Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism - Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1845)

 

Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism

Through an incredible coincidence I finished my previous book and started on “Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism” on the flight to... Argentina. There was absolutely no coordination involved, that vacation had been in planning for a year and I am not skipping on the List. It just turned out that way. So, I would be travelling around in Argentina for three weeks and keep bumping into references to this book, particularly its author Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Every town in Argentina has a street, a monument, a school to his honour. To say he is a big name in Argentina is a massive understatement.

“Facundo” is an odd book. Part of it is a description of the geography and people of Argentina, almost a travel guide or investor briefing. Then there is a large chunk that is presented as the life story of Juan Facundo Qiroga and the last chapter is the story of José Felix Aldao. This sounds like objective science and history, but comes through as an opinion piece.

Sarmiento lines up two opposite forces dominating everything in Argentina: Civilization and Barbarism. Civilization is represented by education, economic and intellectual progress, European influence, the cities and the part of the revolution that aimed at establishing a modern democracy in the spirit of the American and French revolution. Barbarism on the other hand is the loss of all the above to the wild nature and anarchy of the countryside. The gaucho, the Argentinian equivalent of a cowboy is the quintessence of this barbarism. Unlearned, poorly dressed, bad mannered and disrespectful of rules and property. That barbarism is the rule of the jungle where strongmen becomes warlords ruling through their strength and terror and fight for the freedom to do whatever they want, which usually means amassing wealth and power to spend on dissipation and more wealth and power. This fraction aims politically for a confederation where individual units only respect the central authority nominally.

Sarmiento sees himself as representing civilization and describes a development in Argentina that has led to the victory of barbarism. He is in opposition to the current ruler or Argentina, Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he paints as the devil himself. What we have here is therefore an unreliable narrator who has chosen side and tries to convince us who is right and who is wrong and his description of the gaucho, the caurdillo (large landowners of the countryside) and the federalists is therefore one long vilification of these. He may of course have many good points and there is no doubt that those were terrible times, but it is difficult to parse what are facts and what is fiction.

The character Sarmiento has chosen to represent barbarism is curiously enough not Rosas, but Qiroga. It is as if Sarmiento assumes we all know what a terrible guy Rosas is and so focus on one his tools that demonstrates all the barbarism Sarmiento assigns to the Federalist cause. We get the full story, from Qirogas childhood, through his various campaigns and until his assassination. I will not start to describe those campaigns because I got completely lost in them. Typically, Qiroga will gather an army of gauchos, terrorize a neighbourhood and fight a battle. If he wins, he will conduct heinous crimes against his enemies. If he losses, he will escape to some backwater and raise another army. His rule will be arbitrary and based on terror and mainly aimed at all he would think consider themselves better than him.

While it is clear that Sarmiento is strangely fascinated by Qiroga and sometimes even praises his talent, he generally uses his portrayal to exemplify all the horrors and disasters this caudillo-gaucho regime is causing on Argentina and its suffering population. If Sarmiento is to be believed, entire cities in the interior have been virtually destroyed and the population reduced to beggars. Even Buenos Aires, the glorious light of Argentina, is reduced to a source of income for Rosas.

While Sarmiento’s Argentina is in ruins, he sees a lot of potential. We hear of people who has done great things for the country in science, religion, economy or in the military, only to see their work destroyed. If only Rosas and his regime could be ousted, Argentina could be a great place.

Sarmiento would eventually rise to power in Argentina and he is known throughout as the great educator. He founded schools and universities throughout, encouraged immigration from Europe and was a supporter of many industries. I learned in Mendoza that it was Sarmiento who invited a French agronomist to found the wine industry there, which is now one of the world centres of wine production (and the wine is good too!). He would consider the dichotomy of barbarism and civilization unique to Argentina, but it is likely not. What he calls barbarism, some might call freedom. What he calls civilization, some might call colonialism. The world is not as simple as Sarmiento makes to sound.

It was super interesting to read this book with actual present-day Argentina as a backdrop. I know too little about the country and its history, but being there offered a perspective to the story that was quite unique. Sarmiento would likely be both pleased and abhorred by what he would see today, but I found the wonderful Argentinians pleasant, polite and civilized in Sarmiento’s best definition, which more than I can say about many people at home.  

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (1844)

 

The Three Musketeers

As I finished reading Alexander Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” on my way to my summer vacation three weeks ago, I have had plenty on time to think about what to say about it, now that I am back home again. I think time has mellowed my opinion a bit from a somewhat more critical position.

