Year: 2011

NERVOUS CONDITIONS by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I’ve reviewed NERVOUS CONDITIONS for Africa Book Club here.

It’s an engaging novel about a girl from a poor rural background who is given the opportunity to have an expensive western education, and about the difficulties and possibilities that education brings with it.

I found it to be a sophisticated little book, though I was fascinated by the strong sense throughout the story that having to add a new culture into your experience is inherently negative. In the diasporized Zimbabwe of today, this view seems sort of charmingly antiquated. Nowadays, you’re never more of the Zimbabwean zeitgeist than when you live in South Africa, so to suggest that leaving home is such a big deal seems very sweetly of the innocent eighties.

TRUCKERS by Terry Pratchett

This is one of my bedtime books. I used to love Terry Pratchett when I was in high school, but I don’t so much anymore, which always means I am rather sad when reading his books these days. Now, this must mean that either the books have changed, or I have. What do you think?

TRUCKERS tells the story of a group of tiny human-like creatures called nomes who are struggling to survive in a field. In desperation they get on a human truck and end up at a large department store, Arnold Bros, which turns out to be full of nomes. The store is however about to be destroyed, so all the nomes have to find a way to escape by teaching themselves to drive. They also discover that they are in fact aliens from a distant star, and that this is therefore the first step to returning to outer space. Sequel anyone?

The funniest part of the novel is the religion around the god figure of Arnold Bros. that the store nomes have developed. Thus they take If you don’t see what you require, please ask as an invitation to prayer, and Everything Must Go as a instruction to prepare for one’s own mortality. Prices Slashed is a sort of devil, and Bargains Galore an Archangel. However – and here’s what makes me sad – it now all seems a bit heavy handed, and his larger points about religion and meaning painfully obvious.

Oh Terry Pratchett. You are still good for bedtime.

OUR MONTHLY MARCEL

Despite my strict instruction, the days just keep rolling on. Apparently it’s already September 1. So it’s time once again for a little advice from our our man Marcel:

“Habit forms the style of the writer just as much as the character of the man, and the author who has more than once been content to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of his talent, just as, in succumbing too often to pleasure, to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, one traces for oneself, on a character which it will finally be impossible to retouch, the lineaments of one’s vices and the limits of one’s virtues.”

Marcel Proust, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED by F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED is a somewhat depressing and an irritatingly moralistic little book.

Set in New York in the early years of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Anthony Patch, a young man living a life of elegance on his trust fund as he waits for his wealthy grandfather to die. He falls madly in love with a noted beauty of the day, Gloria Gilbert, marries her, and they begin to live a life of endless parties and pleasure trips. Anthony continually attempts half-heartedly to find some kind of employment, but keeps being put off by the amount of work that is apparently involved in actually working.

The couple are cut out of the grandfather’s will, spend their money unwisely, and eventually end up in ever smaller and less salubrious accommodation and society. Anthony becomes an alcoholic, while Gloria becomes pathetically fixated on her appearance.

Honestly, I don’t read twentieth century fiction for a moral lesson! How irritating. We get it. Living like there’s no tomorrow often has a consequence tomorrow.

The book is apparently based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s own unhappy marriage, and this is painfully evident. The novel absolutely drips with painful retrospection, with an attempt to dissect everything from the beginning in order to understand what went so horribly wrong. It is like having a drink with a friend after a messy break-up. As a side point, let me just ask: how much do you love yourself when you call a thinly veiled autobiography THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED. Honestly, get over it.

I have been inspired recently by the following: “When life gives you lemons – say fuck it and bail.” Wise words, though they do come from the movie FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. The early nihilistic partying in this novel reminded me of this fine lesson, and I was sorry Fitzgerald felt he had to make everyone pay so direly for having a little fun.

ADRIAN MOLE: THE WILDERNESS YEARS by Sue Townsend

It’s been a while since I read a book over night. I don’t know if ADRIAN MOLE: THE WILDERNESS YEARS is all that gripping, but somehow I read it till 2am, and then when I woke up again at 4am finished it.

It is one of the sequels to Townsend’s first great success, THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE AGED 13 3/4. Adrian is now in his early twenties, and still just as self-obssessed and miserable as ever. His day job is in the civil service, but his real focus is his novel LO, THE FLAT HILLS OF MY HOMELAND, which is as bad as it sounds.

