2011 - Page 10 of 12 -

I DREAMED OF AFRICA by Kuki Gallmann

This book recounts the author’s life in Kenya. Originally from Italy, she had always been fascinated by Africa, and eventually moved there with her second husband, buying a large ranch on which they kept cattle and provided a safe haven for wildlife.

She provides an interesting picture of Kenya in the 70s and 80s, at the tail end of the Happy Valley period, and includes many accounts of her intimate experience with African wildlife. The heart of the book however is her various bereavements. Her husband is killed in a car crash, and then a few years later, her son, an amateur herpetologist, is killed by a puff adder. Their funerals are minutely recorded, as are those of two or three of her friends.

Now, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.

I think I may have a heart of stone.

Great suffering does not necessarily make a great novel. Heartfelt sincerity, while important, is not all you need. (Oscar Wilde: “All bad poetry is sincere.” Ouch)

Now, before you start hating me in the Comments, let me give you an extract, and you hand on heart try and tell me that this is not dreadful:

There, on the extreme edge of the Great Rift Valley, guarding the gorge, grows an acacia tree bent by timeless winds. That tree is my friend, and we are sisters. I rest against its trunk, scaly and grey like a wise old elephant. I look up through the branches, twisted arms spread in a silent dance, to the sky of Africa . . . A last eagle flies majestically back to nest on steep cliffs.

Clearly, while she may have dreamed of Africa, she did not dream of writing without cliché.

In the interests of fairness, I should say it is very readable, especially if you skip the funerals. I couldn’t sleep last night, and polished off about 200 pages from 1am.

I admire the lady, who has a genuine and inspiring love for the Kenyan landscape, and has had a genuinely terrible time; but I just cannot admire the writer.

BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON

This is a book I have been meaning to read for some time. It’s one of those books one ought to read. So, I’ve read it. Alright, most of it. I had to give up. And I feel terribly guilty. How charming is this, from the Preface, obviously written by a much better person than me:

Loyal Johnsonians may look upon such a book (the abridged ‘Life’) with a measure of scorn. I could not have made it, had I not believed that it would be the means of drawing new readers to Boswell, and eventually of finding for them in the complete work what many have already found – days and years of growing enlightenment and happy companionship, and an innocent refuge from the cares and perturbations of life. (Princeton, June 28, 1917)

Dr Johnson’s fame rests primarily on the fact that he wrote the first English dictionary. In other countries this was apparently the work of entire institutes, not just one man, so this is no small achievement. Dr Johnson was apparently a great conversationalist, and was much admired across eighteenth century London. And by nobody was he more admired than Boswell, who set himself, after every night out, to recall Johnson’s words and set them down. On the one hand, I found this a bit bizarre and stalkerish. On the other, there’s something touching, and not at all contemporary, about so unashamedly and entirely admiring someone. So we learn a lot about Johnson’s opinions. Here’s one I really feel:

When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.

Or:

Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. ‘I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terror to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, if you do thus, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers or sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there’s an end on’t; whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.

I got a good way through the book, but eventually I got bored and had to give up. There were large sections that seemed obscure and eighteenth century, and I constantly felt like I was missing the point. Also, it had no shape. Like real life, it had no plot, no structure or meaning, and I don’t read books to spend more time in real life, but less.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD by Thomas Hardy

I’ve been having some trouble sleeping so am often awake from 3 am for a bit, and was the other night. At some point one does have to read FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, and I guess this was my point.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD tells the story of one Gabriel Oak, a shepherd who has managed to take out a loan to get his own flock and some land. He asks a local young lady, Bathsheba, to marry him. She refuses. Some time after this his young dog in an excess of zeal keeps chasing the sheep till he forces them over a cliff.

George’s son (the dog) had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day – another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Gabriel is thus destitute again, as all his investment, the fruit of ten years work, is wiped out. This all happens before page 33. I was not surprised. I know very well not to trust Hardy, his books are hectic. He will crush you soon as look at you. I learnt this from reading JUDE THE OBSCURE, and I won’t give away the plot, but suffice to say, don’t get too attached to the children.

Anyway, Bathsheba has inherited a farm, and employs Gabriel, much to his chagrin. She marries a certain Sgt Troy who is irritatingly obviously going to be trouble, and he is, eventually faking his own death after his pregnant ex-girlfriend appears and dies of starvation on the doorstep. When he resurrects himself Bathsheba’s new boyfriend shoots him dead, and goes to jail himself. Enter Gabriel, and a happy ending.

