Last week the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) met at the University of Missouri Law School. I was privileged to participate among 120 scholars from 20 countries.
As part of the works-in-progress program at the front end of the conference, I presented the most recent iteration of my work on access to information law, comparing private-sector transparency and accountability measures in South Africa with selected standards in Europe.
I benefited from exchange of critique from a room full of participants, including co-panelists James Maxeiner of the University of Baltimore and Kwanghyuk (David) Yoo of the University of Iowa. Maxeiner presented a fascinating comparative study of lawmaking in Germany and the United States, showing the inventive ways that lobbying-driven American lawmakers might learn from Germany's variegated means of incubating potential legislation. Yoo talked about U.S. and European Union court decisions on antitrust challenges to patent settlements in the pharmaceutical industry: when a company settles a lawsuit to keep a patent challenger out of the market, when does dispute resolution cross into anti-competitive misconduct?
The panel was moderated by Missouri’s Mekonnen Ayano, a Harvard doctoral graduate and formerly an Ethiopian judge and World Bank legal counsel. University of Missouri Dean Lyrissa Lidsky, an accomplished media law scholar, attended and live-tweeted the panel.
[UPDATE: Vainly adding photos with me in them, courtesy of Mizzou Law.]
Prof. Maxeiner and I listen in the lecture hall.
I puzzle over dinner options.
I ramble about ATI in Africa with the generous ear of moderator Prof. Ayano.
Whistleblowers are basking in an adoring limelight in the United States right now. They better enjoy it while it lasts, because the American taste for whistleblowing is fickle.
All the attention being paid to whistleblowing in Washington, you would think that whistleblowers are heroes of democratic liberty, Paul Reveres on midnight rides of revelation. Now there’s a second whistleblower, and maybe a third, and, why, people just can’t get in line fast enough to become whistleblowers.
I have to roll my eyes when I hear people waxing poetic over the great tradition of the American whistleblower. Catch those same people on a different day, different issue, or different side of the fence, and they’ll be lashing the whistleblower to the stake and setting their torches to the kindling like it’s the Spanish Inquisition. For much of American history, whistleblowing has been synonymous with disloyalty and treachery.
The Washington whistleblower caused WNYC’s On the Media to replay a 2015 segment in which Brooke Gladstone interviewed language writer Ben Zimmer and consumer protection advocate and civil rights crusader Ralph Nader. The early-20th-century word whistleblowing, Zimmer explained, comes from what it sounds like: a referee blowing the whistle to stop play in event of a penalty. (See Transparency International for the word’s translations, born of other cultural contexts.) No sooner did the word come about that it acquired a dark connotation. It meant, Gladstone said, “to snitch, to rat, to steal.” You can hear that usage, Zimmer pointed out, in the classic film On the Waterfront (1954), in reference to the enemies of organized labor. In this sense, Trump’s “spy” notion is not so far off the mark.
Nader was responsible for turning the word around in the 1970s. He pleaded for insiders to break ranks in his public safety crusade against Big Auto, and he repurposed the term whistleblowing with the positive spin of serving the greater good, despite disloyalty in the short term. So the word is not the thing. Gladstone nailed the salient distinction, which is whether the whistleblowing accords with one’s value judgments. Trump’s traitor is Pelosi’s star witness. Ed Snowden deserves either a presidential medal or an espionage prosecution. Even Upton Sinclair was a duplicitous meatpacking worker.
Blow the Whistle
Our ambivalence about whistleblowers finds expression in law. When we protect whistleblowers at law—common law usually does not—it’s usually a legislative reaction to something awful that happened, when we wonder why no one in the know said anything. While whistleblower protection statutes are prevalent in the United States at state and federal levels, they are often controversial, hardly comprehensive, and likely to pertain only to the public sector. Protection tends to be narrow and sectoral in scope; to depend upon abundant and variable technical prerequisites; and to offer scant shield from the full range of consequences, formal and informal, that the whistleblower faces. Woe to the would-be whistleblower who fails to hire a lawyer in advance to navigate the legal process. The Washington whistleblower was meticulous. The person either is a lawyer or consulted one.
