Year: 2011

FLY FISHING FOR SHARKS by Andrew Alexander

This book is an honest account of a young man’s battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and with depression.

Andrew Alexander grew up in Zimbabwe, and was educated at various times in South Africa, so the story is largely set in these two countries. His symptoms first appear in high school when he develops an obssessive need to check some aspects of his homework. Various other obsessions emerge, most especially around HIV, which makes him fear infection from even the most unlikely objects, and around driving, when he begins to fear that he has unknowingly hurt someone with his car.

The stress of moving to Cape Town for university triggers a major episode, and he is finally able to tell his family and get some psychiatric help. OCD is not an easy disease to treat, and he does not seem to get the very best of medical assistance. He eventually feels well enough to move to the UK, but the stress of London is too much for him and triggers another episode. He eventually develops depression, along with his OCD, and attempts suicide twice.

The author’s breakdown occurs within the context of the breakdown of Zimbabwe, and thus the book is also an interesting window into a certain historical and political moment. As with most middle class Zimbabweans of his generation he has lived in at least three countries, and thus the book has an easy cosmopolitanism. It is also, despite its serious subject matter, often very funny. One feels very intimate with the author, who clearly has thought deeply about himself and his world, and is at pains to share his knowledge with you as honestly as he can. The path to self-knowledge is a long and painful one, whatever your mental health status, and Alexander has clearly gone a good deal further down it than most.

IN THE MIDST OF LIFE by Jennifer Worth

This is a maudlin and poorly written book that makes an unexpectedly good point.

The book is intended to question the way western culture deals with imminent death. The author begins with an account of her grandfather’s death, which happened gently, and at home, and contrasts this with the deaths she frequently saw as a nurse. It is very common apparently for elderly people to end their lives in a great deal of pain, over an extended period, because doctors feel driven by a fear of litigation to extend life, even if only for a few days, by very painful, invasive procedures.

She gives many examples of elderly or terminally ill persons forced through many weeks or even months of great pain because their carers felt unable to simply let the person go gently. Unfortunately, we do not need many examples to understand her case; one or two would have been quite sufficient. As it is, the book degenerates into a rather sentimental, even morbid, succession of stories of people dying in horrible conditions. I’m not going to say I didn’t spend some of the book in tears, but this owes less to the quality of the writing than to the quality of this reader: I am a giant wimp.

I wish the book had involved more examination into how this state of affairs had developed, because where she briefly looks at this it becomes much more interesting. For example, there is some discussion of the fact that in long term care facilities, it is normal for dementia patients to have a feeding tube inserted into their stomachs. You might think this is because they cannot eat, but you’d be wrong. The tubes are inserted because it saves carers fifteen minutes for each patient – they do not have to spoon their food into their mouths, but can just pour it down the tube.

PERSONAL MBA by Josh Kaufman

This is an unusual entry for this blog. It is, according to the author, a distillation of the most important ideas to be learnt in an MBA.

The author clearly has a pretty big chip on his shoulder about MBA programmes, and in particular about their price. He froths at the mouth for some time in the introduction about how much debt you go into to attend one, and how little you learn. I suspect he may be right about this, though it seems pretty obvious to me that most people do not go to business school to learn about business so much as to make contacts and to have a prestigious institution’s name on their CV. And these are very valuable assets, probably much more important than actually knowing what you are doing.

So this book focuses on the secondary goal, which is actually learning about business. I found it a very good basic introduction to the main concepts in business: profits, costs, overheads, etc. It is very clearly aimed at those starting a small business, and has many excellent recommendations, including explaining how to predict when a business will begin to make a return on investment, and how to start from the most basic beginnings.

Fittingly, for a book about reading, I also learn how to appropriately commodify books and magazines. Apparently, while there are many value forms (production, leasing, etc), reading matter may be classified as ‘audience aggregators,’ that have value primarily because the attention of the audience you gain can be sold on at a profit. Take that, Proust, Shakespeare, et al!

It really makes you think. For example, it made me think: if only Herman Melville had had a copy of PERSONAL MBA while he was dying in poverty! How different the history of nineteenth century American letters!

MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather

Nebraska is not a poetic state. New York, yes. California, yes. Conneticut, maybe. Nebraska, no.

And yet MY ANTONIA made Nebraska a new place for me. It tells the story of a little boy who grows up on a farm in that state in the early nineteenth century, and very movingly recreates the landscape and the people of a small corner of the US just as it is being born. We are mostly focused on his relationship with a young Bohemian (is this Czech?) girl, Antonia, who has just emigrated there. They are free to run all over the country, and we get a vivid child’s eye view of the emerging farm land. He tells us for example:

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Or:

We brought the cows home to the corner nearest the barn, and the boys milked them while night came on. Everything was as it should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold of the sky, the evening star, the purr of the milk into the pails, the grunts and squeals of the pigs fighting over their supper. I began to feel the loneliness of a farm-boy at evening, when the chores seem everlastingly the same, and the world so far away.

