September 2020
Favorites of the month: Traveling with Pomegranates, Twilight of Democracy, and The Margot Affair
Do you ever feel like books have a way of coming into your life at just the right time? Have you ever encountered a story that unearths an ostensibly uncharted — though transcendently known — part of yourself or your journey? This is how I feel about Traveling with Pomegranates, Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor’s joint memoir about their mother-daughter excursions to Greece, Turkey, and France. Though in different ways, Sue and Ann start their shared journey from a place of intense loss, each feeling that they are on the precipice of a dark, alien abyss. Haunted by the “small, telling ‘betrayals’” of her body, Sue is grappling with the “death” of herself as a young woman, sensing that something is over or “lost.” She yearns to write a novel (what would become The Secret Life of Bees), though she cannot shake the feeling that her dream amounts to merely a “whimsy, hope, impulse, [or] silly conceit.” At 22, her daughter Ann has spent the past few years in a cocoon of understood (yet untested) safety, “quietly organizing [her] psychological orbits” around a boyfriend who breaks her heart. As a recent college graduate, she emerges from this cocoon unraveled, shaken, and rejected, desperately trying to find a world to which she belongs.
Lodged deep inside these individual battles is a shared yearning for renewed and re-strengthened relationship. As a mother, Sue struggles to love in a way that is free of interference or enmeshment while Ann, enamored by her mother’s example, hopes to uncover and build an identity that is hers — bound but free, inherited but owned. What results is a “strange purgatory” of sorts in which both Sue and Ann feel uncomfortable with and distant from one another. Though outwardly close, they find themselves preoccupied with the surface-level pleasantries and frivolities of life, unable to unlock what is deep and true.
What thus starts out as a fun mother-daughter trip becomes a pilgrimage of rediscovery and rebirth. From the cathedrals of Paris and southern France to the ancient sites of Athens, Ephesus, Paliani, and Eleusis, Sue and Ann enwrap themselves in a sibylline journey of past and present, uncovering in the Mourning Athena, the Black Madonna at Le Puy-en-Velay, the Virgin of the Myrtle, and the Grotte Chauvet symbolic analogues — as well as instructive templates — for their own renewal. Central to Sue and Ann’s story of renewal is that of Demeter and Persephone, antiquity’s most famous mother-daughter duo. In the Greek myth, the beautiful maiden Persephone is abducted by Hades, lord of the dead, who brings her to the underworld. Bewildered and bereaved by the loss of her beloved daughter, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, the goddess of grain, harvest, and fertility, vengefully scours the earth, rendering it a desolate, unyielding wasteland. With no other choice but to intervene, Zeus eventually orders Hades to return Persephone to her mother. Yet in all of his cunning, Hades tricks Persephone into eating a handful of pomegranate seeds, thus guaranteeing her return to the underworld every winter.
With the start of each spring, however, Demeter and Persephone reunite. Out of this powerful rejoining or heuresis, Persephone emerges not as the naïve, “untested” girl but as a conscious woman, tragically — though perhaps necessarily — “transfigured by her experience.” At the Telesterion in Eleusis, Sue and Ann write, pilgrims from across the ancient Panhellenic world would travel thousands of miles to reenact the story of Demeter and Persephone through the so-called “Rites of Eleusis” (or “Eleusinian Mysteries”). By experiencing a figurative descent to the underworld, or kathodos, followed by a figurative resurrection to “new life,” or anados, the participants would leave Eleusis forever freed from the fear of death.
Through their travels, Sue and Ann each experience their own kathodos and anados and, ultimately, their own shared heuresis. Though as separate individuals, they come together as a mother and daughter, indelibly bound by a transcendent love for each other and a transcendent trust in life after death. In their story, the reader is able to identify countless moments of connection and understanding, regardless of gender, age, experience, or vocation. Certainly, while we may not always be able to literally “travel” with pomegranates, haven’t we all lost ourselves in search of the “right” profession or in devotion to the wrong partner? Haven’t we all buried a dream in which part of ourselves dies too? Haven’t we all experienced a loss that cuts us so deeply that we fear we may never see the light of day again? And haven’t we all yearned for a rebirth that leaves us with a greater understanding of God, each other, and ourselves?
In reading Traveling with Pomegranates, we are able to not just witness such a rebirth, but to profoundly understand what such a rebirth can mean for the relationships that matter most to us. Hopefully, we will all have the courage, patience, and compassion to endure our own “holy dark” to experience this rebirth for ourselves.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anne Applebaum begins her newest book, Twilight of Democracy, with a party. The night is December 31, 1999, and Applebaum and her husband are hosting a lively coterie of friends at Chobielin, a small, ramshackled house in northwest Poland, to help ring in the new millennium. Representing a motley crew of journalists, civil servants, and diplomats, the party’s guests were different though united in their faith in Poland’s future — a future that they all hoped would be safeguarded by democratic checks and balances and a commitment to the rule of law.
Twenty years later, many of the party’s attendees are not on speaking terms, with half having remained loyal to Poland’s classically anti-Communist “right” and half having defected to the country’s nativist Law and Justice party, co-founded by twin brothers Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński in 2001. Applebaum writes that since winning a slim majority in 2015, the Law and Justice party has trended toward dangerous illiberalism, taking over the state public broadcaster, sacking thousands of civil servants, firing army generals, disparaging and defunding cultural institutions, and repeatedly violating the constitution. Harnessing existential resentment toward Jews, Islamic immigrants, and the “rainbow-colored ‘plague’” of homosexuality,” the party has fostered a culture of deep division and discrimination, indulging in nostalgic fear-mongering as well as “alternative facts” to sow, authenticate, and institutionalize prejudice.
In Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum globalizes Law and Justice’s seemingly “unique” penchant toward authoritarianism, exposing the neofascist illiberalism which guides several burgeoning political parties in the West (i.e., Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, Santiago Abascal’s Vox party in Spain, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in France) as well as the governments of the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and the United States’ Donald Trump. With eloquent and persuasive urgency, she identifies what these political movements have in common. They begin, she tells us, with not necessarily an idea or ideology but a person – a charismatic celebrity who seeks more power and fame. With said person at the helm, the movement rises to power by attacking institutions, trivializing democratic ideals, and galvanizing nostalgia for a “simpler” past as it corroborates wild conspiracy theories, fixating on institutional or demographic scapegoats which pose some sort of threat to what is “normal” or “good.” Once in power, the movements back this nationalistic scapegoating with government action while violating constitutional norms and exerting undemocratic control over education and the arts. Capitalizing on anger, division, and existential nihilism, they inspire and standardize hyper-partisanship, breeding distrust of “normal” politics, “establishment” politicians, professional experts, and “mainstream” institutions.
Building on nearly a century of research, Applebaum reveals not just why — but how — authoritarianism can so easily replace democracy. The roots of this change, she tells us, are not political, historical, or specific to the global “East”; rather, they are tied to a deeply human and profoundly universal preference for homogeneity and order and, by extension, an aversion to pluralistic complexity, tolerance, and debate. Citing the French writer Julian Benda, who in the 1920s accused both Marxists and fascists of betraying “the search for truth,” Applebaum frames this “authoritarian predisposition” as not a political ideology but an intrinsically human “frame of mind” that can find resonance on the right as well as on the left. Indeed, whereas right-wing ideologues tend to espouse a nationalist and/or fascist manifestation of authoritarianism that harmfully idealizes the “simplicity” of the past, vituperates academia and the arts, and encourages xenophobic prejudice, left-wing ideologues tend to champion a form of Marxist authoritarianism that harmfully represses freedom of speech, rejects meritocratic advancement, and denounces “the destructive force of capitalism” in favor of socialistically inspired equality. Regardless of its ideological origins, the pull toward authoritarianism exploits the same instincts and breeds the same results, creating a world in which difference is replaced by intolerance, nuance is replaced by absolutism, and idealism is replaced by nihilistic doom and gloom.
During the U.S. presidential election of 2016, argues Applebaum, the anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment politics of the old Marxist left met and mingled with the right’s “despair about the dire moral state of the nation” — an interaction which found its voice in the “restorative,” “proto-authoritarian personality cult” of Donald Trump. During and after the election, Trump awarded credence to left and right variations of anti-Americanism, validating disdain for the “Establishment” (“Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs”) as well as evangelical anguish over the country’s moral deterioration (“the crime and gangs and drugs,” etc.).
With well-examined insight, Applebaum describes the ways in which Trump has successfully actualized much of the authoritarian rhetoric of his campaign. Marking a significant departure from historical precedent, he has 1). Maligned civic and cultural institutions, berating American generals as “a bunch of dopes and babies,” American intelligence as “the deep state,” and American universities as hotbeds of “radical left indoctrination”; 2). Violated the rule of law, prohibiting executive branch officers from surrendering documents or giving testimony related to impeachment while politically coercing members of the federal workforce; 3). Fueled racially rooted fear and animus, joining others in blaming the decline of “the America we know and love” on a factually unsubstantiated invasion of “thieves, murderers, [and] rapists” and an “overrunning” of American suburbs with “low income projects”; and 4). Indulged in conspiratorial thinking, arguing that George Soros “owns” Black Lives Matter, accusing Joe Biden of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and honoring members of QAnon — who believe that Democrats are pedophilic Satanists — as “people who love our country.”
