Eka Kurniawan - Vengeance Is Mine All Others Pay Cash

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book full of interesting juxtapositions, images and ideas. On the one hand, it is a careering journey through a world of mobsters, whores, truck stops, extortion, hitmen, vengeance killings, fights and gangs. The atmosphere created is similar to a very violent cartoon or the sinister stylisations of a Tarantino movie. The prose and structure are simple and staccato. The story is told in snatches; sometimes a couple of lines of conversation, other times a more extended retelling of a series of events. The cast of characters is limited and the overwhelming focus is on the impotent hero Ajo Kawir. The disconnected paragraphs jump around geographically and chronologically and while this is never confusing sometimes it was a bit disjointed.


The book also had a funny, absurd side with Ajo constantly pulling down his trousers to consult his penis in front of other people, angry exchanges between posturing protagonists and pulse raising games of chicken in trucks at the dead of night. However, the book was far from superficial and also dealt with some weighty themes without ever becoming self conscious or explicit in examining them. I thought this was a significant achievement and the best aspect of the book.


Amongst other things, it was a commentary on corruption and authority in Indonesia and portrayed evocative scenes from this lush, lawless land. The roles sex and violence play in growing up and shaping definitions of masculinity were also integral to its story. The mercurial natures of sexual desire, love, fidelity and anger also played an important part in the story. At times, the relentless, gory violence was overbearing but it found a counterpoint in Kawir’s transformation and ability to philosophise and reconcile himself to his life. I found myself impressed by his cool simplicity and dedication to his chosen path. He’s in some senses stoic but also allows his emotions room to evolve and change. He is dispassionate but not, ultimately, to a sociopathic and destructive extent degree that he is at the beginning of the book. These attempts at extreme dispassion only end up in angry demonstrations of a different kind of passion, as the story shows. I felt I could sympathise with the raw, uncontrollable desires that many of the characters portray but was far more impressed and interested in Ajo’s ability to overcome them. This may be a matter time and experience, exemplified by the relationship between Ajo and Mono and the differences between them. While Mono is taking his first steps in his career as a tough guy, Ajo is retiring from his. It could also be more to do with the interplay between chance, circumstance and disposition which is expressed in the different actions Ajo and his wife take at the end of the book. One settles down to raise a child that isn’t his while the other goes out to seek revenge that isn’t hers. The chance appearance of Jelita in Ajo’s truck and the role she plays in his recovery of his erection also seem to point to the fact that large portions of what happen to us may be outside of out control. This kind of determinism also has a physical expression through Ajo’s penis, his consultations with it and his eventual acceptance of his powerlessness.


In the end, I found the book reassuring and reflective. In a world full of dark, traumatic experiences and savage abuses it is still possible to navigate, however circuitously, towards peace and acceptance. The book makes this point in an unromanticized, unsentimental way. Even though many of the scenes and people featured fall firmly in the category of caricature it ended up feeling far more profound and meaningful than I could have imagined when I began.

Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian - Tiger Woods

The overwhelming impression I got from this book is that Tiger Woods is a nasty guy. From dumping his high school girlfriend while at college by letter without explanation and refusing to speak to her - to abruptly severing long standing relationships and ‘friendships’ - to his self-centred and dismissive treatment of people he deems less important than him (everyone). Everything revolves Tiger and must take place on his terms or not at all. He seems socially disconnected, pathological and sometimes sociopathic. This is before you even consider his adultery, which is the most gratuitous example of this kind of behaviour. His attitude seems to have been, ‘I’m so good at golf and such an important person I should be allowed to do whatever I want’.


But beyond acknowledging how atrocious his behaviour was, why did he behave like this? And why did, and do, the public love him so much in spite of the highly unattractive side of his personality? Obviously, his exploits on the golf course and dominance of his sport are the most likely explanations. Here, the two questions - why was he so good at golf? why did his life become such a mess? - may share some common ground. Tiger Woods seems to have been raised as a golf machine and not a human. Both mother and father dedicated themselves to him to a startling degree and there seem to have been very few, if any, distractions from the all encompassing pursuit of golfing excellence. While other children learned how to play with each other and socialise, Tiger’s parents were concerned with creating a ruthless, competitive killer. The book reports that his father used to try and distract him while he played to help prepare him for this eventuality in tournaments. In extreme circumstances he would shout racist insults at his son in a tactic designed to build psychological strength. Meanwhile, his tiger mom would tell him to ‘kill’ opponents and ‘take their heart’. All told, this sounds like pretty good preparation for becoming an amazing golfer but also a good recipe for creating a sociopath. Tiger was almost unbelievably mollycoddled growing up but had to submit himself to an equally inconceivable and all encompassing schedule of training. Both parents and Tiger talk extensively throughout his life about how golf was his choice but it rings utterly hollow in light of the facts of his junior golfing career. As such, a young Tiger Woods would have grown up in an environment that valued golf, mental toughness, compliance with a schedule and, above all, performance as measured by a very limited set of narrow factors. Caring for other people was definitely not one of those factors. It is chilling to imagine that Woods played some of best golf while cheating on his wife and young family with multiple other women. This cold hearted lack of emotion might have served him well on tour but in a family context it has a more sinister and unsettling character.

