<blockquote>Buying things requires at least a rudimentary level of optimism — indeed, why buy the most recent critical edition of Henry James's complete works in a linen slipcase if you're not assuming that life will go on, one way or another?</blockquote>

It didn't exactly make me feel stupid, but it did make me wish I were smarter. Kraft, by Jonas Lüscher, is one man's struggle to defend theodicy.

(One chapter epigraph quotes Schelling: "Doubt the brightness of the sun, doubt the light of the stars, just do not doubt my truth and your stupidity." I do not doubt my stupidity.)

Richard Kraft, German professor of rhetoric, has been invited to participate in an essay competition with the possibility of winning a million dollars. All he need do is present an 18-minute lecture on: what is, is right.
Theodicy, according to my eight minutes of intensive Google research, is the idea that suffering and evil in the world, as a product of God, must not be so bad as we think and, while not exactly good, are a necessary and just component of the divine plan.

Kraft, both the man and the book, is funny. But also unlikeable. While the intellectual challenge of this book didn't put me off, the mood of it it did. He's a smug academic and though he pays lipservice to bucking convention, he is overly concerned with appearances. He is quintessentially male and oozes entitlement. He clearly believes he deserves to win this prize, deserves to live a carefree life with no responsibility toward his children or to the women in his life. He lies to his wife, to his best friend, to strangers. He looks down on... everybody.

Funny and clever, but something grated. It was the throwaway comments about "Nicki Minaj's monumental rear end" and a similar appreciation he expressed, at every opportunity, for the maternal figure of his first love. Deliberate characterization or not, I stopped rooting for Kraft — he's a bit of a dick really.

Still. Favourite sentence:
<blockquote>István appeared intoxicated by the high mass of parliamentarian democracy and lapped up Barzel's every word as if it were sacramental wine transubstantiated to liberty.</blockquote>

Kraft travels to California (it's no accident that he must leave the traditional structure of Europe) and stays with István in the leadup to the competition. Flashbacks give us glimpses into his friendship with István, his politics, his past liaisons and his family life. By my reckoning, he's a lot more shallow than you'd expect a philosophy prof to be.

That's about it. He just can't find a way into his essay. He picks the brains of his colleagues for inspiration.

<blockquote>What he plans to do, Ducavalier tells Kraft, is to take on the task of explaining why almost everything that is, is bad. A rather easy task, he adds, and gives a brief overview of the coming apocalypse: the impending collapse of the European Union; the return of nationalism; the new acceptability of open racism and bigotry; the democratically elected despots who turn their countries into dictatorships with their people's consent — a process that makes one doubt the usefulness of democracy itself; the rising tide of anti-intellectualism, for which the intellectuals themselves are responsible, and the accompanying legitimation of ignorance; the openly expressed longing for strongmen; the moral bankruptcy of the economic elite who behave like unrepentant secondhand-car dealers; the threat of a new economic crisis against which the central banks will be left with no possible recourse, since they can't devalue money any more than they already have, as a consequence of which they've already shot the last arrow in their quiver; a free trade policy combined with a protectionist system of subsidies that drives millions of poor people from the south to the north; the stagnation of economic growth despite the digital revolution; the lack of alternatives to capitalism even though capitalism leads inevitable to an ever greater disparity in wealth that will in turn cut the system's legs out from under it in the near future; the millions of surplus young men in China and India who are badly educated, sexually frustrated, and without hope of a future, a problem that will be most elegantly solved with a war of aggression . . . And although he is of course aware that it is an unacceptable if terribly effective simplification, he will give his explanation theoretical and narrative weight by using a cyclical philosophy of history that will allow him to evoke in his conclusion a return of the conditions that existed during the Weimar Republic, thus conjuring a third world war that will hover implacably over the assembly. Et voilà, Bertrand sat . . . all that is, is bad.

Kraft pulls a lettuce leaf from his ham sandwich. You forgot climate change, he says to Ducavalier.

Eighteen minutes, my dear Kraft, you've got to set some limits. Eighteen minutes is not enough to describe the world's depravity in full.</blockquote>

Already Kraft is setting on his ultimate path. Instead of committing himself to the PowerPoint presentation, he begins to stage his final act, a performance piece that embodies theodicy more than any bullet points.

This book put me in quite a funk, relieved only by the realization that the Trump era is over. A weight is lifted off our shoulders, a veil cleared from our eyes.

I keep wanting to quip, "We have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem." I mean, apart from there being a pandemic on and living in lockdown. And don't forget climate change (23 degrees in Montreal today, far from normal).

First published in Germany in 2017; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 10, 2020

Kraft is the story of an intellectual named Richard Kraft. The story begins in the present, as Kraft is invited to America to compete with other scholars for a million-dollar prize. His task is to write and present an essay on “Why Whatever Is, Is Right and Why We Can Still Improve It.” Kraft understands the topic to be based on the proposition that we live in the best of all possible worlds — presumably because it was created by God — and that the best possible world is nevertheless permeated by evil, which suggests that evil can’t really be so bad. Or perhaps it is bad for the individual but necessary for the greater good of the whole. Kraft doesn’t agree with Alexander Pope’s thesis that “Whatever is, is right” — Kraft is no fan of theodicy — but he needs the million so he endeavors to craft an essay that will appeal to Tobias Erkner, who has funded the competition and will judge the competitors.

