An eerie yet familiar ethereal quality infuses the three stories of Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep. The first-person narrator of each is a border person, existing on the cusp between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, periodically crossing over and crossing back.

In “Night and Night’s Travelers” the death of Yoshihiro, the brother of the narrator, transfixes the lives of his sister, Shibami, his girlfriend at the time of his death, Mari, and the young American exchange student, Sarah, with whom he earlier fallen in love and later abandoned. Mari cannot sleep. Sarah cannot let go. Both have enduring mementos of their relationship with Yoshihiro. It is left to Shibami to serve as their medium, between each other and with the spirit of Yoshihiro.

In “Love Songs”, two women vying for the same man form a relationship so intense, yet unspoken, that it might be love. The death of the older woman, Haru, cements the bond somehow. The younger woman begins taking on some of Haru’s characteristics and is even visited by what she believes is Haru’s spirit. Her purposeful confrontation with the spirit is the necessary next step in her own transformation and broader understanding of love in its many forms.

Death also troubles “Asleep,” with the suicide of the former flat-mate of the narrator, Terako. Her death and the transitional state between life and death of the wife of the Terako’s boyfriend, trapped in a permanent coma, begin to sap the life force of Terako. She visibly loses her will to live, embracing exhaustion and sleeping for increasing numbers of hours, so deeply that she cannot even hear a telephone ring. Again, a visitation from the spirit realm triggers Terako’s rescue.

The themes of death, loss of will, and love permeate these stories. Tone is more important than action. Anxiety, perhaps about the transition to adulthood (most of the characters seem to exist in a state of perpetual late adolescence), dominates. Age or cultural distance may be a barrier to embracing the objects of Yoshimoto’s concern, but her writing itself is well worth reading.

The Routledge Thinking in Action series presents accessible but serious philosophical treatments of key live issues, concepts, or ideas. Like others in the series, Peter Goldie’s On Personality is more than an introductory text. He may be introducing the reader for the first time to philosophical disputes on the nature of character or the role of character traits and dispositions to act in specific ways. But he also is a philosopher of stature with firm views on which way the debate should proceed and thus argues forcefully for that stance. So, very much a case of thinking in action. And is there anything more exciting than that?

The initial chapters lay the groundwork of distinctions needed to discuss personality and character (they are different) sensibly. In the middle chapter, Goldie addressed head-on the apparent evidence from psychological research casting doubt on the notion of dispositional characters. He handily fends off the sceptics, I think, but acknowledges in turn the fragile nature of character and the conditions under which we are prone to misascribe character traits. Having secured our talk of character, he moves on to its vital role in our moral lives. On Goldie’s view we are responsible for many of our character traits and this suggests a rethinking of the ordering of praise and blame in particular cases. A proper understanding of character is thus a clear first step for philosophers working through the connections between agency, responsibility, and character.

Goldie concludes the book with a chapter on the role of narrative in the sense of the self. Although he is often described as having a narrativist position, it is clear that he differs significantly from others in the field. Since he accepts a distinction between narrative and what narratives are about, he sees no difficulty in discounting the view that our lives have a narrative structure; rather, he would say, our “lives, and parts of lives, unfold in a characteristic way which can be related in the form of a narrative (but which aren’t themselves narratives).” Narrative (i.e. self-narrative) is crucial for what he calls the ‘Augustinian inside view’. But it is equally important as an expressive indicator for others.

Things move quickly, I think, in this final chapter. You may reach the end rather wishing that there had been time to learn a great deal more about the philosophical treatment of character, personality, and the role of narrative in the idea of the self. But perhaps that is the best indicator of an excellent introductory text. Recommended.

Gregory Currie’s account of narrative is firmly rooted in neo-Gricean pragmatics. He believes that pragmatic inference—inference to the intended meaning behind the words—is ubiquitous in the comprehension of narrative. For “narratives are artefactual representations” that typically emphasize “the causal and temporal connectedness of particular things, especially agents,” which together constitute the story that the narrative communicates. In this way the intentions of the author, or implied author, are made plain to the perceptive reader. It is intentionalism, certainly, but not the fallacious sort debunked by Beardsley; it has no forensic goal, but is just “a common-or-garden activity over which we usually exercise little conscious control.”

If narratives typically concern themselves with causal and temporal connectedness, it will be no surprise to find that they often serve an explanatory function. This is seen vividly in historical narrative (or narrative histories), but fiction also partakes. And it may also account for the reciprocal and mutually supporting relationship that Currie sees later between narrative and Character (by which Currie means “the idea of character as property, as inner source of action, something related to personality and temperament”).