Far from the glamorous escapades of the Hollywood Insider, the real-life whistleblower’s lot in life is lousy. More whistleblowers become infamous than famous, and most become no one significant at all. Typically whistleblowers find themselves, through no fault of their own, in a catch-22. Behind door number one, go with the flow, stay with the pack, look the other way, and sell out your principles. Behind door number two, stand on principle, and probably lose your job, your livelihood, your home, and your friends, alienate your family, and maybe put your life at risk.
To be fair, not all whistleblowers are motivated by altruism, and not all whistleblower motives are altruistic. Sometimes whistleblowers themselves are victims of the misconduct they are reporting. Sometimes they are grinding an unrelated ax against a perpetrator—which doesn’t make the perpetrator less an offender. Whistleblowers’ motives can be complicated. People are complicated. Altruism is a factor. Courage is a constant.
Play the Game
Last week, I had the extraordinary experience of meeting some whistleblowers in world sport. For me, it was the highlight of Play the Game, an initiative and biennial conference of the Danish Institute for Sports Studies, its first meeting outside Europe. Play the Game aims to raise ethical standards and to promote democracy, transparency, and freedom of expression in world sport.
Whistleblowing in sport might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Consider that transnational sport governors such as the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are among the most powerful non-governmental organizations in the world. Technically they are “nonprofits,” but no one says that with a straight face. Until recently, FIFA and IOC execs sashayed into the offices of presidents, prime ministers, governors, and mayors like they were Regina George’s mean girls on a tear at North Shore High. There were real costs to their shameless greed: global contrails of worthless constructions, impoverished populations, and broken dreams.
That started to change when FIFA and IOC were exposed as corrupt at their cores. Their corruption was exposed by whistleblowers.
Bonita Mersiades (Play the Game CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Bonita Mersiades was a top exec with the Australian Football Federation from 2007 to 2010, when she worked on Australia’s failed bids for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup tournaments. She blew the whistle on the extraordinary demands that FIFA placed on would-be hosts and her own country’s willingness to bend the public interest to conform. Those tournaments we know now were awarded to Russia and Qatar upon such rank corruption as resulted in a 2015 raid by U.S. and Swiss law enforcement and dozens of criminal indictments. Mersiades herself was outed when the investigative report of Assistant U.S. Attorney (now N.Y. Judge) Michael Garcia was made public.
At Play the Game, Mersiades described social ostracism in her community, loss of her career in sport administration, burglary of her home, and hacking and online harassment. She wrote about FIFA corruption and her experience in a 2018 book, Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way.
Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov (Play the Game CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Also on the whistleblower panel (below in full) were Yuliya Stepanova and Vitaly Stepanov. Yuliya was a Russian Olympic runner, and Vitaly worked for the Russian anti-doping agency. Together they blew the whistle on Russian doping, breaking open a massive scandal that rocked Russia and the world, exposing not just systematic Russian doping but reckless, if not criminal, indifference in the World Anti-Doping Agency. With good reason, the Stepanovs feared for their lives. They applied for Canadian asylum and now live in the United States (with their adorable little boy, also in attendance).
Vitaly told a spellbound audience that the stress of the couple’s situation had them on the verge of divorce when, at last, they took the leap into whistleblowing history together. They would have to leave homeland and family behind, and their lives would never be the same. But it was OK, he said, because “after that, … we were united.”
My dinner companions: Mersiades and Dr. Joel Carmichael,
chiropractor to U.S. Olympic athletes
When, over dinner, I lamented the state of patchwork American whistleblower protection law, Mersiades was quick to correct me. It’s much better than Australia, she said. [See UPDATE below.] In the United States, we do have a somewhat vigorous qui tam field. (Read more at Troxel, Krauss, & Chapman.) And the federal whistleblower law now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry is better than the yawning void of jeopardy into which FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley stepped when she testified in the Senate on 9/11 failures in 2002. She retired from the FBI two and a half years later.