So a story not lacking in drama, much of it stupid. However it was entertaining, and there is a supporting cast of yokels which is hilariously well written. Also, Hardy as a philosopher has much to say that is of interest – I enjoyed this, on Gabriel after his loss:

He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. . . . . There was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of aman, is the basis of his sublimity if it does not. And thus the abasement had been exultation, and the loss gain.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE by W. Somerset Maugham

I love Maugham’s book OF HUMAN BONDAGE, so I was excited to find this in my cousin’s bookcase.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE is very loosely inspired by the life of the nineteenth century painter Paul Gauguin. It tells the story of one Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children and runs away to Paris. Everyone assumes he is in love with another woman, but in fact he is in love with oil painting. This is met with general boggling by all his acquaintance.

He paints furiously while in Paris, and almost dies of starvation there. He eventually takes a passage working on a ship going east. When he finds Tahiti, he feels himself at last at home, moves in with a local woman, and continues to paint furiously till he dies of leprosy.

This book is quite interesting in terms of considering what qualifies as a worthwhile goal for your life, and in terms of what it means if your goal is not one that anyone else understands:

Each one of us is alone in the world….We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house

So interesting, but, I thought, a little trite. The above is sort of like OF HUMAN BONDAGE, but on a bad day.

It also all seems to be written by W Somerset Misogynist. It’s only 217 pages, but manages all sorts of unexpected and distasteful discussions of his early twentieth century views on gender:

When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uppermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account – book.

Now, I never knew I could use my trusty account-book for encircling unwary souls! My small mind shall get right on that.

I am not surprised this has all come out in a book on Gauguin. I never liked those pictures of women he made, who all just stare out at you, half-naked, as if they had a secret and mysterious message, that message being BOOBS.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje

Honestly, I wanted to like this book. I wanted to so much that I forced myself all the way up to page 125, before I just had to give up.

It is focused on a villa in Italy in the aftermath of the second World War in which live a group of shell-shocked characters: a severely burnt pilot, his nurse, a sapper who is in love with the nurse, and an ex-spy, with no thumbs, who is also in love with the nurse. Could be interesting, right? Sounds like the bare bones of a good movie, right?

OH IT IS SO POETIC I WANT TO PUKE. I was worried right from the get go, because there are a lot of prepositions, which in my experience is always a bad sign. So it begins: “She stands up in the garden . . . ” then “She has sensed a shift . . ” “Every four days she washes his black body.”

Mr Ondaatje likes a literary flourish. Let me just give you the first and last lines of a couple of sections, chosen quite at random.

“. . . her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”
“This cools her and she likes it when she goes outside and the breezes hit her, erasing the thunder.”
“Someday there would be a bower of green limes, rooms of green light.”

I know this novel won the Booker, and all that, but I can barely choose a paragraph at random without being irritated. Homicidal, actually, by page 125.

LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND SON by V.S Naipaul

I don’t know much about VS Naipaul, beyond his A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, which is a wonderful novel. It’s set in Trinidad, and the book’s so good that ridiculously, I now feel whenever I hear about Trinidad that I have some kind of personal relationship with it.

LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND SON is made up of correspondence between VS Naipaul, his father and his sister, written during the period after he left Trinidad for Oxford University. There is much discussion of the prosaic – money movements, sending socks, and so forth; but also much discussion about writing – the father has literary ambitions, and encourages his son endlessly; and many heart-to-hearts, especially at the end when ‘Pa’ dies unexpectedly.

There was a lot I could relate to in these letters. I also left a developing country for a developed one, and the attempt to reconcile these worlds, the apologies for not writing, the death of pets and passage of time were really quite touching.

I actually felt quite sorry for VS Naipaul, or Vidia, as his family call him. He seemed to me to struggling with some very serious mental colonisation. For example, hilariously, he is all ready for the beauty of an English autumn! Clearly, he has done a lot of reading Keats (here for his Ode on that season), and not a whole lot of waiting on an open platform for the 4.52 to Charing Cross.

He is entirely convinced that in escaping Trinidad he has made a great escape, from a place which is self-evidently less interesting and less worthy of notice than wonderful, wonderful England. And yet, at the same time, what is he constantly writing fiction about? That terrible, boring place, Trinidad. And he doesn’t seem to see any contradiction there.

A very sad strand in these letters is the desire of Vidia’s father to become an author. Vidia is very close to his father, and we learn a lot about this. Pa is hampered by a lack of time, as he has to work constantly to support his many children. (VS does not come off at all well in this respect, as he writes very pointedly to his mother after his father’s death, telling her to tell his younger sister to not to have too many children! As if his poor mother was having them all by herself, asexually, like an amoeba)

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is in fact apparently a version of the story of his father’s life, and I find it rather sad that that should be Naipaul’s masterpiece in the end. Immediately after Pa’s death, he writes to his sister, saying:

In a way I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his – a continuation which, I hoped, would also be a fulfillment. It still is; but I have to abandon the idea of growing older in Pa’s company; and I have to get the strength to stand alone. I only wish I have half Pa’s bravery and fortitude.