Kraft is a professor of rhetoric. Years earlier, as a student in West Germany, striving to stand out in intellectual circles, Kraft embraced neoclassical theory and market liberalism, the trickle-down notions of capitalism that were championed by Ronald Reagan’s advisors. Kraft understands that he has embraced ideas that are the economic equivalent of theodicy because they demand the acceptance of evil (in the form of poverty and injustice) as natural and beneficial to the greater good. He also understands that advancing in the intellectual world doesn’t require him to actually believe the ideas that he defends. As he struggles with his essay, Kraft knows he will need to dress up an economic system that repels him “with an aura of divine ordainment” because Erker is rich and will want to hear that his wealth is the outcome of a natural social order that recognizes his entitlement.

Flashbacks to and beyond Kraft’s student days tell of his friendship with István (a like-minded intellectual), his relationship with Ruth Lambsdorff (who fled without explanation, stimulating Kraft’s “vain craving for admiration”), his equally unsuccessful relationship with Johanna Hueffel (who, years later, takes issue with Kraft’s memory that she fled from him in anger), his past and present unhappy marriages and his ambiguous relationship with his children. Through all of this, Kraft sees himself as an honorable man, although it belatedly dawns on him that others might see him as a monster. In fact, he is neither or both. He would like the freedom of another divorce, but he can’t afford freedom unless he wins the million, a circumstance he finds shameful.

An undercurrent of comedy runs through the story. Usually understated, the comedy occasionally yields slapstick moments (Kraft being found naked in a field near Stanford after a “rowing adventure” is one example). István is almost a comic figure, a man who poses as a dissident intellectual who defected from Hungary when, in fact, he entered Germany as the shirt-washer for the Hungarian chess team and stayed behind when the bus left without him, the officer in charge having failed to notice his absence. The German obsession with David Hasselhoff also inspires some chuckles.

The moral question that Kraft must ultimately confront is whether he can dress up drivel as intellect — drivel he sees through and knows he cannot justify, despite his ability to advance arguments that purport to be honest — for money. Is the cost of being an intellectual sellout outweighed by the greater good of providing for his family? But this has been Kraft’s dilemma throughout his life. His dissertation extolled an economic system that he found repugnant and in which he had so little confidence that he spread the dissertation in all directions, welding on “any number of reinforcements and pointless rivets,” plastering it with his “stupendous knowledge of the relevant secondary literature,” and varnishing it with eloquent rhetoric to disguise its dishonesty.

Kraft is a fascinating novel because of its serious discussion of abstract philosophical concepts and their application to a concrete world. A dissenting voice (who doesn’t need the million dollars) argues that everything that is, is bad: rising nationalism, open acceptance of racism, the democratic election of despots, the embrace of anti-intellectualism and the “legitimation of ignorance,” the failure of countries like India and China to provide hope for a better future to their citizens. Kraft ponders an alternative view — that the coming Singularity that will advance humanity by merging real and artificial intelligence — but wonders whether the Singularity will lead to the enslavement of man by machine. It’s tough to be intellectually honest.

The novel’s humor doesn’t attempt to disguise the reality that world is a bleak place, for some more than others. The novel’s ending is also bleak, perhaps to drive home the point that sunny optimism alone can’t change reality. The ending struck me as something of a cop-out but it reflects a choice that, in a world of infinite choices, might be as valid as any other. Putting the ending aside, I admire Kraft for Jonas Lüscher’s willingness to confront the profound without forgetting that people of all intellectual levels muddle through their lives as best they can, struggling only occasionally (if at all) to make sense of it.

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I wasn't able to finish this one before its expiration. Apologies to the author and publisher. I thought the description sounded incredibly interesting.

I'll give it 4 stars because that is slightly above my average and I don't wish to penalize it for my own inability to fit it in.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Kraft, a professor living with his wife and twin daughters in Germany, is living in a bad marriage. He finds a possible way out by going to Silicon Valley to give a lecture about why the world is currently great and could be made even better by technology. The winning lecture will win a million dollars and give Kraft his freedom from his wife, except that once he gets to California, Kraft finds that he can’t write anything worthwhile, not because he thinks the idea is ridiculous, it’s more that he’s obsessed with his past and, especially, the three major relationships he’s had with women, including one who had his child and never told him until he accidentally found out years later and a woman he lived with for four years and one day leaves for America, never to talk to him again. This is a great comic novel about a blowhard that may be coming to a place where he can no longer lie to himself about who he is.

Ambitious,, learned, wry, but also stodgy and decidedly verbose, this contemporary satire both impresses and fails to compel. Impressive work at one level, but only likely to appeal to a very narrow readership.

This was such a hard read to get through, as it was written more like a dissertation for a doctorate than an enjoyable memoir. I forced myself to get through it, though. I think it may have been a better read if written in the style of a traditional memoir.

I immediately found myself so put off by the style of this book that I did not feel able to finish it.

This is a highly intelligent novel, one that charts the era of Perestroika as experienced in Berlin, the fall of the Wall and the socio-economic forces that led up to it. Interwoven in the pages are the picaresque adventures of a modern day Candide by the name of Kraft. I only make this connection because of Kraft's seeming propensity to experience first-hand, Zelig-like, many of the significant events in the Berlin of the early 1980's. The novel shifts between this illustrious past and the uncertain present, in which thirty years on, Kraft is at Stanford University, attempting to change his life for the better by winning an improbable contest by creating a presentation defining the existence of evil. At points I almost felt this was a schizophrenic work in that the heavy parts dealing with history contrast with some scenes of high comedy, beautifully rendered farce. And I will venture to say that the conclusion angered me.