Still, it seems to me that as a society, we should be able to do better. When the dust settles around the peculiarly technically adept Washington whistleblower, we might ought wonder why whistleblowers aren’t all around us—at every level of government, and in the private sector. Did no one at Purdue Pharma know about aggressive opioid peddling? We should wonder why, in the land of the First Amendment, there are so many disincentives—legal, social, economic—for anyone to speak out as a citizen on a matter of urgent public interest.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” Sinclair said in 1934. That’s why the rule of law must support the apostate who speaks the truth.
The documentary Icarus tells the Russian doping story. Director Bryan Fogel also spoke on the whistleblowing panel (above) at Play the Game 2019.
[UPDATE, Oct. 21, at 10:50 a.m. U.S. EDT: A testament to Mersiades's lament that Australian whistleblower protection lags behind democratic demands, witness today's remarkable protest action by Australian newspapers.]
Choosing a legal career that fits a student’s personality, skillset, and
aspirations is the most important and difficult decision a law student
faces, yet only a small number of law schools incorporate
career-planning into their curriculums. Law Jobs: The Complete Guide seeks to fill the gap. Written by three award-winning professors, Law Jobs
is a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide to every type of legal
career. Packed with authoritative research and featuring comments from
more than 150 lawyers who do the jobs, Law Jobs offers in-depth
exploration of each career option, including general background, pros
and cons, day in the life descriptions, job availability, compensation,
prospects for advancement, diversity, and how students can best position
themselves for opportunities in the field. Covered jobs include:
Large and Medium-Sized Law Firms
Small Firms and Solo Practitioners
In-House and Other Corporate Counsel
Government Agency Lawyers
Non-Governmental Public Interest Law
Prosecutors and Public Defenders
Private Criminal Defense
JD Advantage Jobs
Contract (Freelance) Lawyering
Judges, Mediators, and Arbitrators
Judicial Law Clerks
Legal Academic Jobs
Other
chapters address lawyer happiness, the rapidly changing face of the
legal profession due to technology and other forces, the division
between litigation and transactional law, and the top-50 legal specialty
areas.
Together, the authors have received more than thirty
awards for teaching and research, and have written extensively about law
students and lawyers in books such as 1L of a Ride (McClurg), A Lawyer Writes (Coughlin), and The Happy Lawyer (Levit).
One of my long-term favorite podcasts, Planet Money, last week tackled litigation financing. We talk a lot in Torts in law school about America's runaway transaction costs and how they affect, or impede, civil justice. Litigation financing can seem like manna from heaven when one thinks of tragedy-of-the-commons problems such as climate change. But then there are the problems of corporatocracy, secrecy, and the distastefulness of commodification. Planet Money traces our distaste to champerty in British common law. Here's the introduction:
Litigation financing allows third-party funders like Burford Capital
to invest in other people's lawsuits, but it's long been considered
unethical, and is illegal in many places. But justice can
often hinge more on how much money each side has than on what's actually
right or wrong. So Burford argues that allowing investments in lawsuits
will give more people access to better justice. And it's been a good
business for them. But others worry it might warp the justice system.
UMass Law comparative law students asked about legal harmonization in Central America and asked Dean Castro Valle to assess the prospect of a supranational entity in the region, akin to the European Union, that might advance economic development. She said such a project has been in the works since the 1950s. Pointing to present discontent with President Ortega in Nicaragua, for example, she explained that not enough states have been stable and interested in pursuing the project at the same time. Meanwhile she and other legal scholars are working to harmonize civil codes and arbitration process to increase legal certainty sufficiently to attract investment from transnational business.
I've lately been swamped by developments in global information regulation. Here's a round-up of highlights with links to read more.