In the final chapters, Currie embraces Character scepticism. This might be seen as an instance of a broader challenge to folk psychological (or folk narrative) concepts. It is possible that Character scepticism also has its roots in neo-Gricean pragmatics, though Currie does not draw the connection. In any case, it is a troubling position for the reader who may have casually accepted Currie’s fine distinctions and close argument as he elaborated a plausible account of narrative. For along with Character scepticism goes scepticism for virtues and much of the machinery of moral psychology.

Running almost in parallel with the main argument of Narratives and Narrators is a series of appendices to chapters that present a speculative evolutionary account of how certain features of the practice of narrative might have arisen. It seems strange until one returns to the earlier noted explanatory power of narrative. By the end of the book Currie is exploiting his evolutionary story to underwrite his Character scepticism (where other arguments seem to have fallen short). But this seems illegitimate; here a speculative evolutionary account confers the impression of a causal explanation for why Character might have arisen as a practice even though (pace the Character sceptic) there is no such thing. I suspect Currie’s philosophical opponents may find room for disagreement here.

Currie claims that nearly everything we may want in terms of literary criticism and the expressive impact of narratives can be sustained even in the face of extreme Character scepticism. I am not so sure. But I am sure that any serious analytical philosophical discussion of narrative in future will do well to engage Currie’s position directly and forcefully.

Through a series of vignettes, Tove Jansson evokes summer on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. Sophia—an earnest but tempestuous little girl—spends her summers with her grandmother and her father. Her mother is dead, and one of the first questions she puts to her grandmother is, “When are you going to die?” Grandmother is wise and wily and immensely patient, but equally wilful as her young charge. Sophia is as quick to anger as the summer storms and just as quick to see that anger dissipate. With her grandmother she struggles with friendship, love, and ever-present fear.

Sophia’s father is a silent presence working at his desk or gardening or placing the fishing nets, but he does not speak. The focus is entirely on Sophia and her grandmother.

I am fascinated by what Jansson is able to accomplish with her simple, concrete, but thoughtful prose. At one point the grandmother admonishes a visitor, “Stop talking in symbols…why do you use so many euphemisms and metaphors? Are you afraid?” Certainly Jansson is unafraid to face head on the anguish of loss and impending loss. She follows the solution that Sophia and her grandmother arrive at on many occasions, which is to invent stories that incorporate the people and events confronting them, rendering them manageable. “It was a particularly good evening to begin a book,” notes the narrator, and I think you will agree when you take up this one. Certainly recommended.

Love, I suppose, is a state of wonder. Sometimes numbing, sometimes bedazzling, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes filial, sometimes paternal, and sometimes conjugal—love is a perennial challenge for a novelist. Ann Patchett obviously loves a challenge. And since a writer’s ambition ought to know no bounds, she picks up the challenge of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. To these she adds some dilemmas of medical ethics, participant observer anthropologists, and ethnobotanists. And I’m only just scratching the surface of this rich text. Indeed there is so much here to think about and discuss and reconsider that I doubt any consensus of opinion will form on this novel for some time. That’s as it should be. But love, I think, is a central core around which the other themes swirl.

Marina Singh is a physician turned pharmacological scientist. She suffers from unresolved father love, which transfers to a kind of worship of a former professor with a powerful personality, Annick Swenson, whom Marina later must seek out deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Her task is to check on the progress of Dr Swenson’s research into an infertility drug, as well as to verify the demise of her former colleague Anders Eckman, who preceded her in a similar quest. There is something unsettling about Marina’s awe of Annick Swenson. But she is not alone. Other scientists are equally in thrall, as is an entire tribe, the Lakashi. Such adoration, however, seems to be transitive since Annick herself previously experienced it for her own former professor, and late paramour, Dr Rapp, the discoverer of the Lakashi tribe and, more importantly, the variety of pharmacological treasures which they steward. It is unsettling because such love may imply a corresponding dislike of the self. And to some extent it feels either implausible or unsavoury this late in the day.

An equally niche form of love might be found in the paternalism that underwrites the non-interventionist ethic of the participant observer anthropologist and the ethnobotanist. Dr Swenson insists on leaving the Lakashi in their natural state, despite having lived with them, on and off, for fifty years. (Her scientists have never bothered to learn the language of the Lakashi.) Yet at the same time she is secretly involved in research on a malarial vaccine which she knows would potentially lead to a population explosion in poorly developed countries where it might significantly reduce the child mortality rate. It’s a difficult dilemma, and Patchett is wise to give us no easy answer.

These are merely two of the aspects of love canvassed here. There is so much more in State of Wonder, that all I can do is urge as many of my friends as possible to read it, if only so that I’ll have someone to talk to about it. It is not a great novel, I think. Its virtue resides in its, and its author’s, ambition. Which I admit to being a bit in awe of. Long may she continue picking up the challenge. Highly recommended.