Ernst Junger, _The Glass Bees_, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer

 I WANT TO be careful slinging around the word "prescient," since the specter of replacing humans with machines has been haunting western literature since at least 1920 thanks to Karel Capek's R. U. R., but the frontier of what machines can do has moved so far since the original German publication of this novel in 1957 and even since the New York Review Books reprint of this translation in 2000 that one has to give Jünger a tip of the hat, at least.

Jünger's career was unique. His first book, Storm of Steel, differed from almost all fiction and non-fiction by WWI veterans (e.g., Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse) in being frankly celebratory of combat experience. He was a prominent voice on the hard right in Germany after the war, but he didn't like the Nazis, even though they courted him assiduously; his On the Marble Cliffs (1939) is a novella-length parable about Hitler that makes you wonder how it even got published in Hitler's Germany, or why Jünger was not immediately arrested. He served in the German army during WW II but (according to Wikipedia) was in the remoter orbits of the officers who tried (and failed) to assassinate Hitler.

The Glass Bees is a short novel (roughly 200 pages) about a job interview. The narrator is Captain Richard, who was trained to be a cavalry officer but had to settle for being a tank commander--a suitable analogue for the crushing of the old ways under the wheels of modernization. He has landed a job interview with Zapparoni, a figure a bit like Peter Thiel and Walt Disney rolled into one, a Master of the Universe whose empire is built on automation. Captain Richard has been having a hard time since the (unspecified) war, his reputation suffering from his close association with the bad old days that his society is trying to forget (or repress). The interview is his best shot at getting a secure spot in the modern world.

He doesn't much like the modern world, though, "an age when hierarchy is determined by mastery of technical apparatuses and when technics have become destiny." "Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible," he writes; "If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other." For the Zapparoni business plan to be achieved, "man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed."

As he goes through the interview, Captain  Richard tells us a lot about his past, all of which underlines how uncongenial to him are Zapparoni and all of Zapparoni's works. Over the course of his interview, it occurs to him again and again that he has given himself away and blown his opportunity. Somehow, though, he gets the gig. We don't learn how it worked out.

Marie de Flavigny, Comtesse d'Agoult, writing as "Daniel Stern," _Histoire de la Revolution de 1848_

I HAVE BEEN reading, at a very leisurely pace, Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848. Excellent book--chapters on a variety of people who were on hand in Paris for the tumultuous events of that year and who went on to write about it: Marx, Hugo, Flaubert, Tocqueville, George Sand, Alexander Herzen. The poet Alphonse Lamartine not only wrote about it but was a leading figure, at least for half a year or so.

Among the book's virtues is its whetting my appetite to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) what these people wrote about 1848. I had never even heard of Marie d'Agoult before reading Beecher's chapter on  her, but she's a compelling writer, and her history of the revolution, published under a pseudonym, may turn out to be my best find of 2025.

The Comtesse d'Agoult left her aristocratic husband to live with pianist and composer Franz Liszt in the 1830s; she and Liszt lived together for ten years and had three children (one daughter, Cosima, later married Richard Wagner). When they broke up, d'Agoult became a writer and led a noted literary salon. She was well acquainted with Lamartine, among others, and obviously had some all-the-way inside sources for her history, which appeared in three volumes published during the span 1850-53. 

I did not read the whole thing, which runs roughly a thousand pages, but I did read a chapter or two from each volume, a total of about 140 pages.

D'Agoult sketches personalities vividly, even the people she is not much in political sympathy with. She seems to be of Lamartine's party, seeking a liberal democratic republic that stops short of socialism, but she emphasizes the courage and resourcefulness of the workers. She does seem to have a distaste for Louis Napoleon, whose election as president in the late fall of 1848 was the dismal anticlimax to the year of revolution, but who can blame her?

She has a novelist's touch in rendering the revolution's most dramatic moments, which is what I zeroed in on for my reading: Chapter 16, on February 25th, when Lamartine talked a crowd out of substituting the red socialist flag for the Republic's tricolor; Chapters 22 about some of the leaders of opinion; Chapter 23 about the 17th of March, when a crowd of tens of thousands of workers showed up at a meeting of the provisional government at the Hotel de Ville (city hall) to present their demands; and Chapter 33, about the "June days," when the barricades went up and armed conflict broke out between the national guard and the workers of Paris.

Marie d'Agoult is the Hilary Mantel of 1848. I hope this isn't trivializing, but I couldn't stop thinking about what an amazing miniseries this could make.