Year: 2011

VS Naipaul: I have a lot of issues

You may have heard that poor old VS Naipaul has embarrassed himself rather, once again. He claims that no female writer is as good as he is, not even Jane Austen.

Now, let’s leave the misogyny aside for a second, and just be kind of amazed that he can possibly think he is that good a writer. I mean, I loved A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, but let’s be serious.

He also cliams that within a few paragraphs he can tell if something is written by a man or a woman, and the Guardian has created a brilliant quiz so you can see if you can too. Here it is – try it, it’s fun. I got 7/10.

I want be restrained and end the post there, not engaging in any ad hominem attacks that would be below the dignity of this blog, but let me just suggest you Google ‘VS Naipaul wife beating’ and see what you can learn.

THE EAST OF EDEN LETTERS: JOURNAL OF A NOVEL by John Steinbeck

Every day before he began work on his novel EAST OF EDEN, John Steinbeck wrote a letter for his editor and friend Pascal Covici. These were never really intended to be read by Covici, but instead functioned as a warm-up for Steinbeck’s day’s writing, in which he ruminated about his ideas for the book, and his process in writing it.

The book is thus an interesting insight into the working methods of an experienced author. Aspiring novelists, give in to despair right now: he routinely cracked out 1500 words a day, and considered this a leisurely pace.

There are lots of interesting and entertaining observations. Regarding having his book read by his editor:

I am never shy about it when a professional is doing the reading. But God save me from amateurs. They don’t know what they are reading but it is much more serious than that. They immediately start writing. I never knew this fail. It is invariable. For that matter, I think I dislike amateurs in any field. They have the authority of ignorance and that is something you simply cannot combat

.

Or, regarding his original plan, to have every second chapter be more philosophical than plot based:

Such readers as only like plot and dialogue can then skip every other chapter and meanwhile I can take time for thought, comment, observation, criticism, and if it should seem a good thing to throw it out, I can do that too.

I often skip or skim boring bits in books, and I am pleased so great an authority as John Steinbeck clearly operates on this principle on occasion too.

Anyone who has ever written a diary knows how maudlin anything we write just for ourselves can be, and the letters are frequently of this nature, with moaning about DIY and needing to go to the toilet. This can sometimes be dull to trudge through, but was also I found curiously compelling. You do not often get a day-to-day account of someone’s year, and this made me feel strange close to the writer, and to his period.

DAVID SEDARIS at 3am

I’m not doing so much of the sleeping at the moment, which is not good for the health but is extremely good for the reading list. Usually one chooses books by a series of criteria, such as – I’ve heard of it, it sounds interesting, it’s free; at the moment, I am choosing books based simply on the question: how will it read at 3am?

David Sedaris reads wonderfully well late at night, and thus over the last weeks I have read THE SANTALAND DIAIRIES, BARREL FEVER, DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDOURY AND DENIM, and NAKED.

Sedaris has made a career of writing humorously about his own life. It is the apotheosis of anecdote. This is a pretty small niche, and it sort of staggers me he can get this much material out of one little life.

Interestingly, it’s quite hard to give you a little excerpt that gives an example of how funny he is; it’s not a one-liner kind of thing, more a comic point of view, that’s hard to define precisely. That said, here’s him sleeping on the floor of a Greyhound bus:

The bus’s colossal engine lay just beneath my head, providing warmth for the countless bits of misplaced candy that melted to form a fragrant bed of molten taffy

.

Sedaris had some trouble with drugs, and with being a general layabout, for much of his twenties and thirties, and some of his stories are about this. I don’t know what it means about me that I find this procession of failures strangely comforting; I think it’s just that one isn’t used to anyone being so honest about where they went wrong.

He clearly had no career plan, but was eventually discovered reading aloud his diary ,which he had kept from age 21, in a Chicago club. This got him a spot on NPR with THE SANTALAND DIARIES – his essay about working as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s (say no more). He then wrote BARREL FEVER, which is the only one of his books I’ve read that is ‘fiction,’ and indeed the only one I gave up on. It’s interesting to see how difficult it is to be what you are: a personal essayist – in a world of novelists. No doubt there’s a moral in there somewhere. Then came NAKED (my second favourite, after WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES)and DRESS YOUR FAMILY.

So, apparently, I am now a Sedaris expert. And all the rest of you were wasting your time sleeping.

TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer

For the benefit of those of you who have been being held by Columbian rebels for the last few years, I will summarise the TWILIGHT plot. A central character, unashamedly named Bella Swann, moves to a new high school. There she meets Edward Cullen, who is strangely beautiful. They fall in love. She discovers he is a vampire. He is a kind of vampire who has learnt not to eat people. A people-eating kind of vampire tries to kill Bella, and Edward saves her.

