f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays [Author] Simon Leys [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/04/27 [Review] 
(~180k words; 5 hours) Anthology of literature-focused essays, highly miscellaneous. Judged by wordcount and topic, it seems that Leys’s focus is fairly narrow - I would compare him to a lesser Borges, but Borges delighted too much in philosophical & scientific ideas and speculation for the comparison to really work, while Leys is very much the consummate man of letters. I was interested primarily in his comments on China, and was surprised the extent to which he fixates on French literature (especially for someone who wrote in English). The good parts are his essay “The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote”, “Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of André Gide” (not so much because I care about Gide, but he does sound interesting), “Cunning Like a HedgeHog”, and many of his China essays such as “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past” (which explains a physical absence of antiquity I had felt in my gut but had never risen to consciousness), “One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy” (which finally enlightens me on the role of calligraphy in both China & Japan), “The Wake of an Empty Boat: Zhou Enlai”, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page” (principally for the parable from which it draws its title), “Richard Henry Dana and His Two Years Before the Mast”, & “Tell Them I Said Something”. Because of the goodness, I must overlook the bad. I have little interest in French politics of the 1800s or, much the same thing, its novelists and those essays were excruciatingly dull to me. The short “An empire of ugliness”, despite having the honor of being the second piece in the collection, is a remarkably lame attempt to defend Mother Teresa from Hitchens’s criticism (apparently the most important thing to discuss about Hitchens’s book is whether the title is obscene or merely a double-entendre, and Leys thinks it is perfectly acceptable to accept money from murderous thugs and dictators because… Jesus preached to taxfarmers?; discussion of the meat of the criticisms of Mother Teresa, is noticeable for its absence - apparently Leys believes that good results must follow good intentions while in truth good intentions follow good results, and does not appreciate that a 1% growth in GDP would do India more good than a thousand Mother Teresa); similarly, it seems that the first question Leys asks about any writer of the 20th century is what position they took on Communism, and Leys will never let you forget that he was staunchly against it & deserves credit as a seer (an anti-communism which runs so deep that his own blindness about Deng Xiaoping is all the more curious; he writes hostilely of Deng as late as 2008; to read his essays, one would have to conclude that no man’s hand authored China’s economic boom which has taken it from mass famines to a middle-income and Great Power, it just kinda sorta happened on its own and certainly Leys has no interest in the topic). And “The experience of literary translation” is not so much bad as completely inferior to Borges’s own essay on translating the Thousand and One Nights that I wonder why he bothered to write it.
Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net
Review