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Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money by James Buchan
256 pages (Farrar Straus &
Giroux 1999), Hardcover with dust jacket, NEW. Novelist Buchan, a former correspondent for
the Financial Times, traces the meaning of money since its beginning. He discusses money
in its various formats, emphasizing that money itself is not just an object but "an
outcome of a vast mountain of social arrangements." Various scenarios depict the role
of money in love, war, religion, and other areas of human culture. Buchan uses many
historical and literary works to clarify the perception of money throughout the ages,
relying on Aristotle, Columbus, Shakespeare, John Law, Marx, and Keynes, to name a few, in
these stimulating discussions. Although he writes in a scholarly style, Buchan his many
suspenseful and intriguing passages. ISBN 0374159092.
For some years now James Buchan has
been obsessed with money. Not obsessed with making money, however, but with understanding
"the strangeness of money" and making sense of the many meanings that money has
for people. His obsession led him to amass a huge collection of banknotes -- riyals and
dinars, dollars and marks, zlotys, rubles, rupees, shekels, sucres, pesos, francs, and
pounds; and it prompted him to write this brilliant and fascinating book.
In Buchan's
view, money is civilization's greatest invention. All manner of things can be called
money, and almost every culture has given money an ideal existence. Even so, Buchan points
out, "money, which we see and hold every day, is diabolically hard to comprehend in
words." It is this very elusiveness that is at the root of money's power to seduce.
As Buchan explains, money is "frozen desire" -- and because money can fulfill
any mortal purpose, for many people the pursuit of money becomes the point of life.
In a
learned and elegant survey, Buchan illuminates the many different views of money across
the centuries. Money was a subject in Homer and Herodotus. The Gospels glitter with money.
The New World was colonized by men in search of money. The Age of Faith was followed by
our present Age of Money, which, like the Age of Faith, is bound to end; and it was fear
of the end that led to widespread panic after the stock market crashed in 1929 and 1987.
"Men and women chase money as energetically as they chase one another," Buchan
points out. In Frozen Desire, the chase never fails to entertain. Whether or not money is
humanity's greatest invention, its meanings reveal a great deal about human nature; in
showing us what we think of money, James Buchan shows us who we are.
James Buchan's
other books include The Golden Plough (1995), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and
High Latitudes (1996). A former correspondent for the Financial Times, he lives in London. |