And:

As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass. Antonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow home.

Antonia’s father kills himself, out of homesickness during a freezing Midwestern winter, and her life becomes hard, as she works like a man to keep the farm afloat. She eventually goes into domestic service in town, right next door to the narrator. She is there influenced by ‘fast’ girls, one of whom was often visited by a married man while she was herding cows. One of the modest women of the town lectures her about making eyes at men, to which she replies:

I never made anything to him with my eyes. I can’t help it if he hangs around, and I can’t order him off. It ain’t my prairie.

This is a fine sample of the down-home dialogue I loved in this book and I have been trying since I read it to work “ain’t my prairie” into my ordinary conversation, with limited success.

Antonia is eventually impregnated and abandoned by a worthless young man, and when our narrator leaves for university, we feel her future is to be a shamed woman on her family farm for the rest of her life. When the narrator returns, however, twenty years later and after a career as a lawyer, he finds her happily married and with a big family. This occurs very near the end of the book, and I was beginning to worry where this was all going, and how Cather was going to be able to wrap it up with any kind of thematic or narrative neatness. The novel ends as follows, with the narrator standing on a road by Antonia’s house, and thinking of the first time he met her, on that road, the night that they both arrived in Nebraska:

The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for all of us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

And somehow that worked beautifully for me.

THE GOOD COMPANIONS by JB Priestly

This book begins with three people suddenly deciding to escape their everyday lives and go in search of adventure. One is a middle aged spinster, whose overbearing father has just died; one is a young tutor, fired from his school; and the third is a capenter from the North who finally gets up the courage to leave his wife. All three end up involved with a small variety show, which is touring sad little British towns.

JB Priestly was most famous as a playwright, and thus this world, of provinical touring in the 1920s, is one he knew well, and he presents an entertianing picture of dirty digs and hopeful startlets. Here is a sample, where a gardener has come up and stood hands on hips in front of his employer:

This was his favourite attitude when he had anything important to say, so that Miss Trant, who knew her man, realised at once that he was bursting with news. Not that he looked excited. You cannot expect a gardener who for the last six years has won the first prize for onions (Alisa Craigs) – to say nothing of any number of minor events – at the Hitherton and District Show, to betray his feelings.

The writer is so relentlessly entertaining however that he is never less than arm’s length from his characters, so I found that as a reader I was too, which meant the book became less and less involving as it went on.

Life has been described as being simply one damn thing after another, and THE GOOD COMPANIONS was certainly life-like in this way, becoming after a while rather a rather dull procession of provincial towns. By the end, I was wishing the tour would end just as much as the actors were.

Our Monthly Marcel

I try every month to bring you a new snippet from the patron saint of this blog, the hypochondriac, painfully closeted, fabulously talented, Marcel Proust . . .

“There is no man however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it.

And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man . . . unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell

David Mitchell is famous as an author of literary fiction, so I was unsure what to expect of this novel, some six hundred pages set in 18th century Japan. I feared for lines like this:

Tea is cool lush green in a smooth pale bowl.

And indeed, there was quite a lot of this sort of thing, and, initially, a fair amount of lengthy and suddenly poetic speech-making from uneducated labourers/surly deck hands, as well as learned and unmotivated discourses on early medicine.

I had serious concerns, but I soldiered on, as the setting was interesting. Jacob de Zoet is among the very few Dutch who have managed to gain a toe-hold in Japan as traders, while the country is still resolutely insular, not allowing its citizens to leave the country, or foreigners to go further than a tiny section of the port. On page 100, I was still worried I was in for an elaborate metaphor on the birth of modern science; when all of a sudden, the novel took a bizarre and spectacular left turn. Skip the next paragraph if you plan to read the book.

Jacob falls in love with a heavily scarred Japanese woman, who is then abducted and forced into a CULT FOR BREEDING BABIES which are later MURDERED TO GIVE THIS CRAZY ABBOT ETERNAL LIFE. Safe to say, we have left the realm of the well-behaved literary novel. There is even a failed rescue attempt, with sword fighting, and face-to-face encounters with the deranged Abbot; and then, if this was not enough, we suddenly switch to a being on board an English ship preparing for battle. Apparently, Holland has fallen to the British, so the Dutch on Nagasaki are essentially stranded. There is a big sea battle, and Jacob more or less saves Nagasaki, single-handed, don’t ask me how, because I didn’t really follow. The book ends the traditional way, with a ritual disembowelling and a triple-cross poison plot.

