Reviews and Comments

This book, had its author not been marketed as "The Japanese Stieg Larsson," would've been... Well, it would've been okay, and I would've left it with some of the same complaints. But I felt them more strongly because what I'd been primed for was met in the worst of ways possible, in a way that wasn't at all in line with the point of Stieg Larsson's original trilogy.

There are too few books that deal with abused women, especially abused women who actually succeed despite everything. There are too few books that even engage with the concept of killing your local rapist (or abuser) and what that can possibly mean. There are too few books that engage with the internal struggle of someone who has done that to save themselves (especially in a situation where it wasn't intentional) and actually engaged with what it meant.

This book isn't that, but based on the summary and the use of the name 'Stieg Larsson'... And then based on the opening... That was the book I that I expected.

That was not what I got.

Without spoiling it for others, I hate the ending. I hate the solution, I hate how 'Detective Galileo' (a physicist) is used, I hate the friendship between him and the actual detective, and I hate the message that it sends without doing any of the fucking work for what it delivers. There were so many elements that could've been interestingly used and still supported the characters who had suffered the abuse of the victim. Higashino did none of that, and I just...

He is not The Japanese Stieg Larsson. I don't want anyone to be Stieg Larsson of anywhere, but if that were a mantle that could be passed on? Higashino could not take it because the point of his book did not at all engage with the true forms of abuse that his characters endured and felt like they would endure.

I especially hate that this book could actually properly focus on Yasuko and Misato (a mother and daughter), but he makes it all about Ishigami and his internal thoughts. This man, this man who was going to further harass and manipulate Yasuko and Misato... Who took advantage of their situation... And then committed his own heinous crime... And Yasuko being forced to understand what his "love" for her actually looked like and forced to feel guilty for decisions beyond her own control... And some flippant use of suicide for Misato...

The more that I think about it, the more I find reasons for disliking something that could've actually been interesting. I genuinely hate this, and I hate that it's being marketed as if it's in line with the point and purpose of Stieg Larsson's novels (and it's the fact that it's not actually engaging with the abuse of the characters that makes me so upset; Larsson is a symbol, as this marketer utilises them).

On his writing technique, the man struggles to know how to transition between sections or chapters without telling what this chapter or the next will be about. It's like he has one trick, and he's not quite sure how to lead in to something else.

In terms of the history, he makes a lot of assumptions that no one is qualified to make and that even the data we do have cannot possibly support. We cannot know precisely how violent people were in times where we have no documentation of violence; we can only make assumptions based on what artifacts remain, and it's silly to assume that the handfuls of skeletal remains can tell us precisely how violent a society was. This way of deciding how violent the world was is much in the same vein as when archaeologists categorise unknown objects as "religious relics," even when it's not. (This is something that may have largely gone out of vogue, but we still live with its ghost until it's been totally rectified.)

He also focuses entirely on the positions of Hobbes and Rousseau for his initial "history of violence," and I suspect there were more perspectives on violence than those presented by either man. In fact, I'd be there were lots of people of other classes and demographics whose views were systematically erased at the time and after who could've provided more interesting thoughts than either of these two men who have been used as the template for how to deal with violence or what violence is or how violence can be mitigated, blahblahblah.

Oh, and he also hasn't defined what is violence and what isn't violence, according to him. But I suppose a lot of the constant and daily violence that many of us endure... doesn't count. The constant stress of "what ifs" that many of us have to think about or are faced with, the refusal of care providers to provide the care we seek, the perpetual stress placed upon us by others through varying forms of coercion to exist in certain ways... None of that is considered violence because it doesn't immediately result in us being stabbed or clearly murdered.

"It is no accident that the book starts out as a mystery (and continues to deceive the ingenuous reader until the end, so the ingenuous reader may not even realise that this is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated). I believe people like thrillers not because there are corpses or because there is a final celebratory triumph of order (intellectual, social, legal, and moral) over the disorder of evil. The fact is that the crime novel represents a kind of conjecture, pure and simple. But medical diagnosis, scientific research, metaphysical inquiry are also examples of conjecture. After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?" [page 564]

I don't disagree entirely with this take on the novel by its own author, but I find it troublesome that he didn't seem to recognise that it is possible to explore the metaphysical and underlying philosophies in ways that don't intentionally misrepresent what the book is about. Though, I also think it's possible to engage with the elements of something (say, whether or not Jesus was impoverished or if he laughed or if those who will die for God or truth [not the same thing] are the antichrist) without having to present them as a mystery novel.

In fact, this comment actually feels like a slap in the face to people who dared to engage with the book's mystery elements and then were disappointed by the reveal of the mystery or were frustrated by the ways in which everything in the book feels designed to cover up that aspect, as if Eco himself didn't quite know what he really wanted to do with the novel but was still quite pleased with it. And I'm not saying he shouldn't have been pleased by having written it or by others (who definitely aren't me) enjoying it, but it feels insulting for this to even be mentioned. Based on my own engagement with this text, I would venture a guess that the mystery was initially the foreground of the novel only to be made secondary because Eco had other things he had wanted to cram into the novel and wanted to focus on. It feels disingenuous to say that the readers were "deceived" into believing there was a mystery because of how little happened with it, since it feels much more like he simply moved on from his original goals and then was forced to tie up those loose ends.

And it's that point that makes me dislike this book, if I'm honest. I don't mind mysteries that have little action or where the detective makes little progress; these are things that already exist, and they have a purpose to explore the process and the world. They're often stories that have parallel narratives taking place, which prompts the readers to ask the questions about both the primary narrative and the secondary narrative. This is fine, but this isn't precisely how The Name of the Rose feels.

It feels like he initially wanted there to be a murder mystery in an abbey (especially if the title he originally planned, The Abbey of the Crime, is any indication), but so much of the book got stuck in providing excruciating details and lists of things that it felt like it changed into a bloated philosophical novel instead.

Honestly, I want to be more pointed in my criticism, but this book actually frustrates me for how much of my time I feel like I wasted. There was a story somewhere, but I couldn't remember it through the lists of details on statues or names of books in the library shelves... I couldn't remember half of what I needed to through the discourse of things that would've been more interesting in an entire other format, rather than something trying to portray itself as a mystery only to have the author (rather pompously) point to how it wasn't truly that (because, I think, he didn't understand the format or potential of such a thing).

Edit: I also very much just need to add that the resolution of this book was so obvious from the outset based entirely on the ravings of a person that, when it was revealed, I threw the book on the floor.

I genuinely enjoy the kind of story that is presented in Dr STONE, where people are having to struggle together and build solidarity with others in order to survive. I like that they place the science in it as a core narrative component, which makes it kind of fun.

But I hate the direction that it takes starting from around this volume, and it's largely because it's playing into these weird structures of: a) science is inherently good and scientific progress is a straight line from point A to point B to point C and so on; b) the people who didn't like that progressivist structure are inherently violent types who seek to destroy knowledge; c) people against hierarchies inherently want to instill another hierarchy, which also continues to use the propaganda conflation about the idea of 'anarchy' as being 'nothing but chaos' (even when it's not being explicitly stated).

I'm also not a fan of the fact that the anti-intellectual side is also the only side engaging in Malthusian beliefs ("the world can't support 7 billion of us now, so the herd must be culled" is literally a line within this volume), but we know from our own experiences that the intellectuals have also engaged in this belief (even in Japan)... So the values that are being associated with varying people are very... Well, it feels very propagandistic? And it's hard not to notice.