What has happened? And what are we to think about this new German-French friendship? Is this the vision that will lead Europe to new shores? A threat to European democratic integration, as several Members of the European Parliament and some intellectuals think? Or, is it simply a public relations whim?

I think the friendship is authentic at the personal level; it is being put at questionable use at the level of domestic politics; and it is perhaps not too bad from the European perspective.

First, the personal level: Both Merkel and Sarkozy share an outsider feeling within the mainstream political class of their parties—Merkel as the well-behaved East-German female disciple of Helmut Kohl, Sarkozy as the Hungarian Greek-Jewish protégé of Jacques Chirac. That probably bonds. So does their complementarity in terms of character: her strength is her stubbornness; he is pompous and charismatic.

Domestically, and both in France and Germany, the friendship has earned mockery as the coining of the term ‘Merkozy’ shows. It is probably not harming Angela Merkel’s reputation, but she is not facing re-election until next year, and is still on solid ground with the voters despite her recent mishap with Christian Wulff, Germany’s Federal President, who had to resign following allegations for corruption.

Things are not as promising for Nicolas Sarkozy in France where he is trailing significantly behind his main contester, the opposition candidate François Hollande of the Socialist Party. His embracement of Merkel and Germany is also not helping him at the polls. His keeping to it, against all odds, so-to-speak, could suggest one of three things:

1. He is authentic and means it seriously that Germany represents a model for French recovery. This is the position he has been adopting in interviews. In this connection, it is only fair to say that France could indeed learn something from Germany, especially in the fields of labor market and social security reform. (Moreover, even if Merkel is sometimes portrayed like the German Iron Lady, her policies have very little to do with those of Margaret Thatcher).

2. He anticipates that his pro-Merkel, pro-Germany position (in conjunction with some other elements like a hard stance on immigration) will earn him votes during the second round of the presidential elections when the votes of both Liberals and supporters of the ‘Front National’ will be up for grabs.

3. He is not really that interested in re-election and is hoping instead to assume some important European post following his retirement from national politics, and for this, Merkel’s support would be paramount.

Sarkozy is a sly politician. Any one of the above three options could be valid, perhaps all three of them are.

As for the European level, here it is important to recall that historically and symbolically, the project of European integration has always hinged on German-French friendship. As a matter of fact, one reason this project got stuck during the last years was the principal disagreement between the two founding Member States about how to advance the Union’s federalization.

This does not mean that other EU partners have no say in all this. They do, which is also why the process of integration is a long and winding road. But perhaps the best proof that at European level Merkozy is having a positive impact is how the duo has embraced Mario Monti’s ideas for Italian reforms. These, unlike the ones advanced till now for Greece, rest on both pillars of sound budget policy and growth, and they are likely to gain more prominence, for the whole of Europe, over the next months.

The first part of the story is the one already once told, a quarter of a century ago, in Oranges are not the Only Fruit (1985), but differently—then as the first novel of a young woman intent to make her own way into the world, now from the perspective of middle age, at the crossroads between a past rich in accomplishment and experience, and an uncertain future.

The old wounds are still there and they begin, again, to hurt. Mrs. Winterson, Jeanette’s adopted mother, who raised her fiercely to be an ardent Pentecostal Christian, denying her the basic human rights of love and the thirst for knowledge, and who had no second thoughts about submitting her to exorcism upon finding out that she liked sex and preferred girls to boys, is back to haunt her.

The story needs to be re-told, as there is something that went missing the first time round, namely the memory and traces of Jeanette’s biological mother, “the lost loss,” as she poetically puts it. But that is not all. The adopted mother, Mrs. W., she too continues to lay claim to acknowledgement, “she was a monster,” writes Jeanette, “but she was my monster.”

Following the painful breakdown of a long time relationship and the death of her father, and triggered by the discovery of an old birth certificate—her own, Jeanette thinks at first, but no, it is that of the boy who was first choice for adoption but who died, and whom she came to replace—Jeanette has a breakdown, or, using her own, more direct and truthful words, she goes mad.