Google-France feud. Fresh on the heels of Google v. CNIL (read more), tensions are heating up again between Google and France, as Google refuses to play ball with France's new copyright law. The 2019 EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market aimed, inter alia, to protect publishers from the scraping of their news product for aggregators' clips and snippets without compensation. France was the first country, and only so far, to transpose the directive's article 15 (né draft article 11) into national law. Effective this month, the French law would compel an aggregator such as Google to pay news publishers for the content that appears in Google search results. How much money Google makes from Google News is disputed, but it's a lot. Google contends that news providers are well compensated by traffic driven to their websites. The news industry doesn't feel that way and blames aggregators for killing the business model of news, public interest journalism along with it. Now Google has said that search results in France will exclude content that would require payment under the new copyright law. The News Media Alliance, a U.S. industry association, has called Google's move "extortion."
EU: Global injunction of one country's "defamation." The European Union (EU) continues to amp up internet service provider (ISP) accountability. A chamber of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) ruled that European law—including EU information market directive, the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, and the freedom of expression—does not preclude a member state from issuing a global injunction to take down unlawful content.
The facts reveal the problematic scope of the state power implicated, as the case arose from a Facebook post disparaging, e.g., "traitor," an Austrian politician. The disparagement was regarded as defamation in the Austrian courts, but would be protected as core political commentary or hyperbolic opinion in the United States and many other countries. The prospect of a state order with global reach was raised by the recent CJEU decision in Google v. CNIL. Slate's take took no prisoners: "In so ruling, the court demonstrated a shocking ignorance of the
technology involved and set the stage for the most censor-prone country
to set global speech rules."
The case is Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Ltd., No. C-18/18 (Oct. 3, 2019).
US: Extraterritorial discovery. The Second Circuit meanwhile published an opinion that pushes outward against the territorial bounds of U.S. law. The court ruled that statutory civil procedure under 28 U.S.C. § 1782 may reach records held outside the United States and is co-extensive in scope with the maximum long-arm personal jurisdiction of constitutional due process.
The case arose from Banco Santander's acquisition of Banco Popular Español (BPE) after a criminal investigation and government-forced sale of the latter. Mexican nationals and investors opposing the acquisition sought discovery in the U.S. District Court in New York against Santander and its New York-based affiliate, Santander Investment Securities (SIS), under § 1782. The law compels discovery against a person or legal entity that "resides or is found" in the U.S. jurisdiction.
The court rejected Santander's contention, supported by academic opinion, that the language could not reach a mere "sojourner" in the jurisdiction. The court furthermore held that the presumption against extraterritoriality of statutory interpretation does not apply to a jurisdictional statute, and even if it did, the design of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, with which the statute fits, plainly and expressly encompasses extraterritorial reach.
However, the court held, only SIS, not Santander, was within the reach of long-arm personal jurisdiction. SIS was subject to general jurisdiction, but was not meaningfully involved in the BPE acquisition. Santander had hired New York consultants to contemplate an acquisition of BPE, which could subject Santander to specific jurisdiction, but that was an entirely different transaction, prior to the government-forced sale of BPE.
Though the case deals with conventional discovery, it has important implications for transnational business in the age of e-discovery. Expansive U.S. discovery practice is incompatible with more restrictive norms in much of the world, Europe included. Section 1782 is a potentially powerful tool for savvy litigants to get their hands on opponents' materials when foreign courts won't allow it. That's bound to rub transnational business and foreign regulators the wrong way.
The case is In re Del Valle Ruiz, No. 18-3226 (2d Cir. Oct. 7, 2019). Hat tip to New York attorney Ken Rashbaum, at Barton LLP, who telephonically visited my Comparative Law class and referenced the case, and will be writing more about it soon.
Gin labeling and grains of paradise. OK, this is more about misinformation than information, and it is globally important. Law and gin, two great international cultural forces and loves of my life, come together in a recently filed lawsuit over grains of paradise. You can't make up stuff this dry yet thirst-quenching.