Added to this already considerable burden to perform were the ideas and opinions of his father. Earl Woods regularly told people that Tiger would have a huge socio-political impact because of his status as a black player in the overwhelming white world of golf. When Tiger started playing their were courses that hosted the US Open that would not admit black members. While Tiger actively tried to defuse racial questions, his father seems to have wanted to turn his son into a living ‘fuck you’ to the white sporting establishment that may have curtailed his own baseball career. So, on top of the pressure to be the best golfer and to always win Tiger was also expected to be a symbol of black success in the face of white domination and to change the world. The weirdest expression of his father’s desire for their to be a racial significance to Tiger’s career comes in the form of a story he told about how Tiger was tied to a tree and stoned by his classmates while at school, which the book debunks fairly convincingly. So, Tiger grew up in a maniacally focused, aggressive, hyper virile, super competitive environment, which bore striking resemblance to the military world of the marines his father came from. However, his father quit his job to focus fully on managing his infant son’s career. At one stage, Tiger recalls how his father told him he had a choice of being a marine or being a golfer. Tiger’s obsession with the marines pays testimony to how deeply he had absorbed his father’s philosophy. The pressure to perform, to not let his parents down, to be a symbol of racial change and to change the world must have been unbelievably difficult to deal with.


The book is strong on Tiger’s amazing achievements on the golf course, albeit with a few too many misty eyed descriptions of clutch putts and famous tournament victories. His capacity for practice, his mental and physical toughness and his extreme competitiveness are truly breathtaking. Perhaps what stands out the most is the fact that he won the 2008 US Open only three weeks after being unable to walk and with no cartilage left in his knee. Less spectacular, but equally fascinating, was Tiger’s decision to remodel his swing after winning his first major in 1997. When most people would have been basking in the glory of victory, Tiger had his eyes on far bigger, longer term goals.


Tiger is a personification of modern, competitive, professional sports. Trained since early infancy for a sole purpose, he dispensed with fairplay, sportsmanship and etiquette in favour of a warlike, win at all costs mentality that made everything subservient to his golfing success. However, rather than gaping in awe at the achievements this strategy had yielded, as I would have done before reading this book, I finished the book feeling sad. What kind of life had this created for Tiger? What kind of person had emerged from this regime? Had the extreme micro management of his life ultimately helped or hindered him? Indubitably, he dominated golf in a way that’s never been seen before and made huge amounts of money. Nonetheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tiger grew up in a cold, loveless world focussed on what he could do rather than who he was. This seems to have created an equally cold, loveless man with little capacity for empathy or warmth. The fact that Tiger is still so popular and such a huge star says something about society. It made me think that Tiger is the quintessential example of the corrupt and questionable SportsWorld that Robert Lipsyte describes in his eponymous book. In this world, sports are not played for the development and enjoyment of the athlete as a person located in the context of broader society. Rather he plays for the benefit, more specifically the financial profit, of his parents, his school, his agent and his sponsors. Jack Scott’s 'The Athletic Revolution', which I am currently reading and hope to write about soon, is excellent on this topic. Modern sports, far from encapsulating and teaching the best principles essential for broader life, as is often claimed, teaches the philosophy of unshackled aggression akin to the mindset that predominates in war. In the same way that America, and much of the rest of world, glorify the fundamentally tragic character of war and combat; so too in commercialised sports. Dubious actions and morals are embraced in the pursuit of all-important victory while concepts of fairness, justice and wellbeing are thrown out and laughed at as soft and outdated.


Perhaps the most poignant part of the book is the story of Tiger’s record breaking third straight victory at the US Amatuer championships at the age of 20 in 1996. On the final round, Tiger and Steve Scott are neck in neck. Scott has a putt with Tiger’s ball in the way, Tiger marks it and moves the marker out of his opponent’s line. When he replaces his ball, he forgets to move it back to its original position. Scott points it out to Tiger and saves him from forfeiting the title. Tiger doesn’t even thank him.


Reflecting back on the event and his life afterwards, Scott said, ‘I think I am walking proof that you can win in life without winning’. Scott went on to have an underwhelming tour career and became a club pro. Of course, I can’t judge what a successful life constitutes and even if I could it would vary wildly depending on the individual. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would much rather be Scott, with his kids and his marriage of 18 years, than Tiger, with the chaos of pressure and media attention swirling around him. In spite of the 14 majors and a billion dollars, Tiger’s life as represented in this book reads like a tragedy. I don’t know if Tiger’s upbringing created his problems later in life or if his success lead him astray or if everything is pre-determined genetically; surely the question is too complex to have an easy answer. However, Tiger’s reckless adultery and possible sex and drug addictions do not strike me as the actions of a happy and healthy man.


This was an interesting and well researched book. It was a bit sentimental in places and undoubtedly glorifies his sporting exploits. While it doesn’t question the values and ethics of professional sport explicitly, I feel like it contains all the raw material required to start asking these questions and presents a fascinating case study of a true modern sporting icon. I really feel I got more out of this book because of reading 'SportsWorld' and 'The Athletic Revolution' at around the same time.

