STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST by Erin Somers

It is never a good idea to like a book so much that you immediately buy another one by the same author. It never works out. I know this, but oh well.  This author wrote THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR, which I very much liked, and being desperate and on vacation I decided to read her other book, her first, STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST. 

I am utterly, utterly confused by the morality of this book.  It tells about a 30 year old aspiring comedian who is trapped doing a menial receptionist job at the late night talk show of an older comedian she very much admires.  The show gets cancelled, and he invites her to spend the weekend at his home.  Creepily, she agrees; but she seems weirdly checked out from the whole experience. Like, if you are going to sleep your way to the top, at least being enthusiastically trying to get to the top.  Or agonise about it. Or do something.  I really can’t stand these books where the protagonist does not care about their own life.  At the end she has generally transactional sex with the old guy, and he says: “was it everything you dreamed of?” Maybe I’m naïve but it was gross.  I think I’d rather be naïve than whatever this is.

However it did have fun parts.  How is this:

I watched a young woman shelve cough syrup for a while.  She seemed calm, sapced out, like she was on the cough syrup herself. It was the same look I’d seen on the face of the shopgirl the night before.  Boredom so total it delivered you to the astral plane.  I knew the feeling from my agent’s assistant days, my audience page days, my receptionist days.  You could function in that zone. Answer the phone or take an inventory of the supply closet . . . Meanwhile your brain made the connecting sound of the early internet and played a video of a dog you’d never laid eyes on running through a field.

God this takes me back to temping!

LILIANA’S INVINCIBLE SUMMER by Cristina Rivera Garza

This book is sub-titled ‘A Sister’s Search for Justice,’ and I’ll tell you right now she does not find it.  Her sister was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in the 1990s, and the Mexican state has made approximately zero headway in finding him.   In any case, I do not think that is what this book is about and I suspect it was sub-titled by the Marketing Dept.  What it really is, is the author with the distance of thirty years trying to re-create the last summer of her sister’s life. 

She goes through her letters and diaries, and she interviews her friends.  It is extremely beautiful, a close reconstruction of few months in the life of an ordinary university student thirty years ago.    In fact she focuses very little on the murderer.  I did note though how the relationship had all the hallmarks of domestic violence (suicide threats, stalking, etc); but I guess in the ‘90s no one had the language/structures to identify that .  No one helped her; she did not seem to think she needed help. I hope now the culture would do better at identifying early that she was in a dangerous pattern.  In any case, it’s too late now.  I found this epigraph very beautiful.

“They, like us, are alive in

hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon,

in phosphrous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine”

(Christina Sharpe)

She won the Pulitzer. It’s a lovely tribute. She feels guilty it took her thirty years to do it, but I admire her courage; I can’t imagine opening those letters, even with many more years distance. 

THE SHELTERING DESERT by Henno Martin

I always like to read a book from the country I’m visiting, so here is a piece of non-fiction telling about the author’s two years he spent hiding in the Namib desert 1940-1941.  He went with a friend/lover(?).  He claims the goal was to avoid internment by the Namibian authorities as an enemy national (as they were Germans) but I have the strong suspicion they also thought it would be kind of baller.

They drive out in a truck, and have some supplies, so at the beginning it was easy.  They did have to give up their rifles to the police when war began, and came to regret this a lot, as apparently it is very difficult to shoot something at a distance with a handgun.  There first Christmas was pretty good, but here is their second:

“We allowed ourselves a double portion of maize, and we made it tastier with a teaspoonful of sugar that we managed to shake out of the fabric of our long-empty sugar sack. And then we heated all our empty dripping tins and collected about two teaspoonfuls of fat. It was rancid, but to us, who had eaten nothing but fatless zebra meat for a couple of weeks, it tasted wonderful.”

And he’s underselling the zebra part. One time they are so hungry that after they manage to shoot it they don’t even wait to cook it and just eat some raw. 

They do have a wireless, and so are able to listen to classical music, and to the progress of this “lunatic war,’ as he called it.  Apparently they had left Germany for Namibia in the late thirties, even before war broke out, as they could see it coming and wanted no part of it. I find this cool. Talk about just opting out, even if it ends in raw zebra.

Some of the book I skipped, I have to admit, as it was long discussions between him and his friend on various philosophical topics. I recall this from another African book, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM.  Clearly desert and prison are not too different and you don’t have much to do other than philosophize.

Eventually his friend gets beri-beri, so they have to go and hand themselves in.  They are fined but not interned (after all that!).  He ends the book with a rather sad coda, telling how his friend died in a car accident.  Wikipedia tells me he was an alcoholic who suffered from depression who likely drove himself off a bridge intentionally.  Also very sadly, he reflects on how much less wildlife there already is, ten years later.  He notes: “no man will ever again see a head of four thousand springboks in the neighbourhood’.  I had wondered about this myself; driving through the Namib I did not see anything like this.   It’s sad how an apparently wild environment is already so degraded by us.  Of course if we enter WW3, as we seem on course to do, maybe they will have a rebound

THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR by Erin Somers

I really enjoyed this one, as have many others – it is on many ‘Book Of They Year’ lists.  It tells about a woman living in the suburbs outside New York who has an affair, first imaginary, and then real.  It’s generally very funny, but also rather sad.  Saying ‘it’s about an affair,’ might make you think it’s some kind of tragic love story, but in fact it’s more about boredom and mortality. 

There is a lot of angst about having decided to leave the city for upstate New York: “People back in Brooklyn thought you were Henry David Thoreau, but then they came to visit and saw that you lived in a vinyl-siding house.  It was only rustic in that you could not get good Thai food.”

