July 2025

What I’m reading now

• The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt
• Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968, edited by Lotte Kohler
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, by Ray Monk.
• Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, by Timothy W. Ryback
• The Crisis of Narration, by Byung-Chul Han
• Misbehaving at the Crossroads, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie
• Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, by Margaret Canovan

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin

• by Seyla Benhabib (notes pending)

Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

It’s a commonplace to say that one’s carefully curated online persona leaves out much of the drudgery and discomfort of life in the “real” world. Perfection hones this observation carefully and subtly, suggesting the risk that one might attempt to live the online world to perfection, seeking to avoid the IRL trauma. Latronico admits his indebtedness to Georges Perec, whose novel Things: A Story of the Sixties evidently described the lives of people who found their identity in the things that they owned. (I say “evidently” because I’ve not read Perec’s novel – yet another book to add to my TBR pile!)

Click here to read more.

The novel’s protagonist(s) is (are) the couple Anna and Tom. I make the plural parenthetical because they are presented throughout the book as one – I admit I didn’t count, but it seems that there are more references to “Anna and Tom” and “they” than there are to either of them separately. They are expats, having moved from an unnamed south European city to 2010s Berlin, making their living in online design and branding. The online presences they create for their clients mirror the online presence they create for themselves. The digitized version of their carefully curated apartment, offered as a short-term rental when they leave town for a few days, functions also as their living space. If only their experience IRL could live up to the ideal that they were presenting to the world.

The author (and, I suppose, translator Sophie Hughes) write in a deadpan style that reminds me somehow of the voice over narration of Detective Friday from my childhood’s “Dragnet” television series. I found it a good approach. The book is a quick and easy read. I found the novel to be slightly unsettling, but in a good way — what, after all, is the relationship between the digital world of non-things and the concrete world of material things that we attempt to hold together in one life these days?

When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains

by Ariana Neumann

Ariana Neumann was born and grew up in Venezuela. She knew that her father had emigrated from Prague to Caracus, and even as a child she had hints of his painful past. But he told her next to nothing about his former life in Europe. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he told her next to nothing about his former life while he was still alive. However, after he died, she found a box of documents and photographs that he left for her. A box that invited her to piece together his story, which is also a story of Nazi Germany. In this book she tells his story, and also the story of how she discovered his story.

Click here to read more.

Neumann begins her story with an account of her visit to an old synagogue in Prague in 1997. As it happens, I was in that synagogue last spring, and I also saw the tens of thousands of names written on the walls, names of residents of the area who died in the Holocaust. I wish that I had known then to look for the name Hanus Stanislav Neumann. Neumann didn’t know to look for that name either; she reports that she discovered the name quite by chance. Seeing her father’s name was quite a surprise to her. Her father was still alive in 1997. But it was also puzzling that her father’s name was the only name in the synagogue with only a birth date next to it. Every other name on the walls had both a birth and death date. Why would her father’s name be there, and how is it that his birth date was followed by a question mark instead of a date?

I choose to see see the question mark as a stand-in for the growing list of questions Neumann had about her father’s life. While he was still alive, she chose to live with those questions, in large part because it was clear to her that her father did not want to talk about his past. “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is — in the past,” he said.

When she found the box of documents and photographs after her father died, she thought it might be his way of planting the seeds of his story, of helping her to look for answers to her questions. Initially, she was afraid. What might she learn? But she eventually set out on a quest, in part because she decided that learning about her father would also be a way of learning about herself and her family. “…as we reared our family, other, more intrinsic questions arose about identity, to do with heritage and traditions, about what it is that one, as a parent, needs to pass on. Gradually, I realized that uncovering what had remained concealed concerned me and my children as much as it did my father. Finding out about those who came before us had as much to do with the present and with the future as it did with the past. The desire to understand my father was there all along. And despite my original hesitation, my burgeoning little family provided further motivation. Yet I was still afraid” (p. 34).

Despite her fear, she persevered, enlisting the help of a Czech researcher who translated the documents and sought information in the official records. The search led her to other family members — people she didn’t know — some of whom had additional photographs and documents. She managed to visit many of these people, both face-to-face and by email and telephone. Conversations, photographs, documents, and public records together corroborate a story of her father’s remarkable survival and also his transformation from a happy-go-lucky child and teenager to a severaly disciplined and successful businessman.

As I said up top, there are really two stories here: the story of Neumann’s family, and also the story of her discovery of this story. Both of them are riveting. And I’ll include one small spoiler from near the end of the book. Neumann’s father had his own explanation of the question mark next to his name. “I tricked them. I lived.”