Beat the Devil

There was a lot of celebrating in my Facebook feed last night. Then came a flurry of pointed non-celebration, and then after that defensive responses from some of the most celebratory celebrants. I'm not really interested in seeing Round 4, since I don't really find myself firmly in either camp. I don't even feel relief at the news. All in all, it was rather like hearing about the death of a middle-aged television actor you never cared for from a sitcom you didn't watch, like if the guy who played Al Bundy had suddenly dropped dead.

Okay, I guess I'm kind of in the second camp, since the victory-dancing is making me a little queegy. It's not that I'm such a great humanist that I wouldn't be thrilled by the death of somebody, it's just that Bin Laden wasn't even my top ten list of Political Figures Who Ought To Bite It. Moammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il--tell me one of them is gone and you'll see a very different reaction.

What they all have in common, of course, is that they are in positions where a word or two from them means the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people. I'd be content just to see them resign and go into exile, but they've resisted that so stubbornly that their death seems the only way to end their brutality. Maybe Bin Laden was once in a similar position, but from all appearances he wasn't any longer. I can't remember the last time we had a video, a tape, or even a few quoted remarks from him; you'd think if anyone would have something to say about the Arab Spring, he would.

In my mind, he'd long since made the transition from irritating bogeyman to a pathetic has-been squatting in caves. Is being dead worse punishment than that? Well, I guess it denies him news of further al-Qaeda successes. And that gets at the root of my indifference: taking out Kim Jong-Il would by no means guarantee an end to the murderous regime his father established, but it would at least create an opportunity. The death of Bin Laden at this point will do nothing at all to stem Islamist terror; in fact, it may even invigourate it.

That, in short, is why the rejoicing rubs me the wrong way. It's not relief and delight at the removal of a threat, it's taking pleasure in an act of pure vengeance. Worse, it distracts from ugly setbacks like the massive Taliban prison break in Kandahar[*]. How many potential Bin Ladens were in that bunch? We killed a shadow from the past while the monsters of the present are still free to wreak havoc.

[*] Which come to think of it may be a feature rather than a bug for many people, I don't know.

A dismal April

Ah, hubris--never waste time in catching up to me, do you? April turned out to be as unsuccessful a month for reading as March was brilliant. The blame belongs to Gombrowicz; I knew Ferdydurke would be a challenge, but I thought it would be for slightly different reasons. It's one of those deliberately irritating novels, one that doesn't seem to have aged as well as its boosters claim, but I thought the humour would carry me through. It didn't, but I still carried the damn thing around a couple weeks longer in the hopes my bloody-mindedness would kick in.

In the meantime, I slipped a book of short stories from Maupassant into my bag, "just for those times" when I felt I needed a break. Then I brought along a book of Peter Carey's short stories for those times when I didn't feel like dealing with French. Needless to say, Carey's The fat man in history remains the only work I started and finished within the month; I still have more than a third of the Maupassant to go. I'm used to thinking of his language as relatively easy since he was the first French writer I ever tackled, but really it's not.

So I started on another compilation of French short stories and novellas, one bringing together works by Nodier, Balzac, Gautier, and Mérimée. Pretty much all of them are easier to read than crazy old Guy. I'm about halfway through that volume--I'd read the Nodier ("Inès de Las Sierras") ages ago and dealt with the first Mérimée ("La Vénus d'Ille") and the Balzac ("Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu") in fairly short order, but the purpleness of Gautier's "La morte amoureuse" is less compelling. To be fair, they're all pretty over the top in that 19th-century-Romantic sort of way. (The title of the collection is Récits fantastiques, after all.)

So in order to save my list of accomplishments from absolute patheticness, I pushed through the last story remaining in a collection by obscure Valencian author Ernest Martínez Ferrando. I'll admit it, he drew me in with his title, La botiga de llibres vells ("The used bookstore"). He can get a bit carried away himself, but his social realism tends to get the upper hand over his sentimentality and melodrama. In any case, I've been in no hurry to finish the book, which I've been keeping around for the better part of two years.

This month should be better. I hit the bookstore and came back with Sciascia, Soseki, and Flaubert--all in translation. It pains me in the last case, but I figure if I can't get through two hundred pages of Maupassant in month, I'm not going to make it to the end of four hundred pages of Flaubert in two. And I'd rather know what all the fuss is about Bovary sooner rather than later.