Her recovery from madness after learning to speak to, and interact with, her inner child and daemon, which among others taught her to write some of the most wonderful modern-day children’s fairy tales, is the other story told by this memoir; and also how she searched and finally found her biological mother.

Like all her other books, Why be Happy when you Could be Normal? is not one that easily fits into genre specifications. It is a memoir insofar as it tells a life story; yet in its fragmented diary style that jumps from past to present and back, and which is as rich in reflection about the personal and the social as it is poetic in the discussion of English literature and the own biography, it is much more. It is “experience and experiment” and as such a break with the “received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ … while men write wide and bold.” Jeanette’s monstrous and wondrous inner child is both girl and boy, a discovery already planted in her early work, and the motivation, perhaps, for her writing about sexual identity.

In the end, for the book’s author, its ideal reader, and, perhaps, many of its actual and potential readers (and may they be many!), finding (back?) home and to a fragile sense of belonging, and away from the hysteria of mere longing, has a lot to do with learning to feel and accepting to be loved.

Looking forward to “what happens next”

Pension reform has been with us for almost two decades. It is usually motivated by short- and long-term fiscal pressure associated with rising expenditures for retired persons, who represent a fast-growing population segment. In a nutshell the problem can be described as follows: under the current retirement provisions in terms of age and paybacks, we are likely to be spending twenty to thirty years of our lives not working, thus paying few taxes, yet over-consuming in terms of health care.

There is no doubt that something needs to be done about this. The question is whether the obvious solution to the problem, namely, increasing the retirement age whilst in parallel reducing benefits by putting a cap on annual pension increases, is the right way forward.

This approach saves money in the short-term and promises to do the same in the long-term. In other words, it helps produce polished accounts, which is why I like to refer to it as the accountant’s dream-come-true. But upon closer inspection it fares less good. This is because it is based on a number of assumptions which are not borne out by empirical facts.

For instance: given that the problem with an aging society is that life expectancy increases at a faster rate than healthy life expectancy (i.e. living longer does not necessarily imply we also live longer and healthy lives), increasing the retirement age will, in part, shift the expenditure problem from the pension system to the invalidity system. It is also likely that part of the expenditures will be shifted onto social security through higher unemployment rates among aging employees who, by law, are now required to maintain full-time jobs for longer, yet are costly and not as productive as they used to be, thus end up being fired.

When these and other caveats are taken into account, the projections as to the extent of savings to be made with the help of pension reform must be relativized.

This does not mean that pension reform is unattainable. As shown by research carried out, among else, by the ActivAge project, for pension reform to work, including with regard to its cost containment or ‘austerity’ targets, it must be combined with growth policies in a number of other sectors:

• investment in education for both young and old;

• creating incentives for the creation of new jobs;

• increasing the participation of women in the labor market, which is easier done through parallel investments in child care;

• improving preventive health care; and

• facilitating the combination of work and pension, something which is currently practically impossible in most European countries.

A blanket austerity policy never works. Cost containment measures, and especially those targeting structural reforms, are useful only in combination with growth and support measures in other carefully selected domains.

A Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, Random House) won the Man Booker Prize 2011 and is typical for its author and his elegant reflective prose. The idea behind Barnes’ book is exploring the way in which memory betrays us, or rather how we choose to selectively remember our past, depending on the circumstances of our present and the direction of our future.

The book opens with a school scene: three boys, friends, Tony, the narrator, and his buddies Colin and Alex. Adrian Finn makes the fourth. He is new, strange by reason of his intelligence and earnestness, doesn’t really fit, but he is accepted, since Tony, especially, likes him. They grow up, go to university, remain friends. That is also the time when they begin to fall in love, and as it often happens at that age, the girl Tony goes out with, Veronica, ends up falling for Adrian. Tony is upset, writes an angry letter, leaves for the United States and, as is to be expected, finally gets over it. Upon his return, he learns that Adrian has committed suicide. There is no indication that this might have had something to do with his love affair or his disappointed friendship—it had probably to do with how earnest he was about everything, Tony’s mother says, that’s it, no follow-up, youth is like that, things end before they have begun, and life goes on.