“The Three Musketeers” is one of the more famous works in the canon of nineteenth century literature. There are countless film and TV versions of the story, and I seem to recall an illustrated children’s version that I read as a child. It was therefore a bit of a surprise to me that the only elements I actually recognized, now that I read the book, are names of the four (not three!) musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan, and that it took place in seventeenth century France.

The original story was written as a serial and at great speed. This can be clearly felt in the organic development of the story that sort of forms itself as the story moves on. Dumas may have had some idea where the story should go, but clearly only in rough outline. There are threads started that are not or unsatisfactorily followed through and there are tangents that develops into major plot elements. Haphazard story development may be a bit harsh. Organic is a nicer term.

Our main character is a young man called D’Artagnan, who arrives in Paris from the province with the ambition to become a royal musketeer, an elite force committed to the protection of the royal person (Louis XIV). D’Artagnan is on friendly terms with the leader of the unit, Treville, and gets a position as a guard, but not quite musketeer (yet). D’Artagnan also quickly becomes friends with three (The Three) musketeers, Athos Porthos and Aramis. This happens when he challenges each of the three to a duel on swords on the same day...

Early on it becomes clear that there is a rivalry between the musketeers and the Cardinal Richelieu and his minions. Richelieu is described as an evil and cunning schemer who employs dodgy characters to promote his personal ambitions. The first adventure of the musketeers concerns some diamonds that the Queen (Queen Anne of Austria) has given to the love-struck English Duke of Buckingham. The diamonds need to be retrieved to avoid compromising the Queen. Following this, D’Artagnan falls in love with the pretty Madame Bonancieux, who then disappears, apparently abducted. He also gets involved with a mysterious woman, mostly known as Milady. As it turns out, she is a minion of the cardinal and the arch villain of the story. When D’Artagnan causes her some embarrassment she sets out to kill him.

When the musketeers are sent to La Rochelle to participate in the siege of this city, they demonstrate bravery against the enemy, but mostly they try to defend themselves from the murderous Milady. The story now takes a tangential direction, and we follow Milady on a mission to England to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham, her capture and following escape. For this section of the novel (around a hundred pages), the musketeers are not even mentioned. Finally, with Milady back in France we get a final and dramatic meetup of the characters.

The great strength of this novel, and likely the basis of its massive fame, is the extraordinary flow of the story. Dumas writes dialogue with a speed and fluidity I have not encountered in any novel prior to this one and it is a style massively imitated since. He writes like a modern action movie by wasting little time on descriptions but let the action and the plot drive the story. That has the pleasant effect of making this a page-turner novel that keeps you on edge and waiting for what happens on the next page. Employing this format, Dumas could have written on any topic and it would have been a great read.

When we get down to the actual story, things become a bit more problematic. Obviously, we are supposed to sympathize with the musketeers and think of them as great guys, but in reality, they are rash, violent and proud brutes. Maybe in the nineteenth century their qualities smacked of bravery and manliness, but in the twenty-first century, they are the type of people you do not want to meet on a night in town.

Then there is the conflict between the musketeers and the Cardinal Richelieu. I had a hard time understanding this conflict. Richelieu worked for the (in the story largely incompetent) king to secure and protect France. He drove an organization and centralization campaign we would consider modern and was not surpassed until the era of Napoleon. In a Europe dominated by the devastation of the thirty-year war, he was the glue that tied France together. When the musketeers are in opposition to him, they are largely supporting the enemies of France: Spain, Austria and particularly England. Doing this, amounts to treason and yet the musketeers are the heroes while the Cardinal is the villain.

The only way I can explain this is in the conflict between centralization and regional independence, between king and nobility, state and regions, unionism and federalism. This is a type of conflict that goes back to antiquity and still takes place today. The musketeers in this light represents the nobility who is losing power when Richelieu usurps it for the state. Whether this is a good or a bad cause, I will let the reader decide.

While I read the story, I was frustrated with the meandering storyline, especially the very long detour with Milady, but as the weeks have passed, I see it as less of a problem. Since the flow is never lost and the story remains interesting, it is simply something to accept and just flow with it. And that is the thing with this book: You are never bored by it. Perplexed and confused, yes, but never bored.

That is the best recommendation I can give a book.

 

  

The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allen Poe (1843)

 

The Pit and the Pendulum

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is another short story from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories I got. It is very short indeed, barely 20 pages and covers hardly more than a single scene, but what a scene it is.

