Reducible evil?

Ever since 9/11, I've been predicting a big Dostoevskii comeback. Really a no-brainer. And the electoral season has really refocused my attention on the question of evil. So last weekend I headed up towards the bookshelf on the landing by the attic in search of my copy of The Brothers Karamazov, figuring a re-read was due, Ivan Karamazov's discourse on the suffering of a single child, the Grand Inquisitor, Dima getting wasted, the whole nine.

But it wasn't there, must be boxed up in the basement. What I did found was what I took to be a reasonable proxy, Philip Gourevitch's We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the definitive anglophone accounting of the Rwandan genocides of 1994. The book opens as the author helicopters in to a church in mountain clearing where corpses of slaughtered Tutsis have been left to decompose where they lay as a memorial, much like the sacked Acropolis in Athens or the Cathedral of Coventry. Gourevitch respectively but without an excess of piety recounts how 100 or so women had been raped and had their skulls crushed there. In the next breath, in a pretty funky stylistic turn, he remarks on the jaunty hips and thrust out buttocks of the soldier who is his guide and who guards the site. Caught me off guard. It just goes to show you, if you're contrarian enough to fly around looking at and digging up evidence of a genocide that the rest of us sort of preferred to ignore, you're gonna have an eye for some wierd detail. And so will your editors.

But whatever, it's a book of rare bravery and fortitude. The kind of thing Michael Moore might do if he didn't need eggrolls and a camera crew forever near to hand.

Song du jour A Balkan treat from the Yale Slavic Chorus