It’s a very funny, immensely readable little novel, though I find it difficult to put my finger on quite what is so entertaining about it. I think it is partly that Adrian is so honest in his diary, revealing the embarrassing secrets and dreams that everyone has. It’s also the occasional glimpses one gets of the people in his life, who in their reported dialogue and actions are so very different from Adrian’s narrow view of them.

At one point he writes to his sister that a donkey he sees in Greece reminds him of their dog. This endeared him to me. I had to give up a cat when I left London, and I found that not only did other cats remind me of my cat, but so did dogs, the cuter Masaai cattle, and adolescent giraffes. My London cat was all over Nairobi.

Over the course of this diary, Adrian loses his job, realises his novel is not very good, gets dumped, and in general begins to grow up, which gives the book a sweet and satisfying narrative arc.

BURNT TOAST ON SUNDAYS by Roland K Hill

BURNT TOAST ON SUNDAYS is a comic novel about the romantic misadventures of a young Zimbabwean farmer named Tom Burnham. Published in 1995, events in Zimbabwe have turned this frothy and fun book into a rather sad glimpse into a lost way of life.

The novel opens with Tom trying to make his own breakfast one Sunday morning. This goes so horribly wrong that he concludes he needs a wife. I know: how romantic. I hope Tom will marry me! What a charmer.

His friend Cliff organises a dance at his house, and Tom tests all the potential girls by having them each fry him an egg. No one makes the grade, and he decides to go on holiday to London. This in itself is an interesting perspective on a Zimbabwe I barely remember – the pre-diaspora country, in which going abroad is an event, rather than a routine, and where the airport is packed with tourists and multiple international airlines. In London he meets an English girl, who he invites to the farm to visit. Much hi-jinks ensue, involving rhinos and scorpions and white-water rafting. All ends happily of course with a wedding on the farm.

In the final scene, the English girl confesses she was unsure about living on the farm at first, but she accepts it, because ‘the farm is you.’ Well, the farm’s probably not going to be him for too much longer, unless he has some very good government connections. Shame. If Tom’s a real person, he’s living in a semi in Slough right now.

While the book certainly has some flaws – some awkward issues of style, and an over-reliance on cliches – it is overall an entertaining read. It is famously very difficult when writing in a country without a strong literary tradition not to simply mimic dominant traditions from elsewhere, and I must applaud Mr Hill on writing a very Zimbabwean little book, and not a pastiche of English or American models. He manages to include rhinos, sunsets, and veldskoens without sounding at all like he is writing an exotic travelogue, an endeavour at which many finer writers have failed spectacularly.

In case you plan to buy this book, I should caution that it’s price is probably out of your reach. I see on the inside front cover that it sold for $15,000. So it’s also in its own way a window into a totally different period in Zim history. $15,000! Ah, hyperinflation. I almost kind of miss it.

JOYCE GRENFELL REQUESTS THE PLEASURE by Joyce Grenfell

I am now reduced to reading celebrity memoir. And worse yet, a celebrity I have never even heard of: Joyce Grenfell. She was, it appears, famous in the 1950s as a monolguist. I can only say: monologuist?

Regular readers will understand from this that my Kindle has not yet arrived in Harare. I am thus reduced to reading whatever I can find on my parents’ bookshelves. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for someone else, as my parents own a lot of books, but unfortunately as my parents’child I have had an entire lifetime to read them. Thus, there is not much left. Thus, Joyce Grenfell.

In a move of striking originality, Grenfell begins her autobiography with her birth, which took place in a very nice part of London. Everything thereafter also seems to happen in a very nice part of London, unless it is happening in a very nice part of New York, or of Vancouver. Grenfell is born into a very wealthy family, and one of the more interesting aspects of this uninteresting book is an insight into the life of someone who does not ever need to work for a living. Her life appears to be a round of nannies and tea parties and dances. Family friends include theatre luminaries such as Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. Call me a cynic, but I’m going to go ahead and suggest that her success in show business may not have been down 100% to sheer talent and drive.

Here’s a taster, a comment on her father’s military service: “Like many men, he did not enjoy his time in the first world war.” Profound! And indicative of the book as a whole. Indeed, what I found most striking about this book was how very little Grenfell managed to share about her life, while writing a book about her life.