Several years later, a lawyer’s letter and a small inheritance brings Veronica back into Tony’s life. Tony is in the meantime retired—his life has not been bad but also not remarkable in any way: he has had a reasonably successful career, is still friends with his ex-wife and has a daughter. He meets up with Veronica and realizes she is angry with him. There are so many things he doesn’t understand and will never understand, she says. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, since she refuses to explain. Little by little, he discovers the real story behind Adrian’s suicide and how it had indirectly also to do with him as well as with the sad circumstances of Veronica’s family life, which Tony, as a young man, had failed to recognize.

A Sense of an Ending is a man’s book in that it is full of regrets about failure to understand women—and there is definitely something worth exploring in this idea, and even more so in the book’s seminal concept about selective memory. Yet the plot hides more than it gives away and is not really convincing. Can you really justify so much regret alone for having once written an angry letter? And can Tony really be blamed for not realizing, in his early twenties, that his girlfriend’s family, which he only met once, was seriously dysfunctional?

The book fits in the genre of old age fiction written by older men—a genre which is currently on the rise for obvious demographic reasons since several well-known male fiction writers have now embarked on their life’s finale and seem obsessed with the fact. Yet until now, nothing outstanding has come out of this fiction genre. Julian Barnes’ ideas are good; the prose is wonderful and even emotionally vibrant; but the plot is too constructed, and the complexity of the characters, whilst hinted at, is not crafted well enough.

A UN Security Council Resolution calling for an end to the bloodshed and a peaceful change of government was yesterday blocked by Russia and China, despite the fact it was watered down in significant ways, including with respect to ruling out the possibility of a military intervention. This was an approximate repeat of the situation back in October when a similar initiative was again vetoed by Russia and China with abstentions from Brazil, India, Lebanon and South Africa. This time the vote fell more clearly 13 to 2, there were no abstentions but the double veto remained.

There are many reasons that explain Russia’s position. Syria has been a loyal ally since the Soviet Union times, is a big arms’ client and has signed an agreement allowing it to maintain a naval base at the Mediterranean port of Tartous. Against the background of the rising opposition to Putin’s candidacy for president, an additional reason behind Russia’s intransigence is the Prime Minister’s wish to send a message to Russian citizens that he, like Bashar Al-Assad, is still in control.

The Syrian conflict is internal in nature and the opposition is equally to blame for the violence, having neither clear nor unified demands. This is the Russian take on Syria. Putin has been making similar arguments vis-à-vis the street demonstrators in Moscow, who admittedly, are an odd mélange of liberals, communists and nationalists.

This line of argumentation is, of course, seriously flawed. The two sides to the conflicts are not on a par. For one, only one is controlling and abusing state violence through recourse to the army and the police forces.

Strangely, the fate of Bashar Al-Assad and Vladimir Putin might as of now be closely connected.

Al-Assad’s failure to recognize when it is time to step down in conjunction with the fact that he has everything to lose, since he now is also guilty for crimes against humanity, is what makes his regime extremely dangerous. For his part, Putin is counting on Al-Assad’s ability to wipe out the opposition and on the powerlessness of the Western Alliance and that of the Arab League to do anything against it, not least in view of the escalation of the conflict with Iran (another close ally) over oil supplies and nuclear weapons. Thus the conflict could be ‘frozen’ and time won.

Even if it is partly realized in the short-term, the above scenario is not viable in the long- or, even, mid-term. The opposition against Al-Assad’s regime is more widespread and comprehensive than originally thought and is growing by the day. The same is true about the Russian opposition to Putin. Moreover, modern forms of communication make it impossible to go on acting out massacres of the scale observed during the last couple of days. Finally, economic sanctions against Syria (and Iran) might take some time to have an effect but will do so eventually. In parallel, the West will begin to economically recover. The time won might, therefore, be short and inconsequential.

According to Harvey Morris writing for The International Herald Tribune, Russia’s opposition to the UN Security Council Resolution has also to do with Putin’s “assertive foreign policy [as] part of his platform for elections.” If that were to be the case, then it better be that Lavrov, the foreign minister, who is today on his way to Damascus, does not return empty-handed. That would be the only way for Russia (and China) to show that they have not entirely lost all their foreign policy acumen.