At first, I really enjoyed this book. It has real-page turning power. It’s very compelling, the will-they-won’t-they and the suppressed sexual tension, and I was just thinking: I see why this is a hit! I am so in touch with the zeitgeist! With the mind of the common man! Let’s watch the movies!

When, sadly, it all just got too stupid for anything. I tried, god knows, I tried. If I could like it, I know I could be a different type of person: Fun! Happy-go-lucky! Down-to-earth! Etc!

But, I mean, god:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him – and I didn’t know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Here‘s an interesting article about the author, who is an Arizona based Mormon mother-of-three who has never even seen an R-rated movie. This starts to make it clearer as to why while the book is very sexy, nothing sexual actually happens. It also helps to explain some of Edward’s clothing choices:

He was removing a light beige leather jacket now; underneath he wore an ivory turtleneck sweater. It fit him snugly, emphasizing how muscular his chest was.

I was reading this book at the same time as RABBIT, RUN, which is a novel that makes a serious attempt to understand how relationships work. It made for a lurid comparison with TWILIGHT, where the main hurdle – falling in love – is handled in the first couple of chapters. Thereafter, all major threats are external; whereas, at least in my unhappy experience, most major threats are entirely internal.

Geez. I will never be Fun! and Down-to-earth! at this rate.

RABBIT, RUN by John Updike

This book had been frequently recommended to me, in particular, and vehemently, by young men of a certain stripe. Thus, I had avoided reading it.

It begins with the central character, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom going out to get his pregnant wife some cigarettes. He doesn’t come home. Almost on impulse, he drives through the night, trying to go South. It’s a sort of wonderful fantasy of escaping a disappointing life.

The fantasy doesn’t last long, as he gets lost, and returns to his home town, where he gets romantically involved with a lady who is a part-time prostitute. His wife gives birth to their baby, and overwhelmed with guilt her returns to her. One night, after a fight, he leaves his wife again. She gets drunk and accidentally drowns the baby in the bathtub. (No, I did not expect that twist either). After the funeral he flees back to the part-time prostitute, who is pregnant, and says she will abort if he doesn’t marry her. Once more, he starts running.

The presentation of someone trapped in their life was strangely compelling, maybe because I am about Rabbit’s age. He was a very good basketball player in high school, and he yearns constantly for that experience, of the perfect. It’s awfully sad. Here’s when he’s trying to force himself to go back to his wife:

What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it’s this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.

Stylistically, it’s astonishingly accomplished: he actually manages to pulls off not just the present tense, but also very long stream-of-consciousness sentences, both of which are usually a recipe for disaster. Try this, when Rabbit seems some Amish:

Amish overworked their animals, he knew. Fanatics. Hump their women standing up, out in the fields, wearing clothes, just hoist black skirts and there is was, nothing underneath. No underpants. Fanatics. Worship manure.

Unfortunately as you may be able to tell from the above quote, the book is sort of creepily obsessed with sex, and with women as sexual objects. Rabbit wants to have sex all the time, even when his wife is just back from the hospital, even when its time for the baby’s FUNERAL. And it’s all taken terribly, embarrassingly, seriously:

His wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached

Small angelic sex apart, it’s a very good novel.

VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray, rather impressively, had managed to lose all his money by the age of 25. This was partly because he was a pretty bad businessman, and partly because he had a pretty big gambling problem.

He thus had turned to writing for an income, and eventually in his late thirties managed to produce VANITY FAIR, the novel that gave him back his financial independence, and eventually his claim to literary posterity. I always feel rather a fondness for these historical figures who only get their acts together in their thirties.

VANITY FAIR is, curiously enough, both a wickedly comic and a deeply moral book. It tells the story of two young women: Becky, who is poor, dishonest, and very clever, and Amelia, who is rich, honest and about as dim as a trout. I would summarise the plot, but honestly, this thing is 900 pages long, I don’t think you want me to. Briefly: marriage, Battle of Waterloo, death, debts, Wimbledon, bankruptcy, long lost love, India, happily ever after.

The joy of it really is the shining comic voice. Here, about a hopeful MP:

But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success.

A wonderful book.

Trivia!: Weirdly, Thackery went to the same school – Charterhouse – as an author two books back, Robert Graves, and hated it just as badly, always calling it Slaughterhouse.

LOST IN TRANSLATION by Nicole Mones

Sometimes when one can’t sleep in the middle of the night, one will read anything one can get one’s shaking hands on.

Mine unsteadily landed on LOST IN TRANSLATION by Nicole Mones. Now, unlike 90% of everything else in popular culture, this has nothing to do with the movie.

