Book Review #1 for 2024: Humus by Gaspard Koenig

I've always been inspired by social media book reviews and listicles so I’ll start my own nobody asked for these in 2024, which will maybe incite someone else to do their own or read a little more, contributing to the literary chain as it may.

My first “real” read this year after a couple of comic books (a Fabien Toulme about women-led protests and the new Asterix Iris Blanc, both of them Xmas gifts from my son spending his year in France) was Humus by Gaspard Koenig which I bought in French second hand off of Amazon.

I was intrigued as Koenig has been an essayist in France railing against bureaucratic challenges, who has also been an immersive journalist from experimenting open air jail in Finland to micro crediting in Lima’s slums.

Humus has a sort of Balzac style to it, with keen observations and pessimistic realism, telling the story of two friends from different social classes in the same French prominent agricultural school, using worms as their conduits, one into corporate greenwashing or worm washing in this case, and the other into a quest for individual sustainability and to save Mother Earth.

One is eaten up by the draconian capitalistic world of nepotistic connections, mirages and money ethos, while the other by himself, and the novel culminates in a reunion as a violent degrowth turn the internet and lights out for all revolution is attempted in Paris.

One of their common flames who disappoints both of them in a time of impossible love went to the same elitist school as I did, Sciences Po, and works in crisis communication, as many of my former classmates have, sustaining the French system with their elaborate vocabulary.

At times a bit slow and pedantic, with hyper realist descriptions of farms, worms, academic conferences, anarchist cells and Silicon Valley fundraising, I found the novel really picks up in its second half, as more action and character development meld with conflicting theories and Koenig’s style quite effectively.

Degrowth is not talked about much in the United States, where it might be considered a heresy by so many, but in France it’s very much a rallying cry, and although Koenig comes at it from an anti state direction, it’s given enough credibility in this book to be healthy food for thought.

There's also countless references to Henry David Thoreau, a favorite of my mom's, who happened to be my English teacher when she introduced me to Walden, and who still has her gardens wherever she stays.

Koenig also accomplishes a savage takedown of the French elites maintaining the current status quo and making life impossible for truly original entrepreneurs.

It’s also very much a novel of the climate catastrophe upon us, the hypocrisy of green capitalism and how the non-defeatists, utopians and adventurers of new paths should not be so easily dismissed.