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THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER 1864-1875 by William Finaughty

As always with these kinds of books one is just left stunned by how very much more wildness there used to be in the world. Try this:

We had scattered out, Mr Price being on my right, when he came racing along by the side of about 300 to 400 giraffe. It was a wonderful and beautiful sight. It seemed a pity to shoot them, but we bottled up sentiment and got five of them.

300-400 giraffe?!? I’ve never seen a group larger than about 10. I didn’t even know they would naturally herd in that size, because I guess there just aren’t enough of them alive to do so. He also at one point sees an elephant herd a MILE AND A HALF LONG. Even if he’s exaggerating, it’s still enormous.

I learnt a lot from this book, not least that older male giraffe do not make good eating, and so are colloquially known as ‘stinkbulls.’ It is sad to note the collapse of the ecosystem even in his lifetime. When he first came, he could shoot into a herd and elephants would not even run, they were so unused to bullets. After ten years, if you sounded a gun anywhere, you wouldn’t even see any elephants for days.

Apparently he went on to gold prospecting and gambling addiction. A full life.

SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila McDonald

If you are from London, you have many books about past life in your town. If you are from Harare, not so many, in part because Harare is just that little bit younger than London. This is a book created out of letters sent home by a young wife after moving to what was then Salisbury in 1909, shortly after the city’s founding.

I am struck by how very little seems to have changed. People are in and out of each other’s houses, without calling in advance; people take pride in not being thrown by accidents and emergencies (I am not quite Rhodesian yet, she confesses at one point, when she weeps after an unplanned 10 mile hike with a baby); and people love a little drink at sunset. ‘I’ll never think of Salisbury without the sundowners,’ she says, and 110 years on it’s still the case. Her mother, who she wrote the letters to, was obviously worried about her moving from England to the colonies, and the letters are remarkable for the enthusiasm with which she adopts her new country. I guess pioneers are self-selecting.

I was also very interested to learn that Rhodesian women were thought to be ‘fast.’ She assures us this is the wrong impression (sadly I agree). Apparently it comes form a book called VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS, which was a huge hit. I am naturally in hot pursuit of a copy to find out that hot 1900s goss

A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim

The review I first read about this book was illustrated with a photo of a young Asian woman holding the hand of a much older European man. The review spent much time discussing whether or not the book is revenge porn, and to my surprise the pornographer is in fact the young woman.

Basically, the guy was married, and had an affair with this lady, and this is the story of that affair. This is all sounds very salacious but in fact for a book with really a lot of sex in it, it is remarkably straightforward. There’s a lot of chat about what she wore, and when he did or not text her back. It was drafted in real-time, as the relationship was happening, which gives it an interesting kind of immediacy.

What I found especially interesting was what this lady did for a living, which, as far as I can tell, was nothing too much. She had previously been with another much older man, Malcolm McLaren, who she met when she was a student at Yale, and after his death (about which she is clearly heart-broken) she mostly curates his artistic legacy. She spends her year going between New York and various European capitals, having dinners, going to openings, and wearing designer shoes. I tried not to think the word ‘parasite,’ as of course that is uncharitable. I guess I like my artists starving.

One unfortunate sidepoint is a comment on the quality of a Yale education. She tells us (without shame!) that she has never paid for a first date, because that is not her ‘role.’ She also says she is not a feminist, because, get this, she ‘takes sexual equality for granted.’ What gibberish. Should have been whipped out of her freshman year.

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.

SUPER-INFINITE by Katherine Rundell

I don’t know why but somehow I took it into my mind to read this biography of Renaissance poet John Dunne. It was pretty interesting but extremely random. I found learning about the Renaissance pretty interesting, as for example, that they used to serve a roast pig with a roast chicken posed on top of it, dressed up as a jockey.

It was comforting to learn that despite being today regarded as a major poet, Dunne was in his time as confused as the rest of us. As he explained to his friend in a letter: “I would fain do something.” His problem was figuring out what. He fell madly in love with a rich girl who abandoned her family to be with him. She then spent her entire adult life pregnant, dying in her twelfth childbed at age thirty-three. As I so often reflect in reading about history, THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Interestingly Dunne often wrote his poems in letters to his friends, and did not keep copies. They poems only survive because they were copied by others, and handed around. He had no way of knowing how popular they were. It is quite possible that some of the ones that are most famous today he had already forgotten about in his own lifetime. He eventually went into the church, becoming a famous speaker, with 6,000 people (!) coming to see him at St Paul’s.

