The evolution of American workers from sustaining retirement pensions to
unsustaining 401(k)s is one of the chapters in this book.
Lost in the mix, overshadowed by the glorious sky castle and by Operation Noah, were the 57,000 displaced Gwembe Tsonga, forcibly driven from the valley they had inhabited for centuries and dumped in distant, semi-arid terrain, amidst unfamiliar and
unsustaining ecologies.
In both, he inhabits a blighted, hostile and
unsustaining physical landscape.
Most immediately and obviously, Leiris's text suggests communist China to be an ultimately
unsustaining space for its author-narrator by implying that the maternal and erotic satisfactions he is granted in the Chinese realm prove limited, ephemeral, or disappointing.