Andrew Sean Greer - Less

I was quite taken with the first 50 pages of this book. Our hero, Less, is a graphic character and the sketch of his years as the lover of an older, famous poet are well drawn. Equally, the narrator’s voice and the writer’s eye for detail are pleasing. I particularly enjoyed a reference to, ‘the quilted sides’ of food carts in NY. Less’s impending world tour seems like an good way of setting up the plot structure and, without further ado, we are off on an adventure with the engaging Less; our interest piqued by the narrator’s anonymity.


Sadly, it was largely downhill from there. I did think the author was good at doing scenes from the literary world like writing retreats, academic departments, publishers, book awards, drinks parties and receptions. However, he also had a Franzen-esque penchant for tossing long, pretentious words into his prose for no obvious reason other than to show how erudite he is. Some of these words defied even the definitive power of Google so he really must be extraordinarily clever! For example, I couldn’t work out what the phrase ‘groupe en biscuit’ meant in either English or French. And ‘sesh’? Not an abbreviation for session judging from the context. Alongside this tendency towards elaborate vocabulary there are some really sloppy mistakes in the prose. For example, Less puts his shoes on before his trousers at the beginning of the book, there is a poorly researched poker game and the contradiction, ‘Roman generals hire slaves’; a oversight that really annoyed me! I’d have preferred clearer vocabulary and closer proofreading.

The book seems to have been written, at least partially, as a work of comedy but it isn’t very funny. From the Mexican tour guide who says everything is closed to the lame jokes about Less’s grandmother’s vagina, the attempts at humour are hackneyed and puerile. The problem is compounded by repetition. Some of the travel writing is too cliched with caricatured bell boys, taxi drivers and tour guides. However, the worst aspect of the prose was definitely the dialogue. It wasn’t universally poor but some of the central sections are very clunky. For example, Less’s first meeting with his lover-to-be the poet and his wife. The reader is in the dark about who this mysterious straight couple on the beach, recollected from Less’s 20s, are. But when the foolhardy man wants to take a dip in the stormy ocean, his wife implores young Less to go with him saying, to a background noise of narrative sections being dropped noisily into place, ‘please look after him, he’s a wonderful poet but a lousy swimmer’! Oh, the cruel irony of her inviting this seductive homosexual predator into their marital bliss! Oh, the tragedy of prose so bad that it reads like a plot summary transposed into the mouths of the characters. The whole thing felt awkward and unrefined. Less’s big chat with Carlos at the luxury resort in India is almost as clunky and equally facile. Here too, Less inexplicably doesn’t want to hear more about Freddy’s wedding even though he is allegedly mourning the love of his life. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the novel where Less pines for his lost lover. Additionally, I couldn’t quite work out the root of Carlos and Less’s animosity, which continues throughout the book but is never really explained.


There were several minor aspects of how foreign languages are presented in the book that I didn’t like either. Some of the German in this book is written in German. None of the other languages are attempted for more than a sentence. The German that is contained in the book is not translated. This is a pet hate of mine, translate it in the footnotes for goodness sake! Alongside this, there are conversations that take place in German for the purposes of the story but appear in the text as broken English literally translated from the supposed German conversation. This wasn’t attempted in any other languages. It wasn’t particularly funny and was another example of an insipid reworking of an already overworn theme - ‘the things non-native speakers say’!! It was especially unsuccessful as to really get the jokes one would have to know the German words that are being mistranslated. The fact that this was only done for German was explained by Less only being able to speak this language but, taken as a whole, the book had a weird and unpleasant mishmash of presentations. As it progressed, the structure of the world tour itinerary started to get a bit stale as Less repeated his routine of turning up somewhere, blundering about a bit, learning something very precursory about the culture, having a romantic encounter or recalling one from his past and then stumbling on!


Less, who is initially drawn as hopelessly unknown as an author, surprisingly meets lots of fans of his work during his travels. Besides these minor massages to Less’s ego, he also wins an award and has several sexual encounters that no doubt help boost his confidence in the aftermath of his breakup with Freddy. However, like the acerbic woman who’s birthday party Less attends in the desert who comments on Less’s latest protagonist, I found myself asking, ‘who cares?’ The character of Less, who had started out with such promise, had turned out to be a bit boring and shallow. The prose and the narrative, that I had initially liked, turned out to be repetitive, cliched and full of empty humour. The more interesting aspects of Less, like his feelings about his past loves and the meaning of his life, are drowned out by clunky dialogue, bad jokes and superficial travel details.


