CATLAND by Kathryn Hughes

This one’s an odd piece of non-fiction telling about about the famous cat illustrator Louis Wain and in parallel the slow evolution of cats into pets.

Some of it was interesting. First off, it is interesting to find out that while dogs were domesticated 25,000 years ago, cats were only 8,000, with the coming of agriculture. This is why they have so much less variety than dogs do. It was also interesting to learn that even into the early nineteenth century cats were not particularly loved; in fact, they were considered working animals, and had a reputation for cruelty. It was considered quite okay to torture them, apparently. It’s pretty stomach churning.

Side bar, on phosphorous. I knew that 180,000 mummified cats were found in Egypt, and shipped to England to be used as fertilizer in 1888. I always thought this was rather sacriligeous, but in this book I found out that in fact these cats were not especially special, but were kind of factory farmed to be sold to ancient Egyptian tourists!

After a while we got a bit becalmed in the history of cat illustration, so I gave up, but I’m still enjoyably bristling with cat-related facts

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME by Arundhati Roy

Here is a memoir about the author’s mother. To give you a flavour, let me tell you that the epigraph at the beginning is to the author’s brother: “For LKC: Together we made it to the shore.” Clearly a lot has gone on.

The opening is the author telling us that she wrote this book to deal with her grief, about which she is: ‘puzzled and more than a little ashamed.’

Her mother leaves her husband because he is an alcoholic, and ends up finding a way to go from teaching in one rented room to founding a whole school. It’s a titanic effort. Here is the author:

“It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I was a middle child, one of three siblings, not two. My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother’s favourite child was. She loved, fought for and protected her youngest child with everything she had. That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.”

Her mother can only be described as a real piece of work. Both her children ‘go no contact’ (as Reddit would say) for many years. But they can’t escape how much she formed them, and what she achieved for them, and they both get sucked back in. The book gets into the overall life of the author, which is interesting in its own way (who wins the Booker for their first novel?!?) but somehow lacks the immediacy of the parts about her mother. I wonder for how many people it’s true that their entire adult life has less emotional energy than their childhood

SECOND CLASS CITIZEN by Buchi Emecheta

Here is a semi-autobiographical novel about what it means to really be ‘self-made.’ The main character is born to a low income family in Nigeria, and with zero help (and some resistance) from them manages to get herself a scholarship to high school. This opens the door to university, which she can only attend if married (long story).

She graduates, gets a great job, and her husband moves to London to study. She follows him, with two of their children, and finds him overwhelmed in this new context. He struggles without his extended family, and with the racism, and deals with it by beating her. She gets another great job, while he ‘studies.’ He refuses to allow her to use birth control, despite them having no money, because according to him he can stop pregnancy with his mind. She ends up with five children by 23, and is still the only one with a job.

She eventually writes a novel, encouraged by her colleagues at the library. It’s the 60s, so its all in exercise books, and her husband BURNS IT. This is the moment where she breaks and leaves him. Two weeks later he hunts her down and nearly kills her.

This probably sounds pretty bleak, like it’s a story of domestic violence. But weirdly, this is not at all how it reads. I can only describe it as joyful? It is carried on so much by her energy and her optimism and her love of her children. It’s kind of a classic immigrant story about building your own life, and knowing you are beating the odds. Perspective truly is everything.

THE PIANO TEACHER by Elfriede Jelinek

This is a very sexual book, without being at all sexy. Did I enjoy it? I really have no idea. It’s a super-compressed super-heated story about a piano teacher (you may have guessed this from the title), who has been heavily controlled by her mother. Her adult student falls in love with her and they have creepy sex in a public toilet. She is a virgin but apparently has an active imaginary life where she is a big masochist. The student is surprised to put it mildly. The mother is not too happy about this new boyfriend, so, (spoiler alert) the teacher kind of sexually assaults the mother?!? In summary, it all goes on. I am just kind of surprised people have the time and energy for all this sexual mania. It’s set in Austria, and my theory is this is all down to the social safety net which means people have too much free time

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

LOVE’S WORK by Gillian Rose

The author wrote this memoir after her diagnosis with cancer at 46. She was dead by 48. It’s a highly compressed, painful read. She was a philospher, and you can tell. It’s not clear if this book is personal story or work of philosophy. Maybe all personal stories are works of philosphy, but not so clearly as this one. It’s remarkably dense:

“My journey to Auschwitz and east across Galicia to Belzec on the border of Ukraine did not affect me in the ways I had expected; it was the unexpected, rather, which provided the. nodes of enigma that compressed incompatible and uncomprehended meanings together.”

What?

Here is some rather beautiful lines from Swinburne. Let’s all think about death:

“From too much love of living,

From home and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no man lives for ever,

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

BLANK CANVAS by Grace Murray

Here is book about lesbians at art school. I am not sure why this sounds dismissive. The beginning was kind of fun, where a young woman lies to her acquaintances, saying her father is dead. It’s not totally clear why she does this, but I guess for attention or sympathy. Then thing went downhill. It is fashionable in modern novels to have protagonists who are apathetic and directionless, and this is unfortunately one of these novels. I just can’t. I just don’t know why I should care about your life if you don’t.

Side bar, the author is 22. Deal with that how you can.

CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O’Hagan

I liked the epigraph of this book, from RL Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

I also liked the first sentence: “Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.”

It sort of went dowhill after that, though I did managed about 400 pages. The idea of the book is cool, being a sort of state-of-the-nation, if the nation was North London. The main character is an author who married into the upper classes, though not unfortunately into money, who develops an unlikely friendship with a half-Ethopian student. And the word ‘unlikely’ here is kind of key. I liked the effort to show all London, from top to bottom, but I found half the characters unlikely (e.g., a poor student from an immigrant background goes to a cocktail bar ?!? has the author never been poor?), and the politics rather trite and poorly thought through. I guess the author is trying to say something about inequality, which is nice of him, but let’s do some research. For example, a news report is quoted as saying that ‘migrant children are doing worse than any other group in the UK,’ which is just factually untrue. I think it’s pretty well proven that the academic success of immigrants is why London has the beset school results in the country. ANYWAY.

EMMA by Jane Austen

I did this book for A-level, and so read it many times in adolesence. Perhaps as a result, I have not read it in about 30 years.  What I am struck by on this reading is how completely wrong Emma is on every level.  It is a much funnier novel than I recall, and much more damning of Emma.  It is not nearly so good as some of her others, but obviously still head and shoulders above 90% of all other books  GOD this lady was talented.

MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’  I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail. 

It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much.  He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’   Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran.  He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran.   Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country.  Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting.   Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair.