I’m a little behind my book reviews for The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin by Leonid Solovyov and The Hunger Games by Suzanna Collins. To catch-up, I’ll start on the latest book: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht.

I have read fiction of the Balkans before – none of them happy, but each sad in their own way. Back in secondary school, I read S.: The Novel of the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulic. It gave a vivid emotional story to the cruel violence, torture and sexual slavery that was very much a part of the Bosnian War. It will always be a brutal and saddening story, but with the war only five years old at the time of publishing it made the novel that more timely and raw.

In contrast, Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is not about the Balkan War. Instead the novel is set against the complexities of the Balkans and easily interweaves and moves from the history to the folk tales that stretch from the the time of the Ottomans to immediately after the Balkan War. And even in these moments – be it more historical or folk tale, other elements overlap and interact: 1) Geography, a topic one cannot avoid in the Balkans; and 2) the impact and interactions of animals (yes, including a tiger).

Yet with all all these rich elements in play, so much of story is left unsaid and open-ended. No country or specific region is ever mentioned. No dates (other than seasons) ever stated. So much is left unsaid, yet the novel is still rich and vivid.

Between all this, the central character in the novel is a woman and her relationship with her grandfather. And as the main character moves through the many elements of the novel, so much of journey she brings to the reader are of more familiar mortal themes: death and remembering.

Al Jazeera’s Teymoor Nabili recently interviewed Jin Liqun, the supervising chairman of China Investment Corporation, China’s $400bn sovereign wealth fund. Jin had this to say about Europe’s labour laws and welfare society:

“If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society. I think the labour laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking. The incentive system, is totally out of whack.

“Why should, for instance, within [the] eurozone some member’s people have to work to 65, even longer, whereas in some other countries they are happily retiring at 55, languishing on the beach? This is unfair. The welfare system is good for any society to reduce the gap, to help those who happen to have disadvantages, to enjoy a good life, but a welfare society should not induce people not to work hard.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite end from Europe, over in Singapore labours laws are perhaps slightly too lenient, as construction worker bosses send their workers to gamble on their behalf:

Five bosses – some with exclusion orders against them – told The Straits Times that they have been handing workers cash, notebooks and mobile phones, then dispatching them to the casino. They claimed to know several other employers doing the same thing.

The ‘proxy gamblers’, dressed mostly in company polo T-shirts and jeans, get a cut of the winnings, but if they lose too much, their pay is docked

Creative Commons. Based on: http://www.flickr.com/photos/96khz/3127953038/

While Occupy Wall Street goes global and sometimes violent (see Oakland), how much of the income disparity in the United States is due to technology hollowing out the American middle class? What has happened to bank tellers, travel agents and printing press shops?

“How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs”
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/03/141949820/how-technology-is-eliminating-higher-skill-jobs

“He says machines used to take over work that was physically hard or dangerous or just monotonous. But now, he says, we’re losing higher-skill, better-paying jobs to machines — like bank tellers, airline check-in agents, accountants and whole floors of actuaries in insurance companies.
…
So going forward, the worry is there’s going to be a greater need for people to do minimum-wage restaurant busboy-type work and less need for $30-an-hour office workers.”

“The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/11fast.html?pagewanted=all

Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald’s outlets around the country. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few yards from where they were placed.

 

If you’re confused and feel there’s something “too polished” or “too perfect” about her voice, her style, and her video, well there’s plenty of discussion about that:

We crave a popstar who is authentic, who thrives because of their talent, not PR. So when you stumble across someone like Lana Del Rey – her popularity apparently born online and growing per YouTube click – it’s hard not to be sceptical as to whether she’s actually too good to be true. Surely it can’t be that after posting just one song online, this brand new artist sold out a London gig in half an hour?

Via the Guardian’s “One to watch: Lana Del Rey“

How To Make Vietnamese Coffee from High Beam Media on Vimeo.

The song is called Ding Ding Dong by Waipod Phetsuphan. You can download it via Amazon, as part of compilation CD called “Soundway Records Presents The Sound Of Siam : Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz And Molam From Thailand 1964 – 1975.“

Today, I decided to buy something from the UK, some clothing specifically. After checkout, I received a PayPal receipt from Emmanuel Goldstein to confirm receiving payment from me. The hated Emmanuel Goldstein? The head of the Brotherhood,  writer of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and the focus of everyone’s two-minutes of hate‽ I’m pretty sure I have Big Brother on my tail now.

After finishing Mikhil Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir, I found myself needing to move away from my beloved dead Russian authors to living and non-Russian writers. This took me directly to Haruki Marakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

The writing is airy and the story itself contains so many layers, wrinkles, turns that reveal unlikely connections, unlikely crossing paths between Beethoven’s Symphonies, tells of Odipus Rex, and Hegal quoting prostitute. It does touch on philosophy and the metaphysical, after all the main character is named Kafka. Yet, it was done on a very light and surreal level – perhaps something like a more sensual, darker and grown-up version of Le Petit Prince. Early in the book, I encountered a scene where cats talk and I was concerned this novel would go over the top too quickly. Yet, just like we readily accept the talking cat in Mikhil Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, I found myself doing the same with Murakami’s talking cats.

I have to say I’ve fallen in love with this book and found the ~380 pages a refreshing and breezy read. I’ll be reading Marakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland next, once I’m done reading Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Not sure if I’m liking this Shteyngart novel so far. We’ll see.

Recently, a friend gave me a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir. As Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one my favourite books, I eargerly dug into A Dead Man’s Memoir. It is a different beast of a book, so it would be unfair to compare the two.

A Dead Man’s Memoir feels semi-autobiographical, a comment made by many who have reviewed the book. The central character is a self-hating, awkward and easily frustrated by others, especially the Soviet-era writers and playwrights that the novel thinly satirizes. The central character reminds me of other Russian novels, albeit more contemporary 21st century ones.

Overall, the novel is charming. It would not be the first Bulgakov I would recommend reading, but something to add to your literary reading once you have read a healthy dosage of Russian literature.

Via Kottke (via @atenni):

An economic paper from Helsinki University on the relationship between GDP and – ahem – “organ” size:

The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres.

…

Somewhat surprisingly, male organ was a stronger determinant of economic development than country’s political regime type at the Polity IV autocracy/democracy spectrum.

You can read the paper entitled “Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does SizeMatter?” over at Helsinki.Fi

Kuala Lumpur Skyline. Creative Commons via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KL-Skyline_Night_HDR.JPG

The Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic features an article by Chrystia Freeland, where she writes about “The Rise of the New Global Elite.” Freeland outlines how they differ from past American robber barons and their relationship with the American Worker in the context of both globalization and the current economic environment in the United States.

In an interview with a CFO, Freeland briefly highlights the need for the American Worker to adjust to the forces of globalization and the “Rise of the Rest”:

I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world,” he told me. “So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.”

In the United States, the issue of of outsourcing is a hotly debated issue and indeed has played a role in political discussions of America’s anxiety of a “superpower in decline” to California’s 2010 gubernatorial election. The missing larger context is the not the immediate fear of “exporting jobs” but rather that there is a Rise of the Rest.

The picture above is the skyline of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – a city of 1.6 million people. It may not be a New York, Chicago or Los Angeles (yet) but it can hold its own in the international stage as a center of business and commerce. With a work force that is very much educated, multi-lingual as well as English speaking, the people of Kuala Lumpur are just one example of the new multi-polar world. They also represent why the United States needs to adapt to the forces of globalism and economic openness that is has long advocated for.

American companies can either adapt or they can will be overtaken by foreign companies. The American companies are adapting, but what of the American Worker? And what will be the role of the U.S. government to help lead their people to these new realities?