Indeed it seems that for many A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is the book on which his reputation rests. IN A FREE STATE I believe won the Booker (but let’s face it, that was also won by the wretched FINKLER QUESTION), and I don’t believe we need to know any more about the literary quality of that book than that large sections of it are set in ‘an unnamed African country.’ Because obviously all of Africa is pretty much the same.

Mr Naipaul, take a tip from Mr Marley: Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds!

CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? By Anthony Trollope

This is the first novel I have read on my new Kindle. I feel weird about it. I am, proudly, a late adopter of technology, and here I am leaping in to the e-book.

I didn’t have much choice. I have moved to Kenya, where there are not really a great many bookstores or libraries, and I felt a probably unhealthy degree of fear at the prospect of running out of things to read. Let’s be serious, we definitely don’t want to be left to our own thoughts.

So I bought a Kindle and it’s already got ten books on it, and took up no space at all in my luggage.

This is a good thing, as Trollope’s CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? is an impressive 900+ pages. Stephen King apparently christened it CAN YOU POSSIBLY FINISH IT?, while contemporary critics called it CAN YOU STAND HER?

These people are all mean. It’s a pretty good book. It’s the first in Trollope’s Palliser series. Regular readers may remember how much I loved his Barchester books (here, here, here, and here), and I’m all ready to begin with the Pallisers. How I love Victorian fiction! How I love books that are free for the Kindle! I leave you to decide which is the stronger motivation for this new Trollope kick.

The HER that you may or may not FORGIVE is Alice Vavasor. She broke off her engagement to her cousin George when he cheated on her, and got engaged to another man, John Grey. She then got spooked about him, and broke up with him, getting engaged again to her cousin, and then eventually going back to John Grey. This sounds like a month in the life of the average sixteen year old, but I guess was a bigger deal in the nineteenth century. There are two parallel stories, a comic one about Alice’s aunt, who is wealthy and has two middle-aged suitors, and a more serious one about Lady Glencora, Alice’s friend, a wealthy young woman who has been forced to marry a man she does not love, and seriously considers leaving.

The book is almost melodramatic in tone, with cousin George going mad as the book goes on, and attempting murder; Lady Glencora’s lover considering suicide; and Alice just slutting it up left and right. It is in that way very different from the Barchester novels, but is similar to them in Trollope’s easy, fun prose, psychological insight, strong character development, and involving storytelling.

I’m being flip about the slutting. What I found most engaging actually about this book was Alice’s struggle to determine what she wants of life. She gets spooked about John Grey because she suddenly fears she will be unhappy at his country home, and might be happier as a politician’s wife, with her cousin George in London. She has a really hard struggle within herself as to what she actually wants or needs from her life, and I think most of us can relate to that.

She eventually, once she thinks she has lost it, realises that the quiet and prosaic life is her real choice. Comments Trollope:

“All her misery had been brought about by this scornful superiority to the ordinary pursuits of the world, – this looking down upon humanity.”

BLACK BOOK and BLEEDING HEARTS by Ian Rankin

I’m reading so much of this for work that this is practically becoming a Rankin blog. I will name it Blankin. Or Rog

I recently reviewed KNOTS AND CROSSES, the first Rankin book, and here in BLACK BOOK Rankin the genre writer is firmly established. Detective Rebus no longer has too much of an inner life, or any gross sex scenes. Plot-plot-plot, that’s what we like. The aforementioned plot centres around a fire in a hotel, the guilt felt by the perpetrator, and the attempt by Rebus to pin the fire on its instigator, local tough and long term nemesis Ger McCafferty. Bizarrely, Rankin still finds a role for a paedophile in this story. He is seriously well into paedophilia. Curiously Rankin also talks repeatedly about how pretty this fourteen year old girl is who has a minor role in the plot. Let’s not think about it.

BLEEDING HEARTS was written under the nom de plume Jack Harvey. Apparently the Rebus books were taking only three months to write (what a surprise) so Rankin decided while living in bucolic splendour in France, to write mainstream thrillers also. In this one the story cuts between a first person narrative (of the baddie, I think we are supposed to find this innovative), and a second person narrative of the detective hunting him (a fat New York private eye). There is a cult involved, and a stupid twist where the victim turns out actually to have hired the SPOILER ALERT assassin herself in order to commit suicide.

If you skipped everything since SPOILER ALERT as you are thinking of reading this book, I advise you to think again. There are long lists of gun types, and poorly drawn cult members, and worst of all our thirty five year old assassin is pursued by a twenty two year old beauty who is totally and unbelievably sexually confident and bizarrely interested in this weird old man who has obvious psychological problems.

What boggles my mind is how MANY books I have by men in their thirties and forties that feature heroes in their thirties and forties being pursued by nymphs in their twenties. I mean, seriously, wouldn’t you be embarrassed to publish such obvious wish fulfillment?

IT’S OUR TURN TO EAT by Michela Wrong

A friend kindly lent me this as I am moving to Kenya. It tells the true (as far as that’s possible) story of one John Githongo, who famously decided to blow the whistle on corruption in the Kenyan government.