Even poor writers, when writing about themselves, usually manage to provide some insights; but this book is a miracle of emptiness. I wish I could give you some summary of her later life, and even reveal what after all a monologuist is, but I never got past adolescence, having to give up on Joyce Grenfell after the first hundred pages.

KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST by Adam Hochschild

I’ve reviewed KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST here for Africa Book Club. It’s the history of Leopold II’s brief period of control of what is to today the DRC, and makes for grim reading, recounting how the local people were in essence enslaved in order to produce huge amounts of rubber. Here’s a snippet, in case you don’t click through, to one rubber company employee’s account of his day:

It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day’s work. Some women . . . were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing . . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest. He fell like a stone . . . Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

The mind boggles. So appalling was the treatment of the people of the area that an outcry was raised in Europe. Leopold tries to silence this by sending a hand-picked Commission to ‘investigate.’ In a darkly comic turn of events, so horrified are Leopold’s toadies by what the local people tell them, that they actually return, to Leopold’s shock, an honest report!

People often lazily group missionaries and businessmen together as all part and parcel of one monolithic colonial machine. This book most interestingly debunks this myth, highlighting the huge role the missionaries played in trying to protect local people from the business interests of Europe. The above, terribly sad picture, is taken by a mission lady on her verandah. I’m sorry to have to say that this gentleman is looking at the hand of his five year old daughter. Hands were cut off because soldiers needed to prove that they had not ‘wasted’ ammunition, and needed to prove they had actually killed one person for every bullet used.

Much more, obviously, in my full review here.

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James Cain

This is a creepy little novella.

A drifter named Frank stops at a petrol station. But in this kind of novel it is not a petrol station, oh no. It is a roadside joint.

In this roadside joint he meets the wife of the owner, Cora, and they immediately start a torrid affair, with strong overtones of violence. At one point, he mashes her lips. Apparently, this means kissing. At another point, he rips her. This apparently means tearing off her clothes.

They decide to kill off her husband, and on their second attempt succeed. They think they have accomplished the perfect crime, but the police are on to them, and they quickly sell each other out in an attempt to save themselves. They get off on a technicality but their relationship is now poisoned by mistrust. They eventually patch their relationship up, but at this point Cora dies in a car accident, and the police are only to happy to now accuse him of murder. The novel ends with Frank on death row.

So, super cheery! I would have put some actual quotes in, because there were doozies. But my Kindle is BUST. Yup, I’ve only had it for four months and the screen is BUST. I was all ready to be outraged. But Amazon is sending me a NEW one, for FREE, to ZIMBABWE. This sort of boggles my mind.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M Miller

I have concluded upon reading this book that humanity, taken in a mass, is in fact relatively sane.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ begins with a young monk fasting in a desert. He comes across a hole in the ground which opens into a room, labelled FALLOUT SHELTER – OCCUPANCY 15. He is terrified. He has heard of fallouts, which in the distant past killed huge numbers of people. He pictures them as large and fiery dragons. As his grasp of what is referred to as pre-Deluge English is not great (he struggles with how nouns work, and thus cannot understand the difference between a house cat and a cat house) he fears the shelter is full of fallouts, just waiting to come out.

In short, this is sci-fi. And my favourite kind too, being post-apocalypse sci-fi!

Anyway, the cave is full of technical documents, and the monk’s order is one set up by a certain Leibowitz, who, on surviving the Deluge, set out to preserve humanity’s memory. During the great Simplification, after the Deluge, books and learning were understandably treated with suspicion, and so the order struggles to protect the physical remnants of that memory. The documents are thus a great find.

The book moves forward in history two or three times, on each occasion by a few centuries, as human learning is rediscovered, and it ends, predictably, with another nuclear disaster. To tell you the truth I found the last half a little dull, and did a fair bit of skipping, as there were lots of scenes where men shouted at each other about military tactics.

However, it was an interesting immersion in the concerns of the 1960s. The immediacy of their fear of nuclear annihilation is fascinating. No doubt the apocalypse will happen, and I personally am totally ready to survive it (eat leather, eat other people, drink urine, you name it); but I am encouraged that we have all managed to hold it together so far, and that we’ve had a good half century without species-wide suicide. Let’s go humanity!