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Two books make a post
Feb. 13th, 2026 02:40 pmThese have nothing in common besides both being books that I have recently read; but I feel like discussing them, so here they are, crammed incongruously next to each other.
Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham: A Black trans woman emerges from multi-decade imprisonment to find her old neighbourhood gentrified, her family both unrecognising and unrecognisable, and everyone on the street glued to their strange little flashy devices. This novel follows her in minute detail through the first few days of her release, on a Fourth of July weekend, as she revels in her new freedom, makes magnificently bad choices about what to do with it, and struggles to come to terms with both the brutal trauma she experienced while incarcerated in a men's prison and the heavy disadvantages she now faces as a parolee. It's written in an experimental prose style that moves freely (usually mid-sentence) between grammatically standard third person and first person AAVE dialect.
Listen, I have a fairly low tolerance for literary gimmicks, but I LOVED this. It was like a prose-level expression of Carlotta's irrepressible personality - she wasn't going to let even an imaginary narrator tell her story for her! Her voice just wouldn't stop bursting past the strictures of narrative convention! Punctuation itself couldn't slow her down!
My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide by Jessica Stern: This is a sort of biography/character study/personal memoir about Radovan Karadžić. Perhaps you're looking at the title, as I did, thinking: "Surely there's a tasteful explanation for that possessive pronoun! Surely a German Jewish academic approaching this topic with full retrospective knowledge of the horrors of the Bosnian genocide is not going to be writing fondly about a war criminal she interviewed, as if he's some fuckboy who she knows full well is bad news but can't quite stop hoping to tame!" Alas. Reader, alas.
The book is not only tasteless but also badly written. It's muddled in scope; you start each chapter not knowing if you're going to get sensible historical background, a rambling tangent about Karadžić's cousin's ageing mother, or a breathless "dear diary" recounting of one of Karadžić and Stern's interview sessions. It's like a packet of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, but with war crimes! The chapters themselves are written simply and with a popular audience in mind, insofar as an English language book about a Balkan genocidaire is ever going to be popular. But every chapter comes with half-as-long-again endnotes to reaffirm Stern's academic credentials, including page-length elaborations on points that should invariably either have been included in the body text or excluded altogether.
But I kept reading because it is - and clearly intentionally, albeit in a clumsy way - a useful case study in how charismatic leaders can win people over even in the face of conclusive proof against them. Knowledge, experience, a high level of education, none of these things are foolproof protection from the primal human emotions that populists and authoritarians excel at exploiting. This is an upsettingly relevant reminder at a time when affluent Western democracies around the world are facing an ever-rising tide of far right extremism. It's easy from the outside to cringe at Stern's descriptions of how much she came to crave Karadžić's approval, but if I decided to repeat her experiment, lock myself in a small room with an indicted war criminal and allow him to tell me his story on his own terms without interruption or challenge, then perhaps I, too, in all my self-ascribed wisdom and virtue, would emerge having learnt the pleasures of genocide apologism. It's not a nice thought.
Stern's final conclusions are incoherent: that Karadžić is a grandiose Serbian nationalist who intentionally inflamed ethnic tensions to win political power, but also, that the impersonal force of those inflamed ethnic tensions was somehow what drove him off the deep end to start with? Also, she did not kiss him goodbye. It's important we all know that she did not kiss him goodbye at the end of their last interview session. To quote my kids at the dinner table: yuck.
Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham: A Black trans woman emerges from multi-decade imprisonment to find her old neighbourhood gentrified, her family both unrecognising and unrecognisable, and everyone on the street glued to their strange little flashy devices. This novel follows her in minute detail through the first few days of her release, on a Fourth of July weekend, as she revels in her new freedom, makes magnificently bad choices about what to do with it, and struggles to come to terms with both the brutal trauma she experienced while incarcerated in a men's prison and the heavy disadvantages she now faces as a parolee. It's written in an experimental prose style that moves freely (usually mid-sentence) between grammatically standard third person and first person AAVE dialect.
Listen, I have a fairly low tolerance for literary gimmicks, but I LOVED this. It was like a prose-level expression of Carlotta's irrepressible personality - she wasn't going to let even an imaginary narrator tell her story for her! Her voice just wouldn't stop bursting past the strictures of narrative convention! Punctuation itself couldn't slow her down!
My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide by Jessica Stern: This is a sort of biography/character study/personal memoir about Radovan Karadžić. Perhaps you're looking at the title, as I did, thinking: "Surely there's a tasteful explanation for that possessive pronoun! Surely a German Jewish academic approaching this topic with full retrospective knowledge of the horrors of the Bosnian genocide is not going to be writing fondly about a war criminal she interviewed, as if he's some fuckboy who she knows full well is bad news but can't quite stop hoping to tame!" Alas. Reader, alas.
The book is not only tasteless but also badly written. It's muddled in scope; you start each chapter not knowing if you're going to get sensible historical background, a rambling tangent about Karadžić's cousin's ageing mother, or a breathless "dear diary" recounting of one of Karadžić and Stern's interview sessions. It's like a packet of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, but with war crimes! The chapters themselves are written simply and with a popular audience in mind, insofar as an English language book about a Balkan genocidaire is ever going to be popular. But every chapter comes with half-as-long-again endnotes to reaffirm Stern's academic credentials, including page-length elaborations on points that should invariably either have been included in the body text or excluded altogether.
But I kept reading because it is - and clearly intentionally, albeit in a clumsy way - a useful case study in how charismatic leaders can win people over even in the face of conclusive proof against them. Knowledge, experience, a high level of education, none of these things are foolproof protection from the primal human emotions that populists and authoritarians excel at exploiting. This is an upsettingly relevant reminder at a time when affluent Western democracies around the world are facing an ever-rising tide of far right extremism. It's easy from the outside to cringe at Stern's descriptions of how much she came to crave Karadžić's approval, but if I decided to repeat her experiment, lock myself in a small room with an indicted war criminal and allow him to tell me his story on his own terms without interruption or challenge, then perhaps I, too, in all my self-ascribed wisdom and virtue, would emerge having learnt the pleasures of genocide apologism. It's not a nice thought.
Stern's final conclusions are incoherent: that Karadžić is a grandiose Serbian nationalist who intentionally inflamed ethnic tensions to win political power, but also, that the impersonal force of those inflamed ethnic tensions was somehow what drove him off the deep end to start with? Also, she did not kiss him goodbye. It's important we all know that she did not kiss him goodbye at the end of their last interview session. To quote my kids at the dinner table: yuck.