Kenya used to be run by Daniel arap Moi, who presided over a fairly corrupt administration. (A contemporary joke was: l’etat, c’est moi). Eventually, he was voted out of power (and actually went – take a tip, ZANU), and replaced with Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki promised an end to the corruption, and hired John Githongo to head a special anti-graft unit. There was much hope throughout Kenya that a new dawn was genuinely on the horizon.

Githongo was a well-educated young man, a journalist who had worked for Transparency International, and he set to work with a will, believing that Kenya really could change. He uncovered a massive government scam, which became known as the Anglo-Leasing (or Anglo-Fleecing) scandal. He slowly realized however that neither President Kibaki, whom he had believed in so whole-heartedly, nor any of his ministers wanted the scandal uncovered, primarily because they were its’ main beneficiaries.

He taped incriminating conversations, and kept incriminating documents, and then in fear of his life fled to the UK, where he arrived on the doorstep of a journalist he barely knew asking for shelter. (Thus Michela Wrong our author enters the story). He eventually released his information, and while a huge scandal did unfold, very few heads rolled.

Wrong ties this to the growth of ethnic divisions in Kenya, pointing out that Moi was a Kalenjin, and his regime mainly assisted them, while the Kibaki regime, though it did preside over a growing economy, was perceived to mainly assist his people, the Kikuyu. John Githongo’s special crime was thought to lie particuarly in the fact that he was a Kikuyu, and thus ‘betrayed’ his own people. The book takes us up through the explosion of ethnic tensions that marked the last elections.

So, in some respects a very depressing story. Ms Wrong clearly finds it so, making much of how wasteful aid is, what a hopeless case most of Africa is, etc etc. Personally, I didn’t find it to be that way. The main point I think is that John Githongo did stand. And there were those who stood with him. As we see in North Africa at the moment (viva Benghazi, viva!) there has been an old way of doing things,and Africa is currently run by old people, familiar with these old ways. But I have hope: a new generation is coming. Perhaps it is just that it is a sunny morning, but look – Kibakis is one of these geriatrics, born 1931, Mugabe, 1924, Gbagbo 1945 – while John and all those with him are young.

Ms Wrong writes with a lovely clear lucid journalist’s voice, and has a lovely turn of phrase. She did get me down with her old-Africa-hand despair, and by her typical white British way of dismissing white Africans. But whatever, it was an interesting and informative book.

I only arrived in Nairobi yesterday, and on the way from the airport I already noticed one of the small businesses she mentioned. A good introduction.

THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen

I read Franzen’s most recent novel, FREEDOM, a couple of months ago. I enjoyed it so much that when I saw this one, which was his first big hit, in the library, I fell upon it and devoured it. And I have to report, it is tasty.

From the Dept. of This Guy Can Write A Long Sentence Like Noone Else:
(It’s the thoughts of a son seeing his parents arrive at the airport)

He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags – either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building espirit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise, and, out a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising – before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

I find this hilarious and I love it. The story is about a fairly dysfunctional family. We have mum and dad, Alfred and Enid Lambert, who live in the Midwest, and their three grown children, who have all fled to the East Coast. This little bit, also from the opening pages, will give you a taste of the kind of family this is:

To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred’s straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labour Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid’s outslung hip, it was obvious that they were midwestern and intimidated. But to Chip Lambert, who was waiting for them just beyond the security checkpoint, they were killers.

Chip feels a failure, having lost his job as an associate professor for sleeping with a student. His older brother Gary is rich and has a beautiful family but is finding success unexpectedly disappointing. His younger sister Denise is a chef whose career absorbed so much of her energy that she only late in life discovers that she is probably gay.

We move back and forth between the stories of each member of the family, each amazingly vividly imagined. The arc of the story is given by the father Alfred’s slow decline into dementia, which forces the family to face various feelings they have long hidden about each other. There’s also a strong strand of love and nostalgia for the Midwest, which I found quite compelling.

So, a very good book. But not quite as good as FREEDOM, I don’t think.

He wrote THE CORRECTIONS ten years before FREEDOM, and it shows. It’s clearly the work of a much younger writer, I think, being full of overly obvious metaphor, and rather overheated language on occasion (a season is described as “hurtling, hurtling towards winter” – oh dear). There’s also a very dubious section where the character of Chip goes to Lithuania, and Franzen spends a lot of time making fun of Lithunia. Now, the book in general is in a comic vein, and he makes a lot of fun of America too, but it’s very obvious he knows nothing about Lithuania, and I didn’t really enjoy seeing a developing country being mocked in an ill-educated way, when the rest of the comedy in the book is so intelligently observed and so detailed.

But honestly, I can forgive anything to a man who can write like this:
(About a girl being approached by boys at university)