Oftentimes, when Trump’s neofascist behaviors are called out, the response resembles the following: “Trump is unethical and immoral, sure, but everyone is unethical and immoral” (or, alternatively, “Trump is unethical and immoral, but the liberal media is biased”). As it so happens, this rhetorical fallacy — known as “whataboutery” or “whataboutism” — actually takes its lead from Trump, who often uses American wrongdoing to justify his admiration of Vladimir Putin (i.e., “you think our country’s so innocent?”). While there is certainly value in addressing American wrongs, such whataboutism creates a pernicious moral equivalence between Soviet-style dictatorship and American democracy, undermining our faith in the ideals of our founding while giving the president license to break the rules and win at all costs “just like everyone else.” By equalizing democracy and authoritarianism, it rejects the long-held notion that we are a model of workable, sustainable, and reproducible democracy, thereby eliminating any reason to defend or adhere to our democratically beholden values in the first place.
While there are a few things that Applebaum leaves unaddressed in Twilight of Democracy (i.e., the future of the electoral college, how to cultivate a patriotism that honors without idealizing its past, etc.), no other book that I’ve read provides such a clear and helpful framework for understanding how we got here — or how we are going to get out. Ending on an optimistic note, Applebaum suggests that democracy can be restored: “Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars.”
As part of this fight, Applebaum encourages circumspection of any singular roadmap, rule book, or “didactic ideology” that promises immediate recovery or consummate restoration: “There is no final solution, no theory that will explain everything.” In doing, she reminds us that we are all fumbling through the darkness, all endeavoring to sift through the cacophony, complexity, and uncertainty of our modern era. And though we try, in this sifting, to discern what is right, we are all unavoidably susceptible to hypocrisy, prejudice, self-interest, and “silver bullet solutions.”
All what we can do is embrace the darkness for what it is. All what we can do is resist the temptation of authoritarianism’s seductive but delusive light. All what we can do is keep seeking the truth.
Sanaë Lemoine’s debut novel, The Margot Affair, tells the story of Margot, the love child of acclaimed stage actress Anouk Louve and French presidential hopeful Bertrand Lapierre, who have been carrying on a secret affair for the past two decades, raising their daughter in a clandestine series of “stolen moments.” Set in Paris, the novel opens the summer that Margot turns seventeen: She and Anouk are sitting side-by-side at a small café, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, when they see something that threatens to expose — or at least seriously destabilize — their precious “arrangement” with Bertrand.
Having ascended into the highest echelons of Parisian society, marrying into one of the city’s wealthiest families and becoming the country’s Minister of Culture, Bertrand has always sought to conceal his double life, tucking Anouk and Margot away in a tiny apartment to avoid any stain on his “polished persona.” Though he is a workaholic and a people pleaser, perpetually “conscious of labels,” he is idolized by Margot, who assumes that she is her father’s “chosen one.” By contrast, Margot feels “repelled” by her mother Anouk, who always seems like she has something better to do or someone more interesting to be with. Complaining that Margot has become spoiled and foolish, she sets unexplained boundaries around their relationship, strictly maintaining that “a mother is not a friend.”
For years, Margot has believed that, despite these imperfections, she and her mother are Bertrand’s “better” family – that is, until a certain fated encounter. Tired of existing in the shadows of her father’s life, she succumbs to the temptation to “tear [her] world open by its seams,” revealing a powerful and potentially lethal secret to a stranger she (mistakenly) thinks she can trust.
Born in Paris herself, Lemoine brings the city of Paris to life, describing its gardens, sidewalks, and corner cafés as one would an impressionist painting. As a recipe and cookbook editor, she appeals to our palettes, too, sparking our taste buds with a carte of delectable French cuisine — a tomato and fennel tart layered with parsley pesto; a caramelized pear custard sprinkled with shards of toasted almond; and a sumptuous panini topped with specks of oregano clung to melted cheese. Though seemingly immaterial, Lemoine’s focus on food gradually emerges as one of the novel’s major themes, reflecting our broader human relationship with appetite, hunger, and indulgence. Fitting the mold of the quintessentially Parisian bon vivant, many of Lemoine’s characters indeed take “great pleasure” in their food, devouring whatever is placed in front of them without any heed to their weight, as if they are “oblivious” to their bodies, with some even going as far as to hoard at the expense of others. That said, many others approach their food from a place deprivation: They weigh themselves at the start of each morning and manage each and every bite with meticulous “discipline”; they starve themselves to fit into their clothes — and into the world around them.
At times, Lemoine’s focus on appetite can become rather dark, particularly as she treads into cannibalistic territory, though I ended the book absolutely blown away by her ability to connect our hunger for food with our hunger for relationship, acceptance, and love. For her entire life, Margot has been forced to silence the latter, living in a constant state of postponement and anticipation, drawing comfort only from the belief that she is filling a need in her dad’s life – that she is making his famished, colorless life whole. But the truth tells a far different — and far more heart-breaking — story.
Margot’s response to the truth can be occasionally hard to stomach. Rejecting the transparency she’s always craved, she morphs into what Lemoine describes as a “mass of contradictory selves,” unable to resist the feeling of controlling what others know and don’t know about her. Yet thanks to Lemoine’s tender prose and deep, anthropological insight, Margot’s coming-of-age is not something we can judge her for, at least not for long. She is, after all, just a kid trying to be seen; just a daughter seeking to be fed.