📖 Civilisations ✍

A friend to whom I had raved about 📖 Cahokia Jazz raved back about Civilisations. Well no, he didn’t rave, because he didn’t want to offer any spoilers. All he said was that it was a great counterfactual. When I asked for at least a bit of an outline, he added only, “well, when the Inca fleet turns up off the coast of Lisbon ...”.

That was enough. I won’t do spoilers either, although I will note too that I was very glad to be reading the e-book so I could look up names and dates to fill in the gaps of my sketchy historical knowledge. I loved, too, the matter-of-fact way in which the primary mechanism, disease, was so beautifully set up in the first section and then allowed to play out on the other side of the Great Ocean, unlike its hidden role in Cahokia Jazz. Not that either is better; just different.

For me, the final section was the least entertaining, concerning, as it did, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and his chum Doménikos Theotokópoulos (thank you e-book). I have not read any Cervantes, but presumably the style of that section, so different from the others, is a pastiche of Don Quixote. I also knew nothing of the lives of either man. A few online searches later, I am somewhat the wiser if, indeed, one of the Unknown Gentlemen painted by El Greco was Cervantes.

As a result, I am in awe of Laurent Binet’s ability to weave a detail in one portrait and conjecture about the identity of another into a satisfying, epic adventure. Indeed, Civilisations as a whole reflects that too.

All in all, an extremely enjoyable read.