Barack Obama used the opportunity of the last, in this term, State-of-the-Union address to present his vision for America’s future. The most quoted sentence from that speech—“you can call this [taxing the rich] class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense”—is likely to be agenda-setting against the background of the release, on the same day, of Mitt Romney’s financial accounts, which revealed his effective tax rate to be below fifteen per cent despite an annual income of more than twenty million dollars.

But Obama’s speech included more than just a pronouncement in favor of a fair tax code. First and foremost it was an outline of an economic recovery program around three main pillars: (1) job creation, (2) energy & infrastructure and (3) reform of the financial sector. The measures planned—a mixture of short-, medium, and long-term actions—are meant to tackle the problem at its core: bringing production back to the United States thus improving its competitiveness whilst, in parallel, reducing structural inequalities.

The measures outlined range from providing incentives to companies for relocating in areas undergoing industrial re-structuring; to improving workers’ skills through more and better re-training in the short-term; working to make the teacher profession more attractive; putting a cap on tuition fee increases; legalizing illegal migrants; investing in transport and energy infrastructures and in eco-buildings; helping families refinance their mortgages at low interest rates; imposing stricter rules on banks regarding capital reserves; fighting financial fraud; and addressing the debt deficit by re-optimizing tax revenues through redistribution.

François Hollande’s political vision for France is likewise that of restoring the country’s competitiveness and faith in itself; and he too envisages a series of measures—sixty in all—across several policy domains. Some are similar to those proposed by Obama for the United States like reducing red tape for SMEs, increasing taxes for the rich or improving the education system. Yet Hollande’s program is primarily clientelist in orientation comprising little bits or pieces of something for every single constituency: the farmers are being promised more subsidies; trade-unions a reversal of the recent pension reform; families more child-care places; researchers more time for research; the police more posts; and the Parliament more rights.

None of these measures are in themselves flawed and several of them might even be useful. Yet Hollande’s program is mainly that: a series of measures put together in the old-fashioned way of mass parties whereby what counts is that everyone gets a share of the cake. The only difference is that these ‘gifts’ are now presented under flashy titles meant to boost the candidate’s profile and all starting with ‘I want [Je veux]’—a rather poor attempt to reinvent Obama’s earlier ‘yes we can’ slogan.

Also illustrative is how Hollande has tried to mobilize his activists, or militants, as they are called in French. In an old-style populist manner, which might as well have come from Marine le Pen of Front National, Hollande declared that his real adversary “has no name, no face, no party; it will never be a candidate, even though it governs.” This adversary is the financial sector. Yet reading through Hollande’s propositions on how to ‘combat’ this enemy without a face one finds nothing new that what is currently discussed or slowly being implemented at European level.

Clientelism has characterized European democracies since the end of World War II. It had its legitimacy in the post-war era up to the 1970s during the time of the growth of the European economy in parallel with the consolidation of the European welfare state. But it cannot serve as a blueprint for addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century.

One problem with bureaucracies is their tendency to engage in activities mindlessly or only for the purpose of self-justification. The program surrounding the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage seems to have fallen into this trap.

Intangible heritage, according to UNESCO, is all that which is cultural but not tangible like monuments and objects. Hence it includes things such as “oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices” which, in their totality, are a demonstration of diversity. Accordingly, the Convention has set it as its goal to document all such customs as a means of safeguarding cultural diversity. For Austria, the process of review and approval of related representative traditions has been delegated to a national advisory panel comprising representatives of federal ministries, regional governments, social and cultural experts.

Today the Austrian media have publicized a mishap of this committee. One of the cultural practices to have made it on the representative list is, namely, the Viennese ball tradition. The application, which was brought forward in 2010 by a member of the organizing committee of the Lawyers’ Ball, included a list of seventeen ‘typical’ Viennese balls, one of these being the Corps or Fraternity Ball, known among locals as the ball of the extreme right-wing.

Bummer!

