Winter by Adam Gopnik

Winter: Five Windows on the Season

by Adam Gopnik

House of Anansi Press, 2011

210 pages

Disclaimer: I love winter. So does Adam Gopnik. And I have decided that I'm going to try to stop apologising for this love of mine, as fashionable as complaining about the snow and cold weather is: winter is a wonderful season, and Gopnik spends quite a lot of time validating my fondness of it. If you thought that maybe five lectures and 210 pages was too long to spend talking about winter, you would be wrong. Gopnik manages it and one gets the impression he could have kept going. And this reader - and most readers, I'd wager, even those who have no love of cold and ice - would have been pretty happy to keep following.

Winter is part of the Massey Lectures series, the printed version of the spoken lecture series heard every year on CBC's Ideas. I quite like the idea of reading each of the lecture series, although I haven't gotten very far with this mission and they just keep on piling up (there is a new one every year. How am I supposed to keep up with that?) 

Gopnik's love for this season - this accident of nature, this clockwork shift to ice due to an axial tilt as our planet orbits the sun - is incredibly well-informed. If you look at the tags on this post, you'll get an idea of the sorts of range this book has. He starts with an exploration of the way the way winter has been viewed through the years has shifted, from being a season of bitterness, loss, and hardship, to being a season of warmth, light, and fellowship. He proceeds to an investigation of the polar winter, winter as place, and specifically the draw it held for Victorian explorers. The third lecture is essentially about Christmas, and the place it holds in the Western secular holiday year, as our festival of cold and light. Then there is an extended digression into winter sport, which is mostly about ice hockey, though he spends a serious amount of time looking at the advent and evolution of ice skating period. (Gopnik is a hockey fan, and is quite clear about that, so the entire chapter devoted to expressing his love of the game is not a surprise.) And finally he looks at what it may mean to us to lose winter, either by moving away from it, or by the self-inflicted wound of climate change. Throughout each chapter he is looking at the psychology of winter; that is, what does winter instill in us, culturally, individually? What ideas and thoughts and meanings do we instill into the season? What is winter, exactly, and what has it been?

Books like this that investigate a single idea from so many angles tend to really capture me, particularly if they're done well, and I think this book is. The writing style is very informal - Gopnik's introduction explains that things, as written out, are essentially transcripts of some practice lectures he gave, with a bit of tightening for readability. At times, when a sentence construct felt a little weird, I read it out loud to myself and that fixed the problem. Gopnik is thoughtful, funny, insightful, and relaxed. He circles around particular points and draws his arguments tighter and tighter. He lets the reader in on secrets, he tells us fascinating facts, he laughs at the absurd even as he respects it.

But there was a bit of a thing, and I almost hesitate to even bring it up, because the problem with noting something like this is that, these days, it can be enough for people to pillory the book and the author unfairly. (It can also be enough to earn me the label of "too sensitive" and I hope I don't deserve it in this case, but I am wary of that too.) It was noticeable, and it did bug me, so:

Gopnik is looking a lot at history, and it is a primarily male history. There are not a lot of women in this book. Franny Mendelssohn, sister of the more familiar composer, gets a brief, positive mention. Anna Brownell Jameson, the writer of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada - her diary, essentially - gets a lot of page time in the first lecture. And that is about it, except for some nameless skaters flirting with men in images of skating in Central Park, affectionate mentions of his wife and daughter, the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen, and then - the throwaway and unnecessary reference that solidified my feeling that maybe Gopnik should have been paying a bit more attention to the issue of gender in his lectures - a Playmate makes a very baffling metaphorical appearance. It's not that the book feels like a frat party, exactly. I don't think Gopnik is generally disrespectful of the female, the feminine, and certainly not of individual women. But I was noticing a lack, and then the Playmate comment made me actually wince. It wasn't offensive on its own, but given the lack of female presence in the book, it took on a bit more of a profile than it should have.

The thing is, history, as written by most, and as enrolled in these lectures by Gopnik, is very heavy on men and very short on women, and these lectures are a look into the history of our relationship with winter. Men feature prominently. Women don't as much, so when they do feature, I'd like it to matter. I'd like it to not be played for laughs. I'd like it to not feel a little bit as though we are the temptresses, the objects of desire, that our only relationship with winter is as it allows us to express our otherwise forbidden sexuality (as in his argument about the social role ice skating fulfilled for women and gay men around the turn of the twentieth century). Given his admiration and respect for Anna Brownell Jameson, I don't actually think Gopnik really does think of women only in this way. Unfortunately the book doesn't quite reflect that.