To round off the disappointing experience of finishing this book, which ended up feeling like another episode of a middling sitcom - this week on ‘Less Flounders In Foreign Lands….’ MOROCCO! - the mystery narrator was revealed as Freddy. ‘REFEREE!’, I felt like shouting, ‘surely that’s not allowed’. Freddy the narrator had described himself in the third person earlier on in the book, which excludes him from being the narrator in my mind! The narrator’s voice also felt much older than Freddy’s mid-thirties when I was reading it. It was a sloppy, half-baked end to a sloppy, half-baked book and I felt cheated! The ending was also very neat and tidy with Less returning from his travels to be reunited with his lost lover leaving me wondering what the upshot of Less’s trip was ultimately. Is the moral of the story - if you are deeply in love but your lover marries someone else then don’t say anything and go away for a bit and then he’ll realise how much he loves you? Everything seems to fall effortlessly into place for Less in the end and I found this mawkish and twee.

Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games

There were lots of parts of this book that reminded me of other books, films or cultural reference points. It hung together well enough but I was a bit unsure about the overall effect. The most obvious parallel, for me, was to a film called ‘Battle Royale’ (2000), which in turn is based on an earlier book. The film is about a group of students who are taken to an island and forced to fight to the death by the Japanese government. There were also parallels to be drawn with the Roman Empire, Stoic philosophy, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, My Girl and many others, I’m sure. This pastiche approach reminded me of ‘Ready Player One’ (2011) although that book approaches cultural referencing far more explicitly, which I prefer. The two have other similarities - dystopia, a rise to fame, an exciting, dangerous adventure, a love story, both became films. I think I enjoyed ‘Ready Player One’ more because its content is aimed at middle aged geeks while ‘The Hunger Games’ is aimed at adolescent women. The PG rated love, looking beautiful in pretty dresses and worrying about popularity exemplify the young adult level this is pitched at. On the other hand, it’s violent, dystopian goriness would also appeal to adolescent boys so perhaps I have more of an issue with it because I am the wrong age rather than because I’m a man.


The love story is a bit cringe-worthy but it was saved by the intrigue over whether her relationship with Peeta is genuine and if she prefers him to Gale, her hunting partner back in the Seam. The fact that all the girls at school love Gale, and it’s heavily implied that he’s in love with Katniss, but Katniss has no idea is a bit sentimental and corny. As I mentioned earlier, all romance is very tame and Katniss has never kissed anyone in spite of leading such a deeply adult life and seemingly having many admirers. Similarly, the interviews before the games where Katniss apparently struggles because of her unlikeable personality are a hard to believe. In the end everyone loves her and Peeta declares his love for her in front of everyone; it is a bit vomit inducing. On the whole, I felt the strength of the central plot and the excellent pacing of the narrative saved the book from becoming too twee. I had read in the PLR, where this book was recommended and reviewed, that the pacing was outstanding and this proved to be the case.


It’s just as well because the plot was too facil and, in places, downright hackneyed. The character of Katniss was a slightly unhappy mixture of hardened hunter and ditzy school girl. Her almost inconceivable level of ability and suitability to the games are coupled with some equally inconceivable moments of stupidity. For example, she forgets to loot the bow and arrow from the girl who dies in possession of it even though she has been coveting it since the start of the games and it his her best chance of survival. Equally, it takes her a minute to work out what the sedatives she is gifted should be used for when she needs to subdue Peeta to go to the feast. I was also surprised that ‘the Careers’ didn’t train using more survival skills like Katniss’s given they work so well in the arena! The sponsorship meted out to the players seemed a bit unfair as well. While Katniss got a couple of meals and some burn cream, one of the other player’s got an impenetrable suit of armor! It’s mentioned in the book that gifts are very expensive but it’s also mentioned that the residents of the Capitol bet heavily on the event so I was expecting the gifts to play a much bigger role. The treatment of whether there was going to be one or two victors was a bit clunky but did set up the mutual poisoning scene at the end, which was good, and allows the is-it-real-is-it-not-real? storyline of Peeta and Katniss’s love to continue into the next book.


The themes of this book also saved it from becoming too saccharine or sentimental. Inequality, exploitation, subjugation of a population using the media, humanity’s bloodthirstiness, the morality of murder and the cruelty of consumerism and entertainment culture. These are all weighty topics for young adult fiction and they’re, for the most part, sensitively and subtly handled. In truth, the issue of murder isn’t nearly gory enough for my liking. Contestants help each other and behave in a remarkably civilised manner during the Games whereas I’d have thought they’d be ripping each other limb from limb and screwing each other over at the earliest opportunity. To me, this would’ve been a more faithful representation of human nature although perhaps I’m overly pessimistic!

The strong points of this book were the pacing and the subject matter of the Games. I didn’t really enjoy the way the story was framed or how things developed in the arena. The love story was corny but had interesting angles and some good twists. Overall, it was enjoyable but facile and I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried

I really liked this interconnected collection of short stories. They weren’t self-aggrandising or filled with bravery and machismo. The tone was matter of fact and quotidian even though the content is a long way removed from the everyday facts of my own life. Nonetheless, O’Brien draws you into his world smoothly and skilfully.