The narrator is a prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition who wakes up in a dark cell. He has evidently sustained some sort of torture because even the simple act of gathering his senses is an ordeal. As he slowly comes to, he tries to orient himself, but collapses in the process.

When he wakes up, he realizes the cell is smaller than anticipated, but taller and at the centre of the cell there is a bottomless pit. This pit seems to be the only way out, but our narrator shrinks back from this place as a certain death sentence. Some food has been set out for him, and this has clearly been laced with a sedative because when he wakes up again, he is tied to a pallet. Only his one arm is free enough to reach some food and drink. Eventually he notices a pendulum swinging high above him. The bottom edge of is a razor-sharp blade. His sense of panic increases when he also notices that the pendulum is slowly descending. Over the next few pages, we follow this increase in panic until it reaches a crescendo when the swinging blade is low enough to cut him. Basically, his cell only holds two exits, both through death: the pit or the pendulum.

This is a very short story, but by sticking to describing the developing stages of the narrator’s panic and fear we get plenty of that. By using the first-person form, it is not just him, but us who are feeling the torture and the sense of impending death and doom. The helplessness and the inevitability are the worst of it. There is nothing he can do but wait and anticipate his own destruction. They say that in the last seconds before your death, your life passes before your eyes in summary, but not in this story. It is blind, white, all-consuming fear, you experience.

As I mentioned in my review of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe did not invent the gothic genre, but he shaped it into the form that we recognize. This is also true of “The Pit and the Pendulum”. It is a window into horror literature at least a century before this became a really big thing. Modern horror uses many of the same effects and these can also be found in the other short stories of the book. Not all are as good, but they all contain that eerie, weird feeling that something is not right.

I am not myself a fan of the horror genre, but I recognize the quality of these short stories and for fans of the genre I am certain this is essential reading. It is certainly easily accomplished.

 

  

Lost Illusions - Honore De Balzac (1843)

 

Lost Illusions

“Lost Illusions” is the third book on the List by Honoré de Balsac, a writer I am getting familiar with now. While his books are never happy, this is the most pessimistic book so far. There is a bitterness here that can only be personal.

In the provincial town of Angoulême, two young friends, David and Lucien are striking out in life. David, son of a printer, has inherited his miser of a father’s old printing house, but is more interested in inventing a new process for making paper manufacturing cheaper and so the business slides. He gets married to Lucien’s sister Eve, who tries but has trouble keeping the printing business afloat. While David is a virtuous person, whose only “fault” is his persistence in his research, Lucien is a flagrant type. He has aspirations of being a poet and has already a manuscript for a collection of poetry and a novel. This gets him invited to the salons of the local nobility and Madame de Bargeton starts flirting with him. This develops into an elopement, taking them to Paris.

In Paris Madame de Bargeton easily slides into the world of the fashionable, while Lucien is seen as an embarrassment. Left to dry, Lucien, after having squandered away the money generously donated by David, Eve and their mother, submits to an existence in poverty. His attempt at being a poet flounders amid the brutal reality of Paris, but gains him virtuous friends. A new world opens up for him when he encounters the journalist Lousteau and Lucien becomes a journalist himself. This is a world of absolute corruption, where articles are written for or against people on a whim or for political or economical gains. One day you support a person/play/book/party, the next you are against. Lucien with his talents and flossy moral is excellent at this job, but in the process, he loses his good friends in favour of less reliable friends in journalism. With his new-found power to make or break people he now gains access to also the nobility and even has aspirations to regain his maternal name of de Rubempré. This makes his interesting again to Madame de Bargeton, but Lucien prefers his actress girlfriend and the snuffed Bargeton as well as jealous journalist colleagues set in motion an avalanche of events to ruin and crush Lucien. It even gets so far that Lucien defrauds his friend David, sending him to the brink of ruin and into the arms of people who wants to steal his invention.

Lucien is obviously a flawed character. While he feels sincere remorse for the trouble he causes and seems to have some scruples on taking on questionable jobs, neither last very long. He is arrogant and ambitious enough to think he will get away with it, and it does not help that his good looks often clears the way for him. He gets plenty of admonitions on the right way of doing things, but always ends up taking the easy and fast way. During his time in Paris, his only virtuous act that he sees through is to stick to his girlfriend and even that brings him in trouble. Balzac half blames the weak character of Lucien and half the Paris society. Balzac had plenty of experience to match Lucien’s and the bitterness against to double crossings and cutthroat business of both the printing business and journalism in Paris is evident. Balzac will frequently insert a harangue against various elements of this world seemingly out of context with the story he is trying to tell, simply to vent his frustrations.