There is still lots to love about this book, and lots of really excellent things about it. Sure, Gopnik overreaches his point sometimes, or gets a little repetitive as he circles around his argument; but mostly it's well-written, very accessible, entertaining, thought-provoking, funny, gentle, kind. He captures the feeling of winter, particularly in his first chapter and the chapter on Christmas, the awe and wonder and affection and respect that I hold for the season. It is hard for me to know if someone who isn't as fond of winter as I am would be swayed by his argument, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to be touched by it. Recommended, for Canadians especially: we whinge a lot about this season. I don't think it would hurt us to think about it a little more deeply than just complaining about shoveling and cold.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
Picador, 2009 (originally published 2003)
180 pages

Who would have thought that I would have become so enchanted by a book about math and baseball?

"Is that so? I'd always thought that human beings invented numbers."
"No, not at all. If that were the case, they wouldn't be so difficult to understand and there'd be no need for mathematicians. No one actually witnessed the first numbers come into being -- when we first became aware of them, they'd already been around for a long time."

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a quiet, gentle story which somehow manages to encompass a great deal without very much happening. It is told in a humble, somewhat detached way by our unnamed narrator, a young, veteran housekeeper who is hired to take care of the Professor. A brilliant mathematician, he lives alone in a small shack on the estate of his well-off, widowed sister-in-law. In 1975 he was in a terrible accident that left his brain unable to make new memories; after 1975, his memory lasts only eighty minutes. There have been many other housekeepers before our narrator, but somehow our narrator and the Professor click. What could have been a difficult assignment turns into a wonderful, if unusual, friendship.

This can't have been an easy book to write, but what a gift it is to the rest of us to be able to read it. I think the narrator could have been telling us about toe jam and I would have read it and happily. Instead, she's telling us about math, memory, friendship, and baseball, reminiscing and thoughtful. The language is evocative and beautiful; there are no moments where I was brought out of the text by a clumsily translated line, though every once in a while I was caught by the poetry of it.

If you added 1 to e elevated to the power of π times i, you got 0: e^πi + 1 = 0. 
I looked at the Professor's note again. A number that cycled on forever and another vague figure that never revealed its true nature now traced a short and elegant trajectory to a single point. Though there was no circle in evidence, π had descended from somewhere to join hands with e. There they rested slumped against each other, and it only remained for a human being to add 1, and the world suddenly changed. Everything resolved into nothing, zero.

It was the narrator herself that held me firmly to the story. She is quiet, unassuming, and always distanced, but reading between the lines one gets a picture of her: patient, hard-working, very bright, stubborn and strong, and incredibly kind. She hasn't had an easy life, though we don't get too many details as the story isn't supposed to be about her. She tells it mostly chronologically, though every once in a while there is a small jump forward or backward; it's never hard to figure out where we are in the narrative. Her sense of wonder at the world the Professor opens up to her is palpable if understated. When we are introduced to her son, nicknamed Root, we recognize her deep love for him, as well as her desire for him to have everything she can offer, and more.

The book is evocative, whether of its characters, mathematics, baseball, or the setting. A heat wave, a storm, a garden, an evening ball game, a busy street -- after reading these words about them, the real world is set at a different, more quiet, contemplative angle.

What is most interesting to me is that this is an easy book to read. It manages to be a lovely story on the surface, while having difficult themes, being beautifully written, and about topics I would normally avoid, without being a painful or dense read. I'm still not a baseball fan, but I can appreciate a different side of the game now; I will never be deeply enamoured of mathematics, but I can certainly understand how one might become so.

Reading this book was a treat, and I'd encourage everyone to pick it up, even if it doesn't seem like it might be your thing. It's not full of action, excitement, or romance, but if you're looking for something a little quieter, a little more meditative, something that reads smoothly and rewards attention even if it doesn't require it, you cannot go wrong here.

Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stephen Szymanski

First, a brief DNBR Day report:

I did okay. I finished three books, and started a fourth. Two of those three were from the Bone series, so it's absolutely not that they don't count; it's just that they are short. And quick to read. So I feel I could have read a lot more, except that partway through the fourth book I hit the wall. I hit it like an excited, floppy-eared dog hits a sliding glass door. I hit a book that I expected to enjoy, I was really looking forward to, and was horrified to discover around the fifth chapter that I wasn't enjoying it at all. I was bored and incredulous. I tried to pick up anything else I have lying around here and just couldn't find anything to engage me at all. So... the short of it is, I did more than just read yesterday. I did still thoroughly enjoy my reading, at least up until the last five chapters, so I consider the day a success; next time I'm going to bring home a much wider range of books in case I hit another wall.

And now! On to the review. Of note: this book has a different title across the pond, of course. There, it's titled Why England Loses. I prefer our title, I think it has more of a ring to it; but the English particularly are rather picky about not calling the game soccer.