Beyond the stories themselves, which are well told and frankly relaid, I also found the book to be full of interesting reflections on the nature and function of storytelling itself. The soldiers tell each other stories to alleviate their boredom, attempt to understand their situation and to make sense of their fear and exhilaration. O’Brien writes these stories later as a way to comprehend his own memories and experiences of the war. In both cases, the stories needn’t necessarily be true. Perhaps it’s in some sense necessary that they’re not factually accurate. Facts, empirical accuracy, perception and truth are all slippery concepts and this is acknowledged and explored exquisitely in the book. A story can be true that never actually happened. Something that really happened can be false in terms of what it represents or how it’s portrayed. Between the occurrence and the retelling there is so much in between. O’Brien states clearly that war stories with neat morals are almost certainly false for this reason. For example, his detailed, presumably imagined, description of the man he killed with a grenade seems infinitely more ‘true’ to him than the bare facts of the incident.

Beyond the tales of life in Vietnam, there are also stories about where these stories and experiences sit within a person’s life after the war. How do these experiences change a person? How do you talk about them? How do you understand them in such a violently different context? How do you make sense of your life and the experiences you’ve had? The answer seems to be through stories. Whether these are the stories O’Brien composes as a writer or through the narratives we all tell to ourselves about our lives; the need for a narrative seems ubiquitous. O’Brien doesn’t hide this away behind the stories he tells. He discusses it explicitly. Showing the reader how things are altered, adjusted and reinterpreted so they make sense. So they can become true in the sense that O’Brien understands the word. The simple dichotomy of true and false being inadequate to express the nuance of life as it’s really lived.

Of course, I can never know what it was like to fight in the Vietnam war. However, reading this book I did feel like I was closer to comprehending one man’s experience of it. Through the stories he heard, the stories he lived and the stories he created to make sense of all the other stories. It feels like an honest and unedited account and this gives it the quality of truth. Even if there isn’t, or can’t be, such a thing when dealing with a subject as complex and incomprehensible as war.

Khaled Hosseini - And The Mountains Echoed

I read ‘The Kite Runner’ several years ago and remember enjoying it a lot. Sadly, I never wrote anything about it so I can’t say why or compare it to this book. Certainly, ‘And The Mountains Echoed’ has much to recommend it. The prose is smooth and flowing. The sentences are short and evocative. The characters and settings are varied and rich. Details are well chosen and pithily expressed. However, it also had a sentimental quality most obvious in its extremely dramatic and shocking plot. Much of the dialogue also had this quality in a way that’s harder to pin down but permeated the whole text.

The story is woven together using nine perspectives, each contained in a chapter. These are: 1) A poor Afghan farmer (Saboor) taking his two children (Abdullah and Pari) to Kabul and telling them a story on the journey through the desert (1952) 2) The same farmer selling his daughter (Pari) to a wealthy, childless family (Wahdatis) where a relative (Nabi) works when they reach Kabul (1952) 3) Saboor’s second wife’s (Parwana) story of how she pushed her sister (Masooma) off a tree because she was jealous of her good looks and found out she was going to marry Saboor (1949) 4) Nabi’s story of working for Mr Wahdati and their long shared history 5) the story of two brothers (Idris and Timur) who are Afghans who emigrated to the US during the wars and used to live on the same street as Nabi and the Wahdatis. They come back to try and reclaim their property in Kabul (2003) 6) the story of Pari and Mrs Wahdati’s life in Paris after she leaves Mr Wahdati when he has a stroke (1974) 7) the story of a jihadi turned drug lord and his family who move to the village where Abdullah and Pari were born. The pair’s half brother attempts to reclaim his property from the gangster following time as a refugee in Pakistan (2009) 8) the story of the life of a Greek plastic surgeon (Markos) who lives in the Wahdati’s house when Nabi owns it (2010) 9) the story of Pari reconnecting with Abdullah in America and the relationship between her and Abdullah’s daughter (2010).

Some of the characters and the depth of emotional perception are really good. The brothers in chapter five, for example. However, I sometimes felt like the story was flitting around too much. The emphasis on the clever interconnections between the stories was too heavy and detracted from the quality of the individual stories themselves. For example, at the end of Chapter 5 the child who Idris agrees to help but then ends up ignoring seemingly thanks his brother, Timur, in the dedication to her book. This isn’t explored in any detail and is almost a throwaway whereas I felt it could have been interestingly expanded as another example of the brothers’ relationship, which was a highlight for me. Equally, Chapter 4, the story of Nabi, was really good partly because it didn’t have complicated interconnections that have to be worked out. In some ways I thought this aspect of the novel was overdone and not always successful. There are too many stories and they are too disparate. It’s like Hosseini is trying to do too much in one book. That said, the passing reference to ‘Abe’s Kabob House’ in Chapter 5, which is then explored in detail in Chapter 9, was really well done. I thought it spoke poignantly about the upheaval and change of migration and life as an immigrant and was very well handled.

Against the good writing, powerful characters and scenes, the book is somewhat overly dramatic. The whole thing is so stuffed full of tragedy and is so eventful it sometimes feels like watching a soap opera where something shocking has to happen every five minutes to keep the audience engaged. At times this felt facile, gratuitous and simplistic. Against this criticism, one of the main themes of the book is the turmoil and misery wrecked by the wars in Afghanistan so perhaps it is unfair to criticise the author’s attempts to place this in the foreground. Nonetheless, even the more domestic portions of the book that take place outside of Afghanistan can feel histrionic and overblown. The book is undoubtedly moving but sometimes it feels like the reader’s heartstrings are being pulled a little too hard a little too often!

