THE WRECK OF THE MENTOR by Eric Jay Dolin

I am just massively into shipwreck non-fiction. Who knew. This one is not so much about the shipwreck, which happened in Palau in 1832, but more about what happened after: I’m sorry to tell you the survivors were enslaved. The island was struggling with food insecurity (unclear why) so they weren’t fed very much, but they sure were tatoo-ed a whole hell of a lot. Eventually they were rescued.

Two things I found interesting. One, the Europeans conclude that the locals must have met Europeans before, because they know exactly what they want to get from the wreck: iron. I found this fascinating. I was obssessed with THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS, where I learnt that one of the most important advantages the Spanish had was iron (armour, swords, etc). It’s interesting now we don’t really think of it as ‘precious.’

Two, and this really blew my mind: apparently the whole South Pacific was just absolutely bristling with Robinson Crusoes. I always thought that lone shipwreck survivors were a rarity, but apparently not! Even more interestingly, quite a lot of them had actually chosen to stay on the islands. I guess I can kind of see it – you’re a 14 year old from Glasgow pressed into service as a cabin boy; I can well imagine a tropical paradise dripping with coconuts looks like a pretty good option.

Enjoy this vignette, of someone the enslaved men meet in Palau:

“The old man, who was entirely naked and barely five feet tall, walked briskly with an upright, almost regal bearing, “indicating that he felt himself a person of not a little importance.” He looked to be around sixty years old, with long gray hair, and tatoos covering his legs, arms, and breast. He had no teeth, and his very dark red, almost black, mouth – the result of chewing betel nuts incessantly – appeared like a void in his head. While the whalemen were trying to figure out who this specter was, he exclaimed, “My God, you are Englishmen, are you not?” Barnard quickly corrected him, and then the old man asked: “What year of the Lord is it?””

CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggars

I spent the first 150 pages of this book mildly bored and the last 250 entranced.   The last 250 I read straight through, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, which raises the worrying idea that the quality of my attention is what is driving my perception of the quality of the book. 

On the plot level, this is a book about a boy and girl who get to know each other in high school and are friends (and sometimes lovers) for the rest of their long lives.  On another level, it is a book about what artistic success means.  The girl is extremely career focused, and is a  big success as a curator.  The boy loves to draw, and while he would like to make a big success as an artist, he just doesn’t want it enough to do the non-drawing leg work this requires, such as e.g., making ‘contacts,’ creating things because they are ‘saleable,’ and etc.  He often does not draw for long periods, and she gets very frustrated with him, especially when he, in her view, ‘checks out’ by moving to Thailand. It was an interesting way of thinking about what your life is really for, and what it’s worth spending your time on.

Rather touchingly, he dedicates the book to those friends of his he’s had for ‘forty or fifty years.’  I’ve passed thirty years with some. I hope I get to fifty with them all.  

CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING by Dorothy Baker

This book comes draped with reviews calling it a modern American classic.  I wasn’t feeling it.  It tells about a woman who goes to her twin sister’s wedding, and once there tries to commit suicide, because she is so unhappy about being left alone.

I don’t know what to tell you, I just found it kind of – meh.  I think I am just tired of books about people being so tortured all the time.  Stop drinking so much and go to therapy for god’s sake. 

SKIN CONTACT by Elisa Faison

Here is a book about a woman who pushes her husband to open their marriage.   It had some funny bits, like: “Her face was smooth and shiny in the right places, like she hadn’t put on any face makeup or like she knew the best makeup to buy.”   But mostly I wasn’t so much into it.  This is partly because I am not sure I can relate to all the negotiating about sex, but more because I couldn’t relate to the whole world.  The main character is in her early thirties, and there is a lot about how she misses her life with her friends in college.  Back then, she says, they were “around each other’s apartments all the time, and it never felt like a special occasion or anything.  We wouldn’t wash our hair before getting together.”  I mean who are these people in their thirties who only go to their friend’s houses on special occasions?  And feel they have to wash their hair first?!  Sounds exceedingly lonely. 

Also strange was how worried she is about getting older.  One thing driving her desire to open her marriage is how she is depressed by no longer being the focus of male interest, now she is so old, which is – wait for it – 32.  Honestly I can only conclude that some womens’ appearance really meant a lot to them in their early life.  I am much older than her and this has never worried me once.  Maybe I was just really ugly in my twenties?

LONDON FALLING by Patrick Radden Keefe

I previously read this author’s EMPIRE OF PAIN, an excellent and depressing overview of the corruption in medicine and law that drove the opiod epidemic.  Here we’re on corruption again, this time in London.

It starts with an apparent suicide.  A 19 year old man is captured on CCTV jumping off a 5th floor balcony into the Thames.  He’s from a fairly wealthy English family, and as his horrified parents look into what happened to him, they discover that he has LOTS OF SPOILER COMING being pretending to be a Russian oligarch’s son.  He’d been to school with lots of wealthy Russians, (this being right off the fall of the USSR), spent too much time on Instagram, and I guess gotten the idea that  he needed to get rich fast.  He was a pretty successful conman, sucking in some wealthy businessmen, with the only problem being they were themselves conmen.  They were, unfortunatley for him, in reality gangsters looking to wring some protection money out of an oligarch’s son.   