In a class-action complaint removed to the U.S. Southern District of Florida in mid-September, plaintiffs accuse Bacardi USA, maker of Bombay Sapphire Gin, and Winn-Dixie supermarkets of selling "adulterated" product, because Bombay gin contains a botanical literally called "grains of paradise." According to the complaint, grains of paradise, scientific name Aframomum melegueta, "is an herbaceous perennial plant native to swampy habitats along the West African coast." Turns out, it's illegal under Florida law, section 562.455.
The ABA Journal explained: "The 150-year-old Florida law was passed when people thought grains of
paradise was a poisonous drug. The misconception likely arose when home
distillers added other, dangerous ingredients to gin to 'mask the awful
distilling and make more money,' according to Olivier Ward, a British
gin expert and consultant who spoke with the Miami Herald." Bacardi is not hiding anything and maintains that its products comply with all health and safety regulations. The complaint itself states that grains of paradise are listed in the ingredients and actually etched on the gin's blue bottle.
The case is Marrache v. Bacardi, U.S.A., Inc., No. 1:19-cv-23856 (S.D. Fla. docketed Sept. 16, 2019).
The Massachuetts Superior Court, per Judge Michael D. Ricciuti, denied Harvard University's motion to dismiss a negligence claim brought by the parent of a student, Luke Tang, who committed suicide on campus in 2015. The case comes in the wake of a 2018 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) decision refusing to allow the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to be held responsible for a student's suicide.
In the 2015 case, Nguyen v. MIT, discussed here, the SJC ruled that the university-student relationship does not support a duty in tort law akin to the custodial relationship between a parent and child, or custodian and dependent. That ruling was consistent with historic and enduring common law norms, which hold that a person's intentional suicide, in some jurisdictions a crime, interrupts the chain of duty and causation that would link the death to any earlier-in-time carelessness.
However, the SJC left open the possibility that a university could be responsible for a suicide if the decedent had been in a "special relationship" with the defendant. "Special relationship" is a term of art in tort law, referring to the very relationships in which public policy supports a person's expectation of care from another.
In the instant case, Tang v. Harvard College, plaintiff seeks to pin liability on Harvard and its employees through that very allowance for special relationships. As reported by the Harvard Crimson last year, Tang was known to Harvard as a suicide risk. Tang had been transported to a hospital after a suicide attempt freshman year. When he returned to school, he signed an agreement with Harvard that he would stay in counseling with Harvard mental health staff. Returning to school after the summer, though, Tang failed to keep his appointments, and the complaint alleges that Harvard failed to follow up.
Special relationships in tort law can be created when a medical professional undertakes care of a patient, or when any person voluntarily takes on the responsibility of caring for another, which can be signified by action or contract. Tang's theory of special relationship resonates in those ways, considering the counseling function of Harvard staff and the agreement that Tang signed with Harvard.
Superior Court Justice Michael D. Ricciuti found sufficient basis to distinguish Nguyen. Justice Ricciuti wrote, "Harvard's argument to dismiss this case reduces Nguyen to a check-box, and that once a university checks one of the three boxes—a protocol, or if there is none, clinical care, or if that is refused, reaching an emergency contact—its duty ends regardless of how well or poorly the university fulfils its duty. That interpretation cannot be correct."
Justice Ricciuti is himself a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law. A native of Quincy, Massachusetts, he was in private practice and served as federal prosecutor before being confirmed to the bench.
The case is Tang v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, No. 18-2603 (Mass. Super. Ct. Sept. 9, 2019). Hat tip @ Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (pay wall). Read more at The Harvard Crimson. For a short time, I will park a copy of Justice Ricciuti's ruling here.
A documentary film about Luke Tang, Looking for Luke, seeks to raise awareness of mental health problems affecting young people. Here is the trailer.
