Books: May 2024
Una historia política de Colombia: Del siglo XIX al Frente Nacional (Spanish Edition) — Álvaro Tirado Mejía
⭐ This is a book about Colombian history from about 1830 to 1958. It’s a strange book – some chapters are just one or two pages long, two chapters have the same name with overlapping content. Not a good book. But a very interesting period of Colombian history.
You get the early divisions between the Conservative and Liberal parties, and long periods of first liberal hegemony, then conservative, then liberal. What stands out about Colombia is the extent to which each party, once in power, uses violence against partisans of the other. Some of this seems linked to the fact that virtually all government jobs were appointed by the incoming government, which meant massive transfers of employment when the party in power changed.
The swings between centralized and federalized rule are also interesting. The major conflicts in the 19th century basically involve regional militias rising up against the central government and winning because the latter was so weak. I’d never thought about the fact that at one point Colombia was “the United States of Colombia.”
I was on a reading roll and this book sapped the joy of reading out of me. Horribly written.
The People Immortal — Vasily Grossman
⭐⭐⭐ The People Immortal follows a group of Soviet soldiers fighting an invading Nazi army. The situation is dire; the Nazis are in Soviet territory, rampaging through civilian towns.
There’s some interesting stuff here. The civilian perspective on what an invading army looks and feels like is compelling. German troops coming into villages, people deciding whether to flee, the drama surrounding the local who decided to collaborate – it gives you a clear sense of what it means for a country to be invaded. From 10,000 feet up, you might wonder why a civilian would care which distant power is in charge. But here you get a clear sense that an invading army is basically torching everything as it goes.
The soldiers’ ideology and their perspective on the Germans is also interesting. The ideology part can feel ham-fisted – long, awkward descriptions of the Germans failing to grasp the “natural law” of Marxism make the book feel like propaganda. My edition highlights many moments of self-censorship. Still, there are beautiful passages towards the end about “humanity’s eternal longing for a land that does not know slavery.”
The Soviet soldiers really hate the Germans, which I found very interesting. There’s this titanic struggle between Communism and Fascism but the soldiers don’t grasp any of that. They primarily see the Germans as innately mechanical, soulless:
“In their capacity for mechanical obedience, in their readiness to march on mindlessly, in the ability of millions of soldiers to execute huge and complex manoeuvres with iron discipline – in all this there was something base, something foreign to the free spirit of man.”
There’s plenty of fiction critical of the Nazis, but it is about Nazis as such, not the Germans. It’s not often you get this “Otherized” view.
Overall decent. Some parts feel too close to “glorious war for the homeland” propaganda. I’m more partial to Generation Kill-flavored war books.