Pushing a Boulder, scooping Sand, piling rocks into the river of Hades - all fun

The village in The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe has at its mouth a number of holes, each containing a house. These houses represent the only defense for the village against the sand, which like a liquid will pour through the village unless it is shovelled out of these holes indefinitely - of course, it is an endless task.

It's an interesting take on the idea of finding duty in a sentence of endless servitude. Camus' Myth of Sysiphus is another example, however in the book it refers to the River of Hades. My suspicion is that this "river of Hades" is not derived from the Greek mythology, but rather is given as a crude translation from a Japanese myth - I've got no idea though. In the River of Hades example told throughout the book, shovelling the sand is like piling up rocks in the river of Hades, and there too they are never allowed to complete the task.

This story differs, however, especially if we think of the protagonist and how he deals with his sentence. After arriving in the town, he stays one night with "a woman" who seems a little vague about how he will leave the next day. I like imprisonment stories where the capture is never really acknowledged - however this type of dialogue between the two changes as the story develops. So as a starting point, we never really get the idea that the sentence is carried out with duty - those in the holes are condemned and essentially slaves to the village. It is not until many attempts to escape that the protagonist defers his plans indefinitely.

I couldn't help but think that given the situation and the woman's loneliness, it would have seemed natural just to accept the imprisonment from the beginning - since there is nothing to go home to, however this must be a peculiarity of my own ideas or the influence of Camus.

There are 3 sex-scenes in the book, all quite confronting and not so romantic - in fact, the way the woman in the dunes is treated is really quite appalling... despite her lay-down attitude, I think she still deserved better. Oh well.

Extension du domaine de la lutte... "whatever"

The English title of this short novel, "whatever" is somewhat unfortunate, since the phrase evokes the attitude of young teenagers rather than the struggle of modern man in confronting life's indifference whilst "in a depression". The french title translates literally to something like extending the domain of the struggle (not difficult to discern from the words) and this is something more like what is going on.

Set in and around Paris, Houellebecq draws a lot from Sartre and other writers in that tradition. As well as many passages in the book reminding me (sometimes bluntly) of Nausea, some reminded me of Unbearable Lightness of Being, Fight Club or American Psycho. These similarities are sometimes interesting, however since Houellebecq fails to depict a unique or new crisis in man, I found it hard to find any of the revelations (or lack there-of) important.

His protagonist is ironically funny, sometimes aggressive in his dislike of people (particularly attractive/sexual women), at others surprisingly empathetic. Many of the wry observations refer to his company, the main office and it's software development (the program is called Maple, which is a mathematics programming package in reality but I couldn't quite gather whether he was aware of this or not).

What perhaps distinguishes this story from others is that the lead character is given a diagnosis. He is told that he is "in a depression" and we see the beginnings of the altered interaction with his co-workers after this (he's only got one friend). The depression is expressed more specifically through the character's loneliness, his lack of a loving girlfriend (many mentions of his ex- of 2 years), and how these things are needed for fulfilment when God is taken out of the picture - so in this sense, it moves beyond the existentialist dilemma and toward the more-human need for interaction and love.

Freakonomics

I'm sure not too many would appreciate the pun that is "freakonomics" - it's about as bad as "blogerithm", none-the-less, this is a book of cute anecdotes, most of which involve stats.

Levitt's philosophy is simple: numbers cannot lie - which runs counter to the lying statistics revelations of 1954. In the spirit of this belief, Levitt's work has been rigorous and seemingly unbiased. In investigating correlations been abortion and crime-rate, I was convinced enough by the controlling variables that were investigated to believe, "yeah, crime-rate dropped in the 90s because aborted children in the 70s would be just reaching their prime criming age!".

I was also really impressed by his algorithm to detect cheating teachers (teachers who doctor some of their students' standardised tests so that they don't look like such bad teachers) and the following statistics used for support. What is interesting is, indeed, that statistics were able to form sole justification for the firing of teachers - against professings of innocence, and traditional innocent before guilty notions. Wow, I say.

There are other nice anecdotes retold in this book, one of which involves a man who brought down an entire chapter of the KKK just by revealing their secrets on a Superman radio programme.

I am always skeptical of this type of book, where the "wow" factor of mathematics and statistics is used to intrigue people, however I think the basis of Levitt's findings have been pretty solid, and he has intelligently answered questions that I'm sure would have been thrown in the too-hard-to-know-for-sure basket. This isn't just basic maths dressed up as magic - in fact, I'm pretty inspired to try and find a really interesting application for my own research. Nice one.