The Connecticut Supreme Court adopted alternative liability in a case seeking to hold three smoking teens responsible for a vacant-mill fire. The case is Connecticut Interlocal Risk Management Agency v. Jackson, No. SC-19946 (Conn. Sept. 17, 2019). Here are the facts from the court opinion:
At approximately 1 a.m. on June 2, 2012, the defendants, all of whom were teenagers at the time, entered an abandoned mill located in the town. Once inside, the defendants proceeded to explore the multistory structure while drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Each of them smoked approximately five cigarettes, and each discarded the cigarette butts by tossing them onto the wooden floor of the mill without extinguishing them. The defendants left the mill at approximately 1:45 a.m. By about 2:20 a.m., the property was engulfed in flames, and the Somers Fire Department had been dispatched to the scene. The fire destroyed both the mill and the sewage line.
Law students usually encounter “alternative liability” in the classic California case, Summers v. Tice, 199 P.2d 1 (Cal. 1948). This multiple-liability concept allows a plaintiff to charge multiple defendants with responsibility for a wrong without establishing that any one of them was in fact responsible. In other words, the doctrine engages a fiction as preferable to letting all defendants off the hook.
In Summers, plaintiff was struck in the eye by shot as his two fellow hunters fired at quail. It could not be determined to a preponderance of the evidence, i.e., more than 50% likelihood, which of the hunters actually fired the shot that struck the plaintiff. But because both bore equal moral culpability under the circumstances, relative to the position of the plaintiff, it makes more sense to hold them both liable then to let both prevail. A little shy of that result, technically, the actual effect of alternative liability is to shift the plaintiff’s burden to prove a defendant’s responsibility to a burden of each defendant to prove non-responsibility.
Alternative liability, as articulated in the Second Restatement of Torts and the Court (quoted here), pertains when: (1) “all of the defendants acted negligently and harm resulted,” (2) “all possible tortfeasors have been named as defendants,” and (3) “the tortfeasors’ negligent conduct was substantially simultaneous in time and of the same character so as to create the same risk of harm.” Alternative liability is a lawyer-at-cocktail-party favorite, but few cases have facts that can measure up to this stringent test.
Alternative liability had ramifications in the later development of narrow but important product liability doctrines, in cases in which plaintiffs struggle to link a single manufacturer among many with a particular injurious product—think in terms of a dangerous pesticide containing a mix of chemical compounds, each purchased from various sellers. Some extension of the doctrine has been controversial in the scholarship and ill received in the courts, insofar as product liability is strict, that is, not arising upon proof of any legal or moral fault by a defendant seller. It can seem, then, that strict product liability effectively penalizes participation in the marketplace. Add to that the fiction of alternative liability, and it can be just too much for the conscientious economic conservative.
HT @ TortsProf Blog. Images, by Jim Michaud, from the 2012 mill fire:
In the latest battle of the feud between Google and the French data protection authority (CNIL), the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the CNIL's "right to be forgotten" order should be limited to internet users in Europe. However, the court did not rule out the possibility of a worldwide order if the facts warrant.
The court wrote:
[T]he right to the protection of personal data is not an absolute right, but must be considered in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental rights, in accordance with the principle of proportionality.... Furthermore, the balance between the right to privacy and the protection of personal data, on the one hand, and the freedom of information of internet users, on the other, is likely to vary significantly around the world.
While the EU legislature has, in Article 17(3)(a) of Regulation 2016/679 [GDPR], struck a balance between that right and that freedom so far as the Union is concerned ... it must be found that, by contrast, it has not, to date, struck such a balance as regards the scope of a de-referencing outside the Union.
"Proportionality" is a core principle of EU human rights law when regulation collides with individual rights, or, as here, state power is implicated to favor one individual's rights over those of others. The same principle also constrains supra-national authority over member states.
The case arose from a CNIL fine of Google. The French authority had ordered Google to de-list search results to protect certain individuals' privacy under the "right to be forgotten," or "right to erasure," when those individuals were searched by name. "De-listing" or "de-referencing" search results is the front line of right-to-erasure court challenges today, though the specter of erasure orders that reach content providers directly looms on the horizon.