Mischievously one can say that the extreme right-wing is indeed an Austrian tradition which fights for its preservation and that, therefore, the committee’s decision was not even a Freudian slip but simply honest. The mishap’s revelation is equally telling, coming about through the self-advertisement of the Corps Ball within its circle of ‘friends’ as a ball with an official UNESCO seal!

Joking apart—it might be sensible to scrutinize the whole idea of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ and whether the best way to uphold cultural diversity is by making lists of national and regional customs.

The book tells the story of one of the many scoundrels of that time who made their living through forgery, producing documents to influence public opinion or for the purpose of undermining political rivals. The nineteenth century was the time of the print revolution, the gradual consolidation of the bourgeois society and of republican uprisings. In earlier times, despotic regimes had only to kill their opponents in order to get rid of them. But as literacy and publicity began to spread, with journals and pamphlets sprouting everywhere, the various monarchic and imperial rulers, but also autocratic institutions like the Catholic Church, were suddenly compelled to justify their actions—and what better way to do that than by producing written documentation that ‘proved’ that those opposing them were liars, traitors, greedy non-believers or simply diabolical?

It was a good time for forgers like Simone Simonini, the protagonist of The Prague Cemetery. He did his job well. Not only did he have a brilliant overview of the esoteric literature of the time from which he copied and pasted at will, but he was also very good at faking signatures and writing styles. Accordingly, he was in demand and often used by the Italian, French, Prussian and Russian secret services as well as by the Catholic Church—against: Garibaldi, the Paris Commune, the Freemasons, Dreyfus, and, of course, the Jews, who came in handy as the ideal scapegoat for practically everyone, including the socialists. As one of Simonini’s clients, the head of the secret service in imperial Russia, Pyotr Rachkovsky, put it,

“We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.” (p.342)

As Simonini has to work for different clients, and often for opposing factions, he invents a second persona for himself to make his life easier—a priest by the name of Dalla Piacola. In fact, this is another forger, a competitor so-to-speak, and one of several people Simonini eventually kills and buries in his basement. Everything works fine for a while, but as he ages, Simonini begins to lose the overview and also his memory, and suddenly he realizes he does not know who he is. That is good for us readers, because that’s what gets him to begin writing a diary, and it is through this diary that we learn his story.

It is the story of many villains—indeed what puts this book in a genre of its own is that it has only villains. Moreover, all of them existed, except the protagonist, but even Simonini, Eco concludes in the epilogue, “although in effect a collage, a character to whom events have been attributed that were actually done by others, did in some sense exist. Indeed, to be frank, he is still among us.” (p.439).

Umberto Eco’s book has been widely acknowledged for its literary quality but also greeted with some apprehension. Indicative of the prevailing sentiment is a comment by Cynthia Ozick, reproduced on the back cover, who writes that the novel, whilst “magnificently sly,” should not fall in the wrong hands. This is because, in order to tell its story, it reproduces anti-Semitic legends like those told in ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’

Surely, however, the villains of today do not need to rely on Eco’s novel in order to get hold of vile documents, like they didn’t back in the nineteenth century. Worse comes to worse, they will invent them, like they did then. After all, fiction is not just produced by good guys—that is ultimately also Eco’s message.

I agree with Rebecca Goldstein writing for The New York Times that “Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.” That is moreover a good sign. There is no better way to undermine conspiracy theories and strange belief systems than by throwing light on their shadows. That does not always work immediately; but in the long run, it does.

With many other paintings it is possible to ignore titles. Not so with Magritte, who, again following Foucault, “names his paintings in order to focus attention upon the very act of naming.” This is also a central issue in psychoanalysis and, unsurprisingly, one of Magritte’s famous drawings is one made up of six sketches entitled ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1952) in which we find, among else, a shoe labeled the moon, a hat identified as a cloud and a hammer characterized as a desert.

But what is perhaps even more fascinating about Magritte’s art is the way he likes to undermine assumptions about specific states of mind, and in doing so, question the values we invest in them. A good example is the ‘The Lovers’ (1928) displaying a couple kissing through the dark cloaks covering their faces.