Lucien gets crushed, not so much because he deserves it as because this is what happens to naive talents in Paris. There is always somebody who wants to take advantage of you and if you step on somebody, their vanity knows no mercy. Lucien experiences this, but never seems to learn from it.

Back in Angoulême, it is the same story, but with finance and the legal system as the villains. The Cointet brothers of the rival printing house and the double-faced lawyer Petit-Claud are every bit as remorseless as the journalists and printers of Paris.

So, what is the morale of Balzac? What is the solution? His rather depressing conclusion is that either you become a monster yourself or you leave the game entirely and live as simple a life as possible. Anybody who sticks their nose out are asking for it.

Rather depressive, really. It took me a while to get through “Lost Illusions” as it kept knocking the wind out of me. If you care even a bit for the characters, you will feel distressed on every other page. At least with Lucien, I learned to write him off as a lost cause, but my heart bled for David and Eve. There is no doubt this is a well written book, it even has its moments of wry humour, and it is celebrated as one of Balzac’s best novels. Personally, I preferred “Old Man Goriot”, and I do not feel inclined to repeat the misery-feast parts of this novel, which is, honestly, the majority of it.

    

Happy New Year 2026

 

Happy New Year 2026

A new year is approaching, and it is time for my annual address to... whoever find their way to this blog.

2025 was not a particularly great year. It used to be a casual off-hand thing to say that the world is going crazy. In 2025 it felt as if it is really happening. I find myself increasingly shutting down on international affairs and while I know this ostrich mentality is not really doing any good, I find a lot of comfort in watching movies from the eighties and reading books from the nineteenth century.

I did slow down though on the movies. Only 45 reviews in 2025 of which 39 were List movies. That took me from 1985 to 1987, making this the shortest step so far on this mission. Some of this was due to some very long movies, but most of it was simply lack of time. I love the eighties and the movies have generally been great. Should I mention a particular movie that made an impression, it must be “Tampopo”, though watching “Shoah” with my wife felt very important.

On my book blog I managed 9 books which is pretty good. This took me from “Father Goriot”, 1835 to “Dead Souls”, 1842, a span of 7 years. Those have been very interesting books written some of the most famous classic authors. Maybe surprisingly, the best of them was “The Lion of Flanders” by a, to me, completely unknown author (Hendrik Conscience). This year also included the most difficult to find book-so-far, “Camera Obscura”, which I read in Google translated Dutch.

Anyway, I just want to wish everybody a happy New Year. May the Swartch be with you all (guess what movie is coming up...).

 

Camera Obscura - Hildebrand (1839)

 

Camera Obscura

This was the most difficult to find book on the List so far. “Camera Obscura” is a book by the Dutch writer Nicolaas Beets under the pseudonym Hildebrand. There is supposed to be an English translation out there and I asked my local bookshop to help me find it. This took them about half a year and several failed attempts to finally get it home... in Dutch. Resigned to this I used Goggle Lense to translate every page from old Dutch to English and painstakingly read through those haphazard translations. That was a weird and often confusing experience and one I am not particularly keen to repeat.

“Camera Obscura” is not a single story, but more of an anthology of short stories that have little if anything in common. The only recurring element is that the author often refer to himself. Some text appears to be letters to Hildebrand, others are essays on themes such as travelling, seeing friends from childhood and watching animals in menageries or at fairs. The longest and by far most interesting story is about Hildebrand spending some weeks with an uncle and aunt and particularly his cousin Pieter Stastok. Both are in this scenario students with Pieter an almost comically pedantic and helpless character. Hildebrand attempts to help him but whether it be al billiard or taking girls for an outing in a boat, Pieter Stastok manages to make a fool of himself.

While the individual stories are all quite different both in tone and topic, they all help to paint sceneries of daily life in The Netherland in the 1830’ies. We get portraits particularly of members of the middle class, but also glimpses of the serving class. We meet them in their homes and in their interactions with each other. We hear a lot about fairgrounds, about visiting farms, about travelling. I believe this is the first novel on the List to describe travel by railway, something entirely new and exotic at this time. All these scenes help explain the title of the novel. A camera obscure is used to project a view down on a flat surface to help a painter produce a rendition of the view. In the same way, the short stories project images to us of scenes in The Netherlands so that we can imagine them in the right perspective.

