Harper’s Notes (10/21/24)

Matters of the heart: In a special double-feature response to the question “Should you love your country?” writers Matthew Martin and Fateme Tavakoli turn our attention to the relationship between patriotism and possibility. Martin, speaking of the United States, asks how his father is to love a country whose political distance leaves him feeling reduced to a “stupid landscaper.” Tavakoli, speaking of her native Iran, asks how she is to remain a patriot of the land of her youth, even as the laws of its clerical regime left her “sitting in the back of a morality police van for showing too much hair.” For these authors, however, these questions are not rhetorical. In the face of a politics that undermines the community one cherishes, Martin and Tavakoli argue that the role of the patriot is to cling to the promise of their nation’s potential. Martin argues that in its best form, patriotism retains the grand ideals of its “imagined community” but focuses them at the level of one’s own life, combining “grand aspirations with decisive local action.” Tavakoli emphasizes the strength that faith in the ideals of a nation can inspire, enabling one to demand that one’s country be better “because it believes in it enough to know that it can.” Leaving the reader with the defiant examples of Martin’s father and the executed Iranian dissident Majid Kazemi, Martin and Tavakoli respond to the editors’ question with a resounding affirmative.

Finding beauty on the brink: “In the next town over, a man had killed his family.” So opens Paul Murray’s 2023 novel The Bee Sting, the second of his works since 2010’s Skippy Dies to be considered for the Booker Prize. It’s a menacing opening, signaling the kinds of news stories we read every day—tragedies both happenstance and horrific, thrilling half because they read as impossible, and half because you can just imagine them happening right in front of you. That sense of danger—the possibility for the ordinary to tip right over into disaster—runs through the entire novel.
Set in the aftermath of the financial failure of a small Irish car business, The Bee Sting toggles between perspectives within the family that owns the shop. There’s Cass, a teenager whose prescience and pretentiousness are rendered with equal honesty by Murray’s sharp prose; PJ, a tween boy whose reckless desire for adventure often overcomes his sense of danger; their mother Imelda, whose dazzling stream-of-consciousness takes up an entertaining chunk of the novel; and finally, their father Dickie, whose section, undoubtedly my favorite, I will not spoil. Murray is adept at rendering familial relationships and at writing youthful characters. He has particular skill for capturing the contradictory ways relationships can map onto each other—love coexisting with envy in the same breath. The book could succeed as a kind of Franzenian family epic, and yet Murray never lets go of the sense that something deeper is happening, that these characters exist, always, on the edge of an abyss. The Bee Sting is not a perfect book; some of its crazier plot elements failed to cohere for me. Nevertheless, it remains a work of supreme skill, a veritable masterclass in voice and character particularly. As for where its menacing tone leads, I will not reveal anything. But having read The Bee Sting once, I found it hard to forget.

Autumn leaves: Last week, my mother was in town. Strapped for activities or outings to prove that, yes, we do have fun here, I decided to take her to Doc Films. We were both pleasantly surprised by Fall, part of Doc Films’ spotlight on filmmaker Vadim Kostrov, a Russian expatriate from the Ural Mountains now living in Paris. The film follows a ten-year-old, Vadim, wandering in the town of Nizhny Tagil. At certain moments, Fall lingers on its solitary subject eating a cheeseburger or gazing over the edge of a craggy hillside in the setting autumn sun. These moments were extremely long, testing the patience of the audience, some of whom got up and left. The film also features almost unbearable binaural audio of cars and other vehicles. Alongside the post-Soviet architecture, the lack of dialogue, and the drifting Vadim, one is confronted with the subtle oppression of existing in an urban environment.
The film was followed by a discussion and Q+A with the filmmaker and Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya of cinema and media studies. Kostrov said of the film that it was an attempt to achieve a state of memory—it allowed him to return to the past and to experience impressions of life at that time. Anything present and sharp, like an 8K digital camera, was verboten. To reflect the transition between analog and digital, Kostrov used a camera from 2005. During one of the more action-filled scenes in the film, Vadim cannot get into an apartment building, despite punching in the code several times. Faced with defeat, he walks away and sits on the swings in a rusty playground, electronic music from a nearby apartment playing in the background. Of this scene, Kostrov said that it was based on a real-life experience when he failed to enter his grandmother’s apartment. “It’s just the first time that you face that the world cannot be perfect…You can be alone at night.”

Sunset in tomorrowland: In a city far, far away, there lies a “Bitcoin cafe” and an experimental medical facility where Patri Friedman, Milton Friedman’s grandson, recently had a Tesla Key implanted in his hand. In T magazine’s September issue, Rachel Corbett writes about “The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down,” otherwise known as Próspera, located on the Honduran Island of Roátan. Próspera is one of 5,400 “special economic zones” worldwide, 1,000 of which have been founded just over the last decade—the majority in developing nations.
Not everyone is a fan. Corbett writes that, to some, these special economic zones amount to a “neocolonial state within a state.” Recently, Próspera’s critics have included citizens from Crawfish Rock, a neighboring fishing village, as well as the Honduran Government, which has led the private town to existential trouble. In describing Próspera, Corbett proposes that libertarian and anarcho-capitalist types are motivated “to seek increasingly splintered-off hubs of sovereignty” as an escape from taxation and government regulation. Brian Finke’s photos accompany the article, including a shot of Próspera’s mayoral figure, Jorge Colindres, looking out over the town from atop a tall building. Colindres’ stature, coupled with a small piece of his stomach revealed by wind under a white linen shirt, captures the feeling that all of this might be built on faulty foundations.