So in short: literary potboiler. I loved it. There was lots of beautiful writing – try this:

An enterprising fly buzzes over his urine in the chamber pot

I can’t think when I’ve heard sewage more elegantly described.

There was also a staggering amount of research, and historical detail, woven neatly and elegantly into the deranged plot. I learnt, for example, that to get a gouty toe to heal, doctors of the time thought it a good idea to put mouse droppings in the open wound, to produce more pus. Thank god for the birth of modern science.

THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I really enjoyed Adichie’s novel HALF OF A YELLOW SUN, which seemed to me a fresh and interesting picture of a small corner of 20th century Africa. I was therefore excited to read her latest release, THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, a collection of short stories.

It was, I’m sorry to say, a rather disappointing experience. I did appreciate the unselfconscious way in which Adichie writes about contemporary Nigeria, and in particular the Nigerian diaspora, and some of the stories were quite sweet, and affecting. I especially admired ‘Imitation,’ a story in which a Nigerian wife, unhappy in the US, eventually gets up the courage to insist her family move back to Lagos.

However, I found many of the stories to have an unpleasantly and obviously didactic edge. Now, I don’t mind if an author has an agenda, and feels a need to educate, but I’d appreciate it if they could try and be a little subtle about it. Here’s an example, a girl thinking about her sister while hiding from a riot outside:

She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi’s eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another

This is a very unsubtle elucidation of a very obvious point. Indeed, many of the ‘lessons’ seem rather second-hand and obvious, the sort of stuff that is taught in first year Politics classes at liberal American universities. There is even a really embarrassing section ‘educating’ us about how the British stole African artifacts during colonialism. I think I may have found it particularly toe-curling because I’ve just read THINGS FALL APART, in which a truly great Nigerian writer handles such issues with immense delicacy and insight.

As an avowedly African writer, I was also disappointed to see how very limited Adichie’s understanding of Africa is. The book deals almost exclusively with middle class black Nigerians, and where it steps out of this world tends to fall into caricature; there’s a particularly crude caricature of a Jewish American, and a portrait of a white South African that I found almost poisonous.

In an novel, this limited imaginative world may work quite well: we can accept why there is a single atmosphere, and a single sensibility. Short stories are a very different, and a very difficult medium, and for me, in THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, Adiche’s limits became apparent.

NOT ANOTHER DAY by Julius Chingono

Julius Chingono was born on a commercial farm and worked for most of life as a blaster on the mines before late in life becoming a published author.

I have reviewed his very fine collection of poetry and short stories, NOT ANOTHER DAY, at Africa Book Club. If you’re not going to click through, let me just leave you with this lovely little sample of his work, the poem AFRICAN SUN:

The African Sun
shines bright
even upon dictators
warms even
absolute rulers,

Sets even upon despots

HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER by Richard Mason

I read this ages ago, and entirely forgot to blog it. Here’s the back cover. It will give you an accurate idea not just of the plot of the book, but of its style:

The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men. He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage…’ It is 1907. The belle epoque is in full swing. Piet Barol has escaped the drabness of the provinces for the grandest mansion in Amsterdam. As tutor to the son of Europe’s wealthiest hotelier, he learns the intimate secrets of this glittering family – and changes it forever. With nothing but his exquisite looks and wit to rely on, he is determined to make a fortune of his own. But in the heady exhilaration of this new world, amid delights and temptations he has only dreamed of, Piet discovers that some of the liaisons he has cultivated are dangerous indeed.

Yes, yes, I think you get it. ‘Glittering family,’ ‘exquisite looks,’ ‘heady exhilaration.’ Say no more.

On the positive side, it was interesting to learn about Amsterdam at the turn of the century, and it’s strong economic links with America; I had no idea that Holland was so rich or so influential at this time. Also interesting was the child Piet is hired to tutor, who has a raging case of OCD some decades before anyone is equipped to understand it or help him. There is plenty of sex in this novel, and while it’s no Portnoy’s Complaint, and there were a lot of pulsing mounds and so on, it was in general not embarrassing or sordid, which is I think impressively difficult to achieve.

Encountering this book entirely without context, I read and immediately forgot it, as a piece of mass market pulp. I’ve been surprised since to find it quite extensively reviewed as literary fiction, and to discover that its author, Richard Mason, is famous for having received one of the larger advances ever recorded for a first book, at the ripe old age of 19.

When he was an old Etonian in his first year at Oxford.

But let’s try not to hold that against him. He sounds quite nice here.