Finished: 29/07/2024
Full disclosure right from the start: I didn't actually finish this book. I read about half of the way through
and then just skipped around for the next 140-ish pages. That may disqualify me from giving an accurate book report in some eyes, however I think the pages and sections I missed would not have swayed my (mostly negative) opinion on this book.
A bit of a background of that this book was about: this is an autobiography by Katherine Verdery's about her life as an anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnographer in Romania back when it was in the Soviet Union. In this book, she, in the early 2000s, requests to see the secret police file that was kept on her while she was doing her fieldwork in the 70s and 80s. She knew the Securitate (Romanian secret police) were watching her, but didn't know the extent of it. Her file ended up being one of the largest ever kept by the Securitate. While reading it she got to experience her time in Romania through a different lens, one of which that saw her as a threat: an American spy. Throughout the book she goes on to explain how she grossly underestimated how thorough the Securitate was, how so much of her private life seemed to be on massive display. But she also takes an understanding point of view. She asks how much different are a spy and an anthropologist? The answer she comes up with is "not very different."
With this short summary, one could think that this book is interesting and tells a very unique, nonfiction story. However, I just could not get over how poorly it was written at some points. I want to be fair and say that there were parts of My Life as a Spy that were very intriguing to me and I got lost in. But mostly, I felt like I was always pulled out of my interest by the disorganized way this book was put together.
The first example of this is the Preface, Notes, Acknowledgements and Prologue which all together are about 35 pages long but could easily have been 10. It seems like Katherine Verdery wrote five different introductions for her book and instead of editing them down to just one, she put all five in the Prologue. Things are repeated constantly about where her first encounter with the Securitate started, the time frame of her work abroad, and what the purpose of her work was. Another full disclosure: more often than not I don't read the prologue of books in full, I usually just scan them, but because of my lack of knowledge about the Securitate and Romania itself, I decided that it would be a good idea to read this one. -But honestly, all the information she gives in the Prologue can be found in other places of the book; there's a serious lack of general information about what the Soviet Union was and why they were so scared of western spies. This, however, is evidence for my theory that this book is actually not "for the average reader," but I'll get to that later.
The rest of the book contains two big parts all separated into three smaller chapters each which are even more separated in to smaller sections, the last chapter is a short epilogue. The first two chapters are the largest, the first one talking about what her secret police file says about her in the 70s as a mid-twenties graduate researcher, and the second one is about when she came back to Romania as a professor in the 80s when the surveillance on her was ramped up. I don't know why she even bothered trying to organize this book into this timeline, there is constantly huge, confusing jumps of time in both of these chapters. There's also a lot of names thrown around that are so hard to keep track of. The more you read, the more the people all blend together. Some of them Katherine Verdery gave fake names or just initials, but then the Securitate also gave those same people fake names as to not "out" their informants. -On top of all that, sometimes Katherine will refer to them by a nickname instead. The same one person can have four different names that are just haphazardly used for them.
Katherine Verdery also skipped around between first and third person in a way that wasn't coherent. I get what she was trying to go for: she was trying to distinguished the self she perceived and the self the Securitate perceived as separate entities, her as an anthropologist verses her as a spy. It would've been a very poetic differentiation, but she just couldn't pull it off. It was constantly confusing how she talked about herself, and not in a "this is so interesting how the two selves are one" sort of way, but in a "I don't know what I'm reading and how to follow this" sort of way. I want to also point out that nowhere in the book is an editor listed, it makes me think that she just entirely wrote this book herself without many second opinions from people who could've given her literary advice. I think that the way this book was written made perfect sense to her and the people it involves, but, again, this is probably not "for the average reader."
It was really disappointing to me how annoyed I was getting with all of this because it seems like it could be such an interesting book. My theory about how this is not "for the average reader" comes mainly from 1. the lack of general information I already explained and 2. from the flat and academic wording used. Ignoring how disorganized I think it is for a moment, there's no grand metaphors, or new ideas, or deep emotional analysis I'm used to in literature. I have listed on my profile here that my two favorite books are House of Leaves and Jane Eyre, if you want extravagant and stylish literature, look no further. My Life as a Spy seems like it would be part of college coursework. A small anthropology or world studies class would have a lesson on the secret police in the Soviet Union, they would read a couple sections of My Life as a Spy for homework, have a discussion about it in class, and then move on to something else within a couple days. This theory is backed up even more knowing that Katherine Verdery is an anthropology professor herself. I wasn't able to just sit down and get continuously immersed in this book, there were only a couple sections I found very compelled by.
The two parts I did really enjoy reading about were "Sex in the Field, Part I" and "Sex in the Field, Part II." In these sections, Katherine Verdery talks about how being in a brand new place allowed her to explore her sexuality more than she would've been able to back in the U.S. In Romania, it was like she was a brand new person; she became more outgoing and unrestricted. She talks about how she even ventured into the unknown in romantic and sexual relations with other women. In all of this though, there was a very scary part: in the 80s when the surveillance was heavier on her, some of the Securitate was trying to get close enough with her to sleep with her as to get information. Thinking about having sex with someone with anterior motives like that just makes my skin crawl.
Another thing I liked in these sections is that she talks openly about sexuality and how it's perceived in Romania. I think the general consensus for a while has been that eastern European countries are more conservative than western European countries. But from what Katherine Verdery says, there's a unique view in Romania that exploring your sexuality is just part of growing up. Sleeping with someone of the same sex doesn't automatically make you "gay," it's just an experience. Despite that, there's also an assumption that you "grow out of homosexual desires" and end up being with someone of the opposite sex. Other than the "growing out of it" part, I could really subscribe to this thinking. Finding your sense of self is already very difficult for younger people, having more of an "open" (I guess?) view on sexuality could really help some people find out who they are.
Reading this book made me remember a couple experts I read in my college German classes about East Germany and the Stasi; mainly it reminded me about Christa Wolf. I read a bit of her work and always wanted to go back to it, she seems like an author that I'd really like to read.
Finally, I want to talk about the short Epilogue of this book and what it brings up about modern surveillance and how it's similar to the all-knowing Soviet secret police. It is scary thinking about how there's cameras everywhere you look, how your devices listen to you and advertise to you without your knowledge, how social media sells your data, how your phones and watches track where you go, how healthy you are, and even down to your pulse. The idea about this that I've always had is that, "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I worry?" But the question is how much psychological damage is caused by this normalization of paranoia? How much privacy are we entitled to? And is this constant monitoring really making the world a safer place? I don't have answers to any of these questions, but they are intriguing to think about. That's all, thank you for reading!
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