surfacing, briefly
I’m currently tackling Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. This Chilean opus was Nr. 6 on NYT’s top 100 books of this century, and it is very long. Therefore it will take me some time before I can introduce five new books to you, my bookish friends.
However, I stumbled across something in the memoir Wild Swans, a story of Communist China, which I can’t stop thinking about as I watch the election politics in the United States. The author Jung Chang writes:
In the days after Mao’s death, I did a lot of thinking. …I tried to think what his ‘philosophy’ really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire for perpetual conflict.
…He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other.