What are then the impressions we get? Mostly that people were in The Netherlands in the 1830’ies the same way as people are at any time in most of the places in the world. Some are pedantic, some think they are funny. Some are choleric and upset while others are embarrassed, either of themselves or their kin. The doctor who arrives on a blistering hot day in a small town to find his old friend from his student days, only to find that his family is a mess with unruly children and obstinate servants and after hardly an hour cannot wait to get away again. There is an essay on education of children that probably tells a lot about schools in those days and even a rant warning about trying to be amusing when you are not.

I am not entirely certain it is working for me though. Only the story of Pieter Stastok is long and detailed enough to make the scenes really come alive. To some extent I do blame to awkward reading process, but I did get enough out of it to catch the idea. There is something of interest in the short stories, but I do wish they would have been woven together in a coherent whole. Maybe you must be Dutch to really appreciate it.

In any case, I cannot say I found reason enough for this book to be on the List. It is not a bad book, just not enough. From my movie list I have learned that if something is difficult to find, it is usually for a reason. So apparently it is with books.

    

Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (1842)

 

Dead Souls

“Dead Souls” is the second novel by Nikolai Gogol on the List after “The Nose”. This time he toned down the absurdity, but only by a notch. Where most people will agree that a nose cannot just leave the owner, the characters of “Dead Souls” are just about plausible even if they are caricatures and for this reason it is a novel that works so much stronger than “The Nose”.

The novel consists of two parts which share little but the main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. Chichikov is a man on a mission, which is to create wealth for himself, but every attempt of his eventually sours because it is just on the other side of the acceptable, either by social or by legal standards, yet ironically the palette of characters Chichikov encounters are practically all further on the wrong side of that boundary, but seems to get away with it.

The first book serves as a particular case. Chichikov arrives in a provincial town and manages to befriend all the gentility of the town with his friendly manner. Chichikov’s ploy to make money involves buying up “dead souls”, meaning peasants who have died, but are not yet registered as dead and so their owner, meaning the landowner of the village, still must pay their tax. I do not know exactly how that ploy works, but clearly the locals do not know either and so seeds of mistrust for Chichikov are being sown, despite Chichikov’s insistence that what he is offering actually helps them.

Every single one of the characters Chichikov meets are odd, in one way or another, and I suspect they each describe archetypes in caricature among the Russian gentility in the first half of the nineteenth century. They may be spendthrifts, drunkards, niggards, or outright corrupt or, in the case of the women, gossips, halfwits or primadonnas. By comparison Chichikov is a boy scout and he becomes our eyes experiencing this zoo of characters, which means that he becomes the hero we associate with and his reactions to these people largely reflect our own. Only rarely does his own oddities pop up, and when they do they appear harmless and innocent compared to those around him. When in the end he is run out of town, it is not because we see him as transgressing any boundaries of significance, but because everybody else make him up to be that transgressor.

The second book is a disjointed affair, partly because large sections are missing, including the ending and partly because it jumps around almost at random. We learn some of Chichikov’s backstory, placing him in a less flattering light then the first book and his transgressions also become more tangible. Still, they are peanuts compared to the characters around him who are all fools in different ways, even the hard working and outward sensible Konstanzhoglo.

While the second book continue to expose the odd characters of Russian gentility, it is more difficult to see the deeper point of this part. Chichikov does get in trouble, but this time not so much from the frenzy of the mob as from actual criminal actions that he really should not have done but have been led to by his own wish for fortune and the examples of all around him.

I much enjoyed the first book. It is amusing in its parody of Russian society, a parody we can understand even not being Russian because these traits are not exclusive to Russians. It is also coherent and realistic enough that I as reader get caught up in the story. The second book, however, often lost me. Every time I thought I had recentred the story, it took me somewhere else, leaving me disoriented and that meant getting disassociated from the story. I still enjoyed the characters, but they became vignettes rather than a coherent entity. This is a shame, and I think “Dead Souls” would have stood stronger had it only contained the first book.

I can only guess at what contemporary Russians may have thought of this satire of their society. The peasants would have been largely illiterate, so the readers would be the very same gentility Gogol was satirizing. Would they have found that amusing? And would it at all have been safe, given the repressiveness which have always pervaded Russian systems of any name? As an outsider it is hard to come to terms with people being the property of somebody else, but that element is never questioned by Gogol and that in itself leaves me baffled.

I have finally found a copy of “Camera Obscura”, an earlier book I have bypassed. It took the bookshop half a year to track it down, but now it is finally here... in Dutch. This will be a reading through Google Len