Another, ‘Pure Reason’ (1948), shows the chess figure of the knight, painted in pink, standing in front of a stage, behind which extends a forest made up of super-size blue leaves. This, like ‘The Philosopher’s Lamp’ (1936), which displays a man whose nose, pictured as an elephant’s trunk, ends into his mouth in the form of a pipe, exposes the way in which intellectual reflection can end up in single-minded pursuits (as in trees that are made up of only one leaf) or the constant eschewing of the same ideas (as in smoking-inhaling of tobacco).

Recurring themes in Magritte’s works are the blue sky with cloud patches, often set in context to exhibit the illusionary character of perception, the heavy stone hovering in mid-air, habitually in the background in situations of presumed harmony, and the bowler hat, a signature sign, I think, of the artist / author, like the (green) apple.

The exhibition at the Albertina, which runs till the end of February, was conceptualized in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, where it was shown last year, and comprises about 150 paintings. It includes Magritte’s poster work and also his portrayal of the famous French villain Fantômas, and is definitely worth a visit.

The new novel by Haruki Murakami has confirmed this view. The book comes in three parts and has more than nine hundred pages. It was published in three volumes in Japan where it first appeared in 2009-2010. I was pretty happy with the first volume, but bored by the time I was halfway through with the second, and I found the third part extremely repetitive and basically obsolete. That is more generally the problem with writing or producing sequels, like in the movie business, and IQ84 seems to have been written with film rights and big cash in its author’s mind.

With the exception of a few chapters at the beginning and in the middle, the novel displays a poor writing style. I do not always mind books written with not much ado and comprising a lot of dialogue, yet the language of this one (at least in English translation) is too flat. The story, on the other hand, is mostly good, albeit bizarre, and basically a mixture of fantastic and magic realism.

Aomame, the book’s heroine who makes a living working part-time as a physical trainer and part-time as an assassin of men of battered women, finds herself in a world with two moons—accidentally after deciding to take an emergency staircase to escape a traffic jam. It is the year 1984 (and the references to Orwell’s 1984 are intentional and often made explicit throughout the story), therefore our heroine decides to call it IQ84 in order to distinguish it from the ‘real’ 1984.

The two moons are not the only specificity of the IQ84 world. Even if not perceptibly at risk, the IQ84 society is one at the brink of a takeover by a secret association which has emerged out of an extreme left ecological movement turned religious fundamentalist. The leader of this group, who is only known as Leader, acts as the spokesman for the ‘Little People’ who are mostly invisible but which can materialize through animals’ dead bodies and, when they do, are capable of creating clones of real people (using a method reminiscent of some of the horror fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen).

Ultimately, however, the Little People are not as dangerous as the real grown-up followers of the Leader. Besides planning a societal revolution, these are obsessed with the idea of the virgin birth of the Leader’s heir, and therefore encourage the rape of young women. All this is pretty crappy, of course, but unfortunately perverse practices are not unknown within religious sects. That is also how Aomame comes into the picture, since she is assigned the task of killing the Leader in order to protect his victims.

Aomame’s adventures as she goes about organizing the assassination, and then trying to escape, are one storyline. The second is that of Tengo, her soul mate, who works as an editor and is given the task of re-writing the book of a dyslexic seventeen year-old girl called Fuka-Eri, who happens to be the Leader’s daughter and has managed to escape her father’s oppression. Her book which is entitled ‘Air Chrysalis’ is, in fact, about the Little People and their growing power. Once published, it makes it to the bestseller list and begins to stir the waters of the IQ84 world. Consequently, Tengo also becomes a target.

The third storyline is Tengo’s and Aomame’s love story, how they first met as children, lost touch thereafter, and met again in the world of the two moons after perhaps saving the world. This is definitely the weakest part of the novel, especially when, towards the end, Aomame gets pregnant from Tengo but before they have sex. As this appears to have been enabled by the Little People, it raises the question whether the world has really been saved.

Odd—but since the occult and esotericism are central components of IQ84, and given the wide success of some other weird (and pretty awful) fantasy stories like the ‘Twilight series,’ its global success should perhaps not come as a surprise. The book’s largely positive critical acclaim is nevertheless one.