Google complied with the CNIL order only for European domains, such as "google.fr" for France, and not across Google domains worldwide. Google employs geo-blocking to prevent European users from subverting de-listing simply by searching at "google.com" (United States) or "google.com.br" (Brazil). Determined users still can beat geo-blocking with sly technocraft, so CNIL was dissatisfied with the efficacy of Google's solution. Undoubtedly, a dispute will arise yet in which the CNIL or another European data protection authority tests its might with a more persuasive case for global de-listing.
The case is Google, LLC v. Commission Nationale de L’informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), No. C-507/17 (E.C.J.), Sept. 24, 2019. Several free speech and digital rights NGOs intervened on behalf of Google, including Article 19, the Internet Freedom Foundation, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as Microsoft Corp. The case arose initially under the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive, but carries over to the new regime of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
I'm part of a book group, among other reasons, to find an excuse to read things I otherwise would not take the time to read. I love my group, but a lot of the times, the reading only confirms my good judgment about use of time in the first place. The exceptions, though, stand out, e.g., Fredrick Backman's Man Called Ove, and invariably make the whole commitment worthwhile.
Last month was such a worthwhile month. We read Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow, selection of public-service-lawyer-extraordinaire Karen Owen Talley. Here's the beautiful and clever book trailer (Delphine Burrus, dir.).
"Beautiful and clever" only begins to describe this book. I have not read Towles's previous and popular Rules of Civility, so I cannot compare. Suffice to say, though, I was surprised to learn that Towles is a Boston-born investment manager writing from Manhattan, and not a full-time scholar of the Russian Revolution, or even a recently arrived time traveler from 1920s Moscow. Shelved as "historical fiction" in some libraries, this book depicts changing Russian society over decades after the revolution, from the 1920s to 1950s, all from the curious and ultimately delightful perspective of an aristocratic political prisoner under house arrest in an upscale hotel.
Maybe Towles was playing at Russian style, or it's just his speed; the book feels slow on plot a good ways in. Ordinarily that's a turn-off for my action-aficionado, smartphone-addled brain. Yet somehow this book was engrossing; every day I looked forward to re-immersing my mind's eye in the fantastical world of the Metropol Hotel, as envisioned from the endearingly witty perspective of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov.
Towles is brilliant at authoring irresistible rabbit holes for the reader. Sometimes these seemingly discrete stories feel like pointless tangents; a fellow groupie and I had simultaneously imagined Towles as the sort of person who carries around a small memo pad to jot down vignettes of the day, from his peculiar perspective, and then litters his writing room with the pages. Yet these seeming tangents weave themselves together later in the book into a tapestry that is so much more than the sum of their parts. While each vignette in the book seems dispensable in its time, the whole of the novel would be painfully incomplete were it lessened by any one. Here's a short example, just as the Count has discovered morning coffee and the reward of grinding it himself:
Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee.
In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things. While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing.
. . . .
So perfect was the combination that upon finishing, the Count was tempted to crank the crank, quarter the apple, dole out the biscuits, and enjoy his breakfast all over again.
But time and tide wait for no man.
I won't go much into the meat of the tale, other than to counsel the reader to watch for time as a theme. The seeming absence of plot is itself a grand illusion, representative of how time passes and transforms Russia outside the steady, unchanging walls of our protagonist's hotel confinement. I didn't realize that until we started to put the pieces together as a book group, and now I wish I had paid closer attention on first read.
A TV series is in the making. I thought that a bad idea, at first, worried that this delicate marvel would be tortured by Hollywood-like priorities until it yields something more fast and furious. But a fellow groupie pointed out that it's all in the characters: an unhurried and dignified telling might be executed well in the right hands. Perhaps it bodes well then that Kenneth Branagh is set to produce and star. But don't wait for a screen adaptation; you'll be cheating yourself out of a journey best rendered by the imagination.