I have World Cup fever. I get it every four years or so, and this year I got it hard. I put myself in charge of a World Cup display at work, and have been keeping the game scores updated and asking people which team they support, and charting that on a little graph. So far we have equal and large numbers of England/Brazil/Netherlands supporters, with a few smatterings of other countries: Italy (poor things), France (ouch), Portugal and Spain and Argentina and Germany (would have thought more than two supporters each), Japan (they were my pick, and sooooo close they were) and Ghana among those.

So, as I was watching some excellent soccer, I decided it was time for me to pick up Soccernomics, which is a book I've had my eye on for some time. I've heard Simon Kuper interviewed a couple of times and he always seems like a really intelligent guy, not to mention interesting and funny. If I'm going to read a book about sport and statistics, he's the kind of guy I'd want writing it. Turns out, my intuition on this point was correct: Soccernomics is really interesting, often funny, and enlightening on both soccer and the human condition. Kuper and co-author, sports economist Stephen Szymanski, have managed to write a book analyzing soccer and its fans that is loving, enlightening, and eminently readable.

The whole thing is pretty fascinating, but the part I found most interesting was the dissection of England's national side and England's national expectations. The whole section is pretty scathing without being nasty. It was particularly fascinating watching the reaction pour in to England's defeat at the hands of Germany; Soccernomics (published in 2009) predicted almost all of the fan and commentator reaction I caught on BBC's live commentary pages, in some cases in exact words. Soccer being invented by the English, and dominated by the English at the start, the English believe that they should always be the best. That is the players, the media, the fans, the soccer establishment: there's a manifest destiny-style feeling about soccer in England. Kuper and Szymanski systematically and logically dismantle this: no matter what anyone believes or feel should be the case, the numbers say that England actually overachieves in current-day international play. This is not to say that they are the best that they could be -- Kuper and Szymanski also offer several points that hamper England, including systemic if largely unconscious discrimination against middle- and upper-class and foreign players/managers, and consistent refusal by the vast majority of suits in England's soccer establishment to use the numbers and think logically about the game, and instead swearing by traditional "wisdom." Nothing about international or professional soccer is given a free pass with this book -- it's all put under the statistical microscope, examined, and explained.

I think part of the reason I found this whole discussion so engaging, aside from the fact that it's so well-written, is that I recognized a lot of the advantages and problems with English soccer from Canadian hockey. Ice hockey is in no way the international sport that soccer is, and never will be, but it's a lot more international than it used to be. And the exact same problems -- and advantages -- of English soccer can be identified in Canadian hockey. We have the same feeling of entitlement and when the Canadian international team loses we feel the same sort of outrage and shock that English soccer fans feel when the English team loses. You also see the same kinds of ugly anti-foreign sentiment, the sort of thing that makes me embarrassed to say I'm a hockey fan, the sort of thing that would be considered racism anywhere else but gets a pass in our respective "national" sports. The traditional management "knowledge" versus actual science. It's all there.

In the interests of not going on too long, I'll hold most of my other thoughts there. Aside from the content, the bones of this book are solid. The mathematics are clearly explained and not at all confusing or overdone; for someone who isn't always particularly fond of math, I had no trouble with it here and even enjoyed the way the statistics was explained. Every once in a while there is a bit of repetition that seems needless, sometimes across chapters and sometimes it is worded so closely that it almost seems like an editing mishap -- the one I'm thinking of is the discussion of etymology, whether or not the word "soccer" is actually an Americanization (it's not; apparently before the 1970s the English tended to call it soccer, too, which puts lie to the argument that North Americans call the game "soccer" to differentiate it from American football.) There are other areas where connections and comparisons could have been drawn a little tighter, as in the discussion of the Premier League standings near the beginning of the book and then the international standings further on. But overall, I thought this was an excellent book.

One doesn't need to be a soccer fan to enjoy it, although it certainly helps to know some of the names of people and teams. I think being a sports fan, though, is probably a prereq. Though there is some anthropological discussion (what is a "fan"; big sports tournaments save lives, by reducing the number of suicides in the countries that have teams participating; and there's a discussion of how and why poverty-stricken countries will never do particularly well at sport despite traditional arguments to the contrary) there is not enough to engage someone who isn't already at least peripherally interested in sport as an institution. But any fan of any team sport will probably find something in here, and enjoy the read.

I'm very keen to read a couple of Kuper's other soccer-related books now, including one about soccer in Europe during World War II and another about the social and cultural implications and ties of soccer, called Football Against the Enemy which sounds absolutely fascinating. Szymanski's other work seems to be primarily economics-related, which while I'm sure some people would enjoy, is not exactly my thing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a soccer match on.