This was an enjoyable, varied and readable book. I had a few issues with the structure and the intensity and frequency of its dramatic episodes but overall I would recommend it.

Ray Dalio - Principles: Life and Work

I was excited to read this book because of Dalio’s success with Bridgewater. His investment style could be broadly described as one of quantitative, macroeconomic trading, which is far from the long term, qualitative, bottom up, equities investment strategy I try to follow. I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn about how someone has had a lot of success with a very different style of investment to most of the books I read. In some senses this turned out to be true and in others rather less so! The publishers have done a good job in releasing this book, principles on ‘life and work’, before the second volume on ‘economics and investment’. Dalio is famous for his understanding of investment so most people would probably read the second volume over the first. That said, he’s sufficiently famous for his prowess as an investor that some punters, like me, will read this one anyway!


The book started quite well for me with an interesting overview of Dalio’s life and career. What becomes clear very early on is that he has a lot of ideas and a very high capacity for work. He is also an inveterate speculator, which I view as a positive. He writes in Chapter 3, titled ‘My Abyss’, about how he lost all his money early on in his career. I enjoyed this as many people might want to airbrush this from their career. Dalio is upfront about this mistake and, more generally, writes persuasively about the value of making mistakes in gaining experience and improving. Anyone with any experience trading knows the following is true, “I believe that anyone who has made money in trading has had to experience horrendous pain at some point. Trading is like working with electricity; you can get an electric shock” (p18 quoting from Jack Schwager Hedge Fund Market Wizards). Losing all your money is a sign of some naivety and excessive risk taking but it seems like Dalio definitely learned his lesson. That said, this is the only major mistake that Dalio mentions in the book and the rest of it is notably devoid of serious problems that he must have encountered in growing his firm. It is remarkable how many investors only focus on their successes, at least publicly. Although I suppose it could be viewed as good marketing. When it comes to the nitty gritty of running a company, the book is long on wishy washy management principles and very short on practical, painful examples. This is in spite of the fact that Dalio consistently refers to problems and mistakes as the lifeblood of evolution. I expected him to mention far more of them rather than just talk about their value in general terms and this was a disappointment.


As well as making clear that he is a bona fide speculator, the early chapters also demonstrate Dalio’s love of quantitative data and systems. To Dalio, everything is a machine that has rules and moving parts that can be understood and programmed to work more efficiently. The economy is a machine, so is a company, so is your brain. I’m not sure I agree with this assessment but this is how Dalio sees the world and operates within it. He states his quantitative approach definitively writing, “theoretically...if there was a computer that could hold all of the world’s facts and if it was perfectly programmed to mathematically express all of the relationships between all of the world’s parts, the future could be perfectly foretold” (p39-40). This reminded me of Keynes’ thoughts about the future and speculation and how contrary they seem to Dalio’s. Keynes writes, ‘“We have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts. Thus the fact that our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain, renders wealth a peculiarly unsuitable subject for the methods of classical economic theory….By ‘uncertain knowledge’....I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European War is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth holders in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever’ (my italics). Whereas Dalio seems to have faith in the ability to model provided the computing power is of sufficient force. Leaving aside the theoretical and focusing on today’s imperfect computer models Dalio states, as anyone with any practical experience of uncertainty knows, that even the most powerful quantitative analysis can only produce a range of probabilities rather than one specific and definite outcome. Dalio writes, ‘Truth be known, forecasts aren’t worth very much, and most people who make them don’t make money in the markets….This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome’. I thoroughly agree with him on this even if, ultimately, I’m probably closer to Keynes philosophically. Dalio’s skill is clearly not just modelling; it is also knowing when and how to bet. A lot of Dalio’s work seems to centre on the use of empirical logs and tools to eliminate human bias and errors. Having been thoroughly convinced about the faultiness of the human brain’s decision making by books like Thinking Fast and Slow I thought this was an area where Dalio is insightful and valuable. Especially given the advancements in AI and machine learning happening at the moment. Section 5.11 on algorithms, beginning p257, is very good on this and is something I need to learn more about and make use of.


In his early days as a commodity trader and consultant, he comes up with the idea of his ‘pure alpha’ fund through a combination of his love of speculation and his love of data. In researching his speculation he had come up with a huge number of strategies - ‘I had a large collection of uncorrelated return streams. In fact, I had something like a thousand of them’ (p58). He also had good, systematic data that recorded all of these systems and bets he had been trailing - ‘we had programmed and tested lots of fundamental trading rules’ (p58) in each asset class and they were trading lots of different asset classes. Combining this ability to come up with thousands of different types of trade, tracking and back testing them to see what was profitable, with his ‘eureka moment’ of realising that ‘having a few good uncorrelated return streams is better than having just one, and knowing how to combine return streams is even more effective than being able to choose good ones’ (p57) led to the creation of his fund management business.