There’s also career angst.  The main character, Cora, has a dull job, having downgraded her ambition around network television after an internship showed her how much work it was:

“To do something you believed in or enjoyed, you had to throw yourself at it like Eliot or Jules. Cora’s mom had envisioned her as a no-nonsense lady, like Barbara Walters or Gayle King. It had hurt her to learn that Cora was, in fact, nonsense.”

And then comes the affair partner, who when she first sees him she notes: “He wore socks printed with fir trees and a chambray shirt.  His jeans were only mildly terrible.”

This jeans comment really makes me lol. This is indeed the low bar straight women accept from straight men.  So much of the story is about the imaginary affair that when the real affair happens, it is inevitably something of a let down.  I really liked this, as a commentary on the actual affair:  “The shabbiness of real life.  You had to admire its consistency”

It is kind of interesting how the affair does not seem to affect her love for her husband. It’s more her working through her own feelings of emptiness.  I note again, just like SO YOUNG, SO OLD, that friendships are once again presented as difficult and superficial.  I don’t know if that’s just what happens to youwhen you move to the subrubs, but I’m not about ot find out. 

Once the affair is real, the imaginary life becomes one where she has a third child with her husband. I like this line, from an acquaintance, when she decided not to have the child partly because she fears what it will do to her body:

“Your body is going to a grave, said the woman.  To a landfill.  It’s a single-use item.  You might as well wreck it.” 

A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR by Elizabeth Taylor

I love Elizabeth Taylor’s books usually.  MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT was one of my favourite books of recent years.   So I was surprised to find that this one just sucked.  I need to google it and find out: was it maybe her first book? Or her last?  Or perhaps I just didn’t like the subject matter? It was a rather bleak story about a community in a fading seaside town.  Lots of moaning about how the ‘funfair doesn’t come anymore’.  I mean JUST LEAVE THEN GOOD GOD.  Other people be parading half-way round the world I think you can get off your asses and go to Milton Keyes.  The other annoyance was that one major strand was about a couple having a very dramatic affair.  JUST GET DIVORCED FOR GOD’S SAKE IF YOU’RE THAT UNHAPPY. 

THE CLAW by Cynthia Stockley

Here is some pulp fiction from 1890s Africa! This is not a sentence you write every day. It is by Cynthia Stockley, whose VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS I just read. I’d never heard of her, but she was a very successful Zimbabwean novelist of the nineteenth century, whose books got made into many silent films.

The story is straight up romantic melodrama, but I enjoyed it in anyway.  Partly this is because is strong on plot, as melodrama must be.  Partly because it is funny, which melodrama usually is not.  At one point she is telling us about the very un-funny plan the white men are making to go and destroy Lobengula’s kraal.  But here’s the elderly doctor, refusing to go: “He was not looking for any Lobengulas, he said. He had not lost any Matabele impis, so why should he go and search for them?”

But mostly I enjoyed it for a rare chance to learn about life in Zimbabwe in this period, by someone who was there.  It all goes on: using anthills as ovens; marching once boots run out with your feet stuffed into wallets; and etc.  I was struck by how the white Zimbabwean culture of that time seems pretty continuous with this one.  There is still today a similar frontier spirit, I think, and a love of country. There are lots of sections dedicated to the beauty of the veldt, which if you are sad can make you happy, and if you are happy can make you sad.   The ‘claw’ of the title is the claw of Africa, that would not let the main character (an American girl) leave, because she loved the place too much. Also very Zimbawean is that she never uses the term home (for either America or Zimbabwe) without quote marks around it. For some reason that really struck me. 

MAURICE AND MARALYN by Sophie Elmhirst

Called A MARRIAGE AT SEA in the US, not sure why in the UK it has this name, this is the true story of a couple who spent 117 days in a lifeboat after their sail boat went down.

Lots of SPOILERS.  The husband was a pretty rigid and eccentric character, and was fairly lonely till his late thirties, where he met his wife, who was ten years younger.  They did not come from money and saved hard to have the chance to go on an epic sailing trip.  They made it across the Atlantic okay, but in the Pacific, a few days away from the Galapagos, a dying whale sank their ship.  They scrambled onto the lifeboat with what they could, and Maralyn (the wife) took a photo of the tip of its sail as it went down.

Then began 117 days. They saw 8 ships, none of who saw them, before they were rescued. They got through their food in 20 days, and then started on what they could catch.  They fished with safety pins, and caught turtles and sharks (!) with their bare hands.  They sometimes caught birds too, and ate not just the birds but the fish the birds vomited back up.  They were thirsty enough to think fish eyes were delicious water source.  Hardest of all was the despair.  Maurice was willing to give up, but Maralyn insisted they would live.  Towards the end the raft started deflating, so they had to pump it back up EVERY HALF HOUR.  They were near death (and I’m talking pressure sores that reached to the bone) when a South Korean ship rescued them. 

They are (get this) eager to get back on the water again and use the money they make from selling their story to buy another boat and sail on.  Eventually though they run out of money and are forced to go home.  I felt bad for them that YouTube was not invented yet.  They would have raked it in.  They are less happy on land, but still extraordinarily happy together, until Maralyn dies at 61.  Maurice is bereft. 

Bizarrely, the author begins the ending of the book with this:

“There are many ways to take the measure of a life.  In the linear version, Maurice’s life had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, an isolated end”

Yikes.  Imagine thinking it’s your business to take the measure of a life.  What does that even mean?  Luckily she takes a steer from Maurice, from his self-published autobiography (which, charmingly, only begins on the day he meets Maralyn), where he says:

“Although I am wary of accepted truths, I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”

So she concludes with the idea that you could “measure (a life’s) success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.  On that count, his life had been a triumph”