Particularly impressive was how he handled his death. As he lay dying, he not only gave instructions for the carving he wanted on his tomb (him, wrapped in his own winding sheet); but also got out of bed and got into his winding sheet, so the artist could sketch it and take his comment. It still stands in Westminster Abbey, being one of the few that survived the Great Fire of London a hundred years later.

STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide

A mystifying and annoying book which for some reason is very famous. Basically this guy and his first cousin fall in love as teenagers. He has to go away to travel and study, while she stays at home (because, gender). They embark on a long correspondence. Over time she gets more and more religious, and somehow convinces herself that what she really needs to do is sacrifice his love for her so he can more fully love god. And apparently the sacrifice is only good if she does not tell him what she is doing. I mean: there are a lot of weird issues here from this lady. Though the guy needs to take some responsibility, because this nonsense goes on for YEARS. Doesn’t he have any friends to tell him he needs to block her number? (Metaphorically only, as it is 1909). Eventually she goes off to die poetically in a sanatorium. So dumb.

Apparently the real Gide married his cousin after an eleven-year courtship. Apparently also he was a self-confessed ‘pederast’ and eventually ran away from her when he was 47 with a 15 year old boy (!!), at which point she burnt all his letters (that he called ‘the best part of me’). In the novel, his travels take him to North Africa, from where he writes to her of his love. In real life, this is where we know he discovered his really gross interest in young boys. I didn’t like this book, but I can see that it has a weird kind of emotional charge. I think it is because it is telling one messed-up story to cover the much more messed-up story that is actually going on.

LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham

I REALLY loved this one. I have already recommended it to about five people, none of whom seem enthused. It is the real dairies that the author kept as a 19 year old in London during WWII. They brought her huge fame when published in the 1980s, after her granddaughter found them in her attic.

Part of the interest is a day-by-day account of what it was like to live in London during the war. But, curiously, that’s not really most of what it focuses on. She’s a 19 year old girl, so mostly it’s focused on BOYS. She is desperate to lose her virginity, and then when she does, desperate to have an orgasm (takes 4-5 boys, all of whom we learn about). She is very jealous of her friend, who claims she can have one just by leaning on a railing (!) I don’t know what I thought a diary by a wealthy teenage girl in the 1940s was going to be like, but I did not expect it to include the taste of semen (bitter almond, in her opinion)

There is also something exceedingly touching about hearing about someone’s daily life long ago in a city you currently live in. One night, for example, just before the Blitz begins she tell us they: “climbed the hill that looks over Highgate and lay in deck chairs at the top, smoking in the moonlight.”

Or once, when she is with her friend they see an old man on that street

“Dorothea said, ‘That is Professor Freud.’ Back to Chelsea in a tube like an oven.”

Living in Chelsea she meets many artists – Julian McLaren Ross (read his OF LOVE AND HUNGER here), Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas, who gropes her. She volunteers for the WAAF, where she has a job tracking planes. She meets a man who has managed to get out of Poland, and, awfully, no one believes him when he tells them about the concentration camps, thinking it is too dreadful to possibly be true.

I find in writing this summary I struggle to capture what I loved in this book so much. I think it is partly the dailyness of it (cold peas for supper!) and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, who seems to find so much to enjoy in those days.

SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King

This is an imagination of what would happen if a vampire moved into a small town in New England. It’s was fun and very easy-reading, but I find I kind of forgot about it seconds after reading it. It’s King’s second novel, after CARRIE, which is a book that I find I often still think of even years later. I guess it’s because there are tons of vampire stories, but not too many about period-power. Though curiously both involve a lot of blood 🙂

DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald

This book of personal essays was reviewed rapturously in the New York Times. I did not quite get it. You don’t need to have had an ‘interesting’ life to write interesting essays about that life. But this is not his problem – Fitzgerald does seem to have had an interesting life : Catholicism, bar work, porn work. And yet the essays were, for me at least, rather vanilla. It’s hard for me to imagine how you write a tame essay about your time in porn, but there you go, seems to have been done. I guess others loved this book, but it wasn’t for me.

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn. It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub. You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting. This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story. Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country – might be being staged for her benefit. Things get weirder from there. It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice.

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny. For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.” It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession. At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again. The lesson being:

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”

I like this.