I was surprised to learn how much gangster activity there is in London.  But that was only by-the-by. What was really surprising, and depressing, was to learn how deep Russian corruption ran in London.  Or possibly still runs.  I knew London was laundering Russian money, but I did not realize the huge number of ‘suicides’ and ‘accidents’ that came with that.  And that they largely went (or go?) almost totally unexamined by the British police.  This poor young man was caught up in that. The Met interviews almost no one.  The Met doesn’t bother to visit the building for a week after the body is found.  The Met accepts that that the gangster ‘doesn’t know’ what he meant by texting an associate that he HEATING UP THE KNIVES right before the young man jumps. (This despite in other court cases it was entered into the record that this particular gangster was well known to torture people with heated kitchen knives).  Anyway, I can’t get into it all.  I’ll give it this tribute: it did change the way this Londoner thinks about London

POOL HOUSE by Mary HK Choi

In this book a woman is unhealthily obsessed with her mother.  Her mother meanwhile is unhealthily obsessed with her career in Hollywood.  There is also a surrogate son character who is just generally unhealthy.  I found this to be a quick-moving interesting read, but I can feel myself already forgetting it.  I think it’s because everyone in it is so unendingly miserable.  At some point towards the end there is like a rising arc, where you start to think we might get some kind of evolution or at least insight but then LOL no, how can you be so naïve, there is no escape! Everyone is just as unhealthy as they were before

I just found this dumb.  We eyeroll romances because everyone is so beautiful and happy, which is kind of silly.  This I found a bit silly too, just in the opposite direction, towards ugliness and despair.   

THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER – I KNOW MY OWN HEART ed by Helena Whitbread

Now here are the diaries of a 18th century lesbian. I don’t know what I thought was going on back then, but DAMN. Charmingly, they were discovered by a PhD student who was looking for a subject in her home town of Halifax, so she would not need to travel too much. She was reading the letters of Anne Lister, and then (as she put it) the librarian changed the next decade of her life with seven words: “Did you know she had a diary?”

The diary, which in total runs to five million words, was half in a code that Lister invented. The family had the key to the code, but had suppressed it these two hundred years, because what that coded stuff was about was super gay. It is charming, and it is also sad.

The charming part is how she keeps falling in love with everyone. Here she is when a woman responds to her complimenting her bonnet:

“She seemed pleased, saying she thought I did not notice such things as these. I said no, not in general. Some people might have sacks about their heads & I not know, but there were some whose ribands I could count over the last seven years.”

She is also constantly swearing off love. Just like people centuries later, she keeps being “determined to devote myself soley to study,” and then not three days later falling in love again. The sad part is that she is actually in a long distance committed relationship with a woman called Mariana. It’s long distance, because at the time of the diaries, Mariana has gotten married (for the money) but this does not stop the women from considering themselves a couple. To give you a sense of all what goes on, let me just say Mariana gives Anne an STD (called ‘the whites’) which Anne then gives to her hookup Isabella (who btw is a bottle-of-wine-a-day drinker). There’s a lot of ‘treating’ herself by injecting herself with pepper.

One also learns a lot about the eighteenth century, not least how horrible the food is. Try this sample: “My aunt’s bowels being far from well, & myself very bilious, we had minced veal (white) & a light batter pudding with a lump of preserved apricot on top”

Probably what I most liked about the book is the intimacy. She really tells you her truth. As she puts it: “What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself & throw the burden on my book & feel relieved”

There are lots of moments when you feel her touching you across time. Like this one: “They are clearing my room that I am sitting alone in the drawing-room . . . I feel rather low. I must turn my mind into another train of thought.”

She had ambition to be a writer, but unfortunately died of a fever while on holiday in Russia at 50. Strange to think she has achieved a certain kind of fame anyway. I’ll try and stop now, because this woman’s life was very interesting. I recommend you wikipedia her, I haven’t even got into her first love who was a mixed race girl who ended up in an insane asylum, or the scraping her teeth with a pen knife for a half hour at at time, or the non-binaryness, or the electrifying machine experimentation –

SONS AND DAUGHTERS by Chaim Grade

Here are 700 pages on Jewish life in Poland. The cover tells me it’s considered the last great Yiddish novel. It has a plot, kind of, or more like multiple plots, not all of which overlap. It also has a truly vast array of characters. Particularly I noted how much he liked to describe people, even minor ones. And then I realized we were in the 1930s, and started to wonder: is the description of the people the point of the book?

The introduction tells me this is indeed the case. This poor guy grew up in 1930s Vilna, where there were 70,000 Jews. After the war, there were only a few hundred. He was extremely fortunate to escape, and when he returned I’m sorry to tell you he found his mother and first wife were in the same mass grave. Here he is in a letter to friend:

“I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great that generation that I knew”

It was an odd book. At first it was kind of boring, I kept thinking I was going to quit, but the more I got into it, the more I got into it. I felt kind of bereft once it was over, and really weirdly close to Polish Jews of the1930s. I guess that was his goal. For what it’s worth, they live for me.

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather

This is Cather’s alleged masterpiece. I am a huge fan of the much less famous MY ANTONIA, so thought I would give it a try. I can’t decide how I feel about it. Despite it being only about 250 pages, I kept almost giving up. Weeks later though, I am finding it has strangely stuck with me.

It tells about the struggles of two French priests, sent to Mexico (or New Mexico? I am not sure) in the late 1800s to manage an immense Catholic diocese. After the Spanish left, Catholicism managed to survive there on its own for multiple generations, without any additional reinforcement, developing its own rituals and apocrypha. I find it fascinating to see how the basic ideas of a religion are powerful enough across continents and centuries to keep people engaged, even if they only have a very short introduction to it. The priests were tasked with bringing this wild growing version of Catholicism back in line.

The book is a series of very short but very beautiful vignettes, moving back and forth in time from when the priests are young men, and decide to leave France for Mexico, through long mule rides across mountains, to building cathedrals, to rescuing women from abusive relationships, and finally on to death. It’s packed with incident and yet really I can’t tell you what I think it is about. I didn’t enjoy it, but perhaps I agree it is her masterpiece.