On a less positive note, Dalio is seriously pleased with himself and never misses an opportunity for self-congratulation. A lot of this is dressed up in the most transparent form of false modesty, which makes it even worse. He makes a big song and dance about how relationships are the most important thing in the world before going on to list his wealth and influence according to Forbes and Time. He tells us about how much dating he was doing before he met his wife, compares his theory about uncorrelated income streams to Einstein’s theory of relativity and says he won’t talk much about his family before going on to boast about all of them at some length! He even states twice that Bridgewater is the most successful hedge fund ever and has made more money for his clients than anyone else in history. If this isn’t the writing of a very competitive and self satisfied person, then I don’t know what is. The whole concept for the book oozes self-importance!


Page 79 sees him talk about his ‘amazing achievements’ and about how most of what he does within the company ‘couldn’t be adequately delegated’. He feels like he is doing everything and needs help so sets up a management committee to monitor his performance. This all sounds fine and dandy until you learn later in the book that remuneration is very much Dalio’s domain and not the management committee’s. This sounds like getting a bunch of people who rely on your opinion of them to get rich to tell you how you’re doing. As I’ll try to explain later, this kind of duplicity applies to Dalio’s ideas of ‘radical transparency’ and ‘radical honesty’ in a similar way. It all sounds great and the ‘idea meritocracy’ sounds impressive until you realise it is, essentially, a Ray Dalio-ocracy where he makes the rules and chooses whether to enforce or suspend them at will.


Dalio thinks of himself as amongst history’s most incredible minds. For evidence of this, Dalio describes Bridgewater as ‘intellectual Navy SEALs; others describe it as going to a school of self-discovery run by someone like the Dalai Lama’ (p88). Not wanting to stop at comparing himself to the Dalai Lama, he also recounts a story where he meets the man himself. Apparently, he congratulated Dalio on his amazing understanding of humanity and asked him to join him in meeting but Dalio was too busy. The inference is very much that the Dalai Lama, too, has lots to learn from Dalio or that they are both ‘ninjas’ - a oddly fratty term Dalio uses to describe people who are very good at something. Pages 93-98, entitled ‘Learning what shapers are like’, are the most egregious example of his self satisfaction. Here he compares himself to just about any other great person you can think of. Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Einstein, Freud, Darwin, Muhammad, Jesus, Newton, Franklin - it’s almost impossible to believe he isn’t being sarcastic! He tries to mitigate this a bit on p111 by writing, ‘I want to be clear that I don’t believe that those who are ‘heroes’ or ‘shapers’ are either better people or are on better paths. It’s perfectly sensible to not have any desire to go on such a journey. I believe that what’s most important is to know one’s own nature and operate consistently with it’. However, the whole tone of the book and even his decision to write it indicate that Dalio most certainly sees himself as better than almost everyone else! Section ‘H’ on p230 where he talks more about ‘shapers’ is a good example of this.


The problem is, like many skillful market operators, Dalio takes his skill at navigating the market to indicate that he is an amazing thinker in all areas - not just markets. In Chapter 5 he describes himself as a impartial economic doctor in self-aggrandising section called ‘helping policy members’. Later on at p108, while boasting about his close relationship with Wang Qishan, he declares ‘I feel i get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe’ when the two of them talk!! Perhaps this level of self obsession is necessary to become as successful as Dalio. It certainly isn’t attractive and made me feel like Bridgewater is really a cult of personality rather than the utopian ‘idea meritocracy’ that Dalio would like us to believe that it is.


Alongside the infuriating smugness, I also found the book hard to read because it is quite badly written. Dalio is not a wonderful writer and most of the analogies he uses are related to baseball or skiing. He brands anything that doesn’t agree with his interpretation as ‘backward’, there is endless talk of ‘triangulation’ and ‘getting in sync’, which quickly becomes wearisome and repetitive. The book is presented as principles (e.g. 10) with sub-principles (10.1) and further details (10.1.A). This would appear to point to some kind of logical development and connection between the ideas being set out, as is the case with geometric presentations in philosophical books like Spinoza’s Ethics. This is definitely not the case with Dalio’s book! In spite of the appearance of logic and cohesion, these are really just vaguely connected statements or ramblings. Some of the sub points are just phrases like ‘show candidates your warts’, something he doesn’t really do in this book, with no examples or significant elaboration. By the latter stages of the book, I realised that I was just reading a list of poorly written general reflections that I would never be able to remember because they’re not cohesive, logical or supported by good examples. For this reason, I found the book a struggle to read and hard to follow.


