novel is much beloved by parents’ basements dwellers… sorry, I mean, libertarians, and by fascists… I mean, conservatives. Published 66 years ago, it reads like it was written by AI today. It combines the impeccably consistent style and realistic characters of Fifty Shades of Grey (another bestseller, with largely overlapping audience) with generous verbosity of classical Russian literature (which was originally designed for inbred aristocrats who were dying of boredom in their remote rural estates and needed lengthy books to survive the endless winters, which is why there can be multiple volumes conveying a simplest idea, i. e. “war bad, peasants good”). Ayn Rand is the pinnacle of that literary tradition: one of her characters delivers a monologue that is 60 pages long to say “greed good, charity bad”.  The overall idea of this book is familiar: you must get rid of some part of the society for the others to prosper. Lenin thought the part that needed removal was the elite; Russia still tries to exterminate the national elite in every country it invades, although never as successfully as Khmer Rouge did. Hitler thought it was Jews, Gypsies and gays who obstructed the path to eternal bliss; his followers today have partially shifted their attention to immigrants (Muslim or Latin American depending on the country). Ayn Rand’s version is a bit more convoluted: she believed that people can be divided into “movers” (who make things run and improve) and the useless majority. Since she hated Marxism and Socialism, she decided to flip them over and worship industrialists instead of proles. In her imaginary world, those wealthy guys are actually victims of parasitic bureaucrats and ungrateful masses. After suffering from idiocratic society through the 1100+ pages (in small print), the “makers” escape to a laypeople-free enclave in the Rockies, happily watch as the rest of the world collapses into Stone Age, and then emerge to magically bring everybody back to prosperity. Personally, I would never go into that ashram: spending your life surrounded by the likes of Elon Musk and Henry Ford isn’t my idea of paradise. The book didn’t age well: today we know that it’s the super-rich who drove our country and our planet to the brink of destruction; moreover, it’s actually the right-wingers who are constantly trying to kill all innovation – look up who banned Tesla from selling cars directly to customers and prohibited sales of lab-grown meat in Florida. Since the book came out, there’s been numerous attempts to create such libertarian heavens; the last one I’ve heard of, somewhere in New England, ended up overrun by bears because nobody would organize proper garbage removal. I didn’t plan to end my review with the word “garbage”, but here it is, so perhaps here it belongs.