Bridgewater definitely struck me as culty on the evidence of this book. Like Dalio’s arrogance and seeming perception of himself as some kind of hero, perhaps this is what’s necessary to have the kind of success that Bridgewater and Dalio have enjoyed. Nonetheless, I would like to call BS on a couple of the principles at Bridgewater. This is not to say the system doesn’t or can’t work; evidence would point to the contrary! More that the reality of the ‘idea meritocracy’ seems quite different from Dalio’s perception and presentation of it in this book. Section D on p159 is a good example of the difference I perceive. Here Dalio tell us, ‘the biggest mistake people make is to not see themselves and others objectively’. This sounds OK, but who is to say what is objective and who makes the rules about how these judgements are arrived at? For Dalio, there seems to be an idea that data can be completely objective but, the more I read about Bridgewater, it seemed that what Dalio means when he says ‘objective’ or ‘higher level thinking’ is ‘my belief in what is objective’ or ‘my thinking’! Further examples can be drawn from the ideas of ‘radical honesty’ and ‘radical transparency’, which are the key pillars of the ‘idea meritocracy’. In the idea meritocracy, the best ideas are supposed to be valued above the person who presents them’s rank in the hierarchy. However, when talking about the future, it’s sometimes hard to judge whose ideas are best as many outcomes are plausible and possible. When this happens, Dalio employs the idea of ‘believability’, which essentially means the person’s track record. As such, people with high believability will hold higher positions in the hierarchy meaning that the idea meritocracy essentially functions in a similar way to a traditional hierarchy! Dalio says he has never gone against the ‘believability weighted opinion’ when making decisions and this immediately made me think, ‘Dalio must have a very heavy believability weighting!’. Equally, radical transparency sounds interesting and good. All meetings are recorded and decisions about the company aren’t confined to a small management group. However, later on we learn that remuneration - probably the single most important and divisive issue in any company - is not subject to radical transparency (p334). Indeed, the only advice Dalio offers on pay is to ‘pay north of fair’ and ‘pay for time’. Given how important this issue is in running a company, I was disappointed that there was such little discussion of this. My conclusion is that Dalio makes most big decisions on pay in a radically non-transparent and individual manner! By the same token, talk of secret auditing (p513) and public executions (p514) seemed more akin to a dictatorship than a society governed by radical transparency!


I think Dalio’s principles are a bit like a religious text. It seems to provide an external, objective reference point for how things are decided and governed. However, inevitably, these principles can be interpreted and acted upon in a huge number of different ways so they end up being a tool to justify and vindicate the decisions of the leaders. Simply look at the incredibly disparate societies and communities the Bible has been used to support! Everything is in the interpretation and Dalio himself seems to recognise this in 6.4.B (p390), which in essence states that principles can mean lots of different things to different people but his interpretation of the principles is the correct one! So much for the idea meritocracy, unless everyone agrees that his ideas are the best - which they may well be when it comes to investment! On p391 Dalio argues that sometimes the idea meritocracy has to be suspended for the good of the organisation and, in the very next principle, that one should be wary of someone who seeks to suspend the idea meritocracy for the good of the organisation. This kind of contradictory thinking makes it seem like the principles are, like almost all principles, open to a large amount of interpretation and modification depending on what the most powerful people in a hierarchy want. In this way, Dalio’s way of operating sounds pretty much the same as most successful fund managers’; my way or the highway!


All this criticism might make it seem like I got nothing out of this book and that was not the case. He is very good on using algorithms to help investment and some parts of management and he writes persuasively about how the power and speed of the subconscious mind make it imperative to learn and analyse systematically before making decisions. His belief that people often get bogged down in details and his adherence to the 80:20 principle and general principles struck me as true. He also counsels that knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets to make (P253 5.6b), which I felt is important and true. In short, there is quite a lot of decent advice about investment in the book. Although little of it is ground breaking or particularly well exemplified. Unfortunately, what good stuff there is is wrapped up in a lot of self aggrandizing crap and meaningless waffle.


One thing Dalio definitely understands is the importance of matching your nature to what you do. I feel this is the single most important thing in becoming a good investor; trying to understand yourself and match your style to your strengths while making every effort to compensate for your weaknesses. Dalio understands this very deeply. He writes, ‘the happiest people discover their nature and match their life to it’ (p124) which I would wholeheartedly agree with. He also writes at length about the opportunity to learn from mistakes, which is also crucial. I think what Dalio has done in creating Bridgewater is to design a company that matches his nature extremely closely. This is a hard thing to do and I think he is exceptional in having done it to the extent he has. He also clearly has a gift for market speculation. However, rather than creating a new, broadly applicable way of thinking about managing a company, which is what Dalio thinks he has done, I’d say he has really just designed an environment that suits his nature very well. Lots of the book is couched in terms of, ‘I have had so much success, now my main goal is to pass it on to others’ but I would argue that very little of what he writes is easy to apply generally. The principles are vague, subject to modification and interpretation and are never fleshed out with really tricky practical examples. The problems he does talk about are largely trivial and the ones that people might really be interested in, for example the sexual harassment case brought against his CIO, are never mentioned. This is really disappointing given how much Dalio talks about learning from mistakes and difficult situations.


All in all, I didn’t get much from his book. The sections on Dalio’s life and career were probably the best bits as they’re not presented in the ‘principles’ style used later in the book. These sections also contained more factual information and fewer wishy washy aphorisms. As well as having a frustrating structure, the book isn’t well written and this made it a slog to read. However, given his track record, I’ll probably still read ‘Investment and Economic Principles’ when it comes out in the hope of getting more practical tips for making money! Hopefully with lots more concrete examples of his experiences in the markets.