It is a trashy tale of an American translator in China who is hired to help an archaeologist find the bones of Peking man, a homo erectus fossil lost during the Second World War. Here are the main elements:
– an engaging find-the-object plot
– ‘evocative’ descriptions of China (ie. evoking nausea)
– stupidly obvious psychological issues for the translator
– a background story relating to a 17th century Jesuit, intended to give a literary patina to this nonsense

The translator who is a white American is apparently only interested in Chinese men. We are supposed to find this charming, but really I just found it racist. For some reason, people don’t seem to get this: anytime you outline how you only like one race, you are by definition a racist.

Anyway it was a good page turner, but I had to stop after 250 pages or so. I could easily have got to the end, but really, life is short.

EAST OF EDEN by John Steinbeck

I seem to be reading nothing but memoir at the moment, so I thought that this epic novel would be a interesting change.

Oh dear, never mind that, this turns out to be a kind of memoir too, but of the large scale, mythic and messed-up kind. Steinbeck wrote it as a history for his small sons, and was convinced it was his masterpiece.

It’s pretty long and painful overall, but there are some great parts: a wonderful evil prostitute murderer character; ideas about early home freezing; some quite shocking violence; and an interesting conception of America: ”In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.”

On one level, it’s a retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel; on another it’s a story of the Salinas Valley in California where Steinbeck grew up; and on another it’s a history of his family. Basically, the book tells of two neighbouring families, across two generations, where two sets of brothers battle for their father’s affections. Steinbeck clearly feels we are a bit dim, and in case these repetitions weren’t enough, makes sure to tell us, frequently and explicitly, about his theory that the ur-story of us all is our endless struggle for our parents’ love.

Clearly, this guy had a lot of issues with his siblings.

Personally, I think he should have gone to the therapist, rather than the publisher, but what the hell, he’s Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck and I’m some girl in Nairobi who’s still in her pyjamas at 2pm.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves

Graves wrote this memoir when he was just a year older than me, 34, going through an ugly divorce, and on the point of leaving England forever. It is an awesome exercise in wholesale bridge burning.

It makes me feel like writing my memoirs, except that fortunately for me I have not had quite such an event filled life as Graves, who was in that unlucky generation that left high school in 1914, and so swapped one uniform for another, entering the First World War as teenagers.

We begin with his childhood, which is largely spent in one of these famously damaging English public schools, and he seems to have been accordingly damaged. He is bullied relentlessly (honest to god, where are the ADULTS in these places? When I was teaching I regarded one of my main jobs as keeping a beady eye on the big ones – anyway), until he takes up boxing. He has some success with this, and that seems to help keep the worst kids off him. He’s also astonishingly frank, for a book written in 1934, about falling in love with a younger boy, Dick.

On graduation, he volunteers for the army and is sent to France. The first dead person he sees there is a soldier who has killed himself rather than carry on, and things go downhill from there. Graves writes a very straightforward account, including detailed accounts of the bungling by high command. At one point he is declared dead, and his mum gets the condolence telegram, but with all the rude health of nineteen he pulls through.

On one of his leaves he marries a young woman and when the war ends they live in Oxford together. You might think, from the prosaic way he writes, that he was not as damaged by the war as some; but then he calmly tells you all about how he keeps seeing dead people piled up on the streets, and how these daymares are with him constantly until at least 1928.

He has four children by his wife, who is an early feminist, and when they lose all their money in a failed business venture, very laudably pitches in with this mountain of childcare for many years. Even more laudably, given that this book is written during a bitter divorce, he refrains from bashing on the feminist wife too much.

A grimly honest account of an interesting thirty four years.

THE LAST RESORT by Douglas Rogers

This book tells the story of the author’s parents’ attempts to hold on to their land during the decade of Zimbabwe’s collapse from about 2000 on. The perspective is surprisingly honest: Douglas Rogers couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Africa from his feet, and can’t understand why his parents would fight to stay.

Rogers grew up on various farms in eastern Zimbabwe, and once he left school fled this rural idyll as fast as he could. On retirement, his parents bought a rocky piece of land and decided to run a backpackers lodge, which did well initially, until the economy, and thus the tourism industry, began to crumble.

That Rogers worked as a journalist for many years is abundantly clear from this book. The style is simple and unaffected, and the plot moves quickly enough to keep the attention of any commuter. This is almost to a fault; the book is sort of forgettable, though the story is not.

After the backpackers left, the prostitutes started arriving, then a small dagga business (that’s pot to the non-African readers), then the dispossessed farmers (both black and white), then the illegal diamond dealers, then, most dangerously, the MDC activists in hiding during the dark days of 2008 (that’s during the bloody elections, non-Zimbabwean readers). Meanwhile the possibility of their land being seized was constantly in the air; at one point they found out that their property deed had been cancelled, and ‘vested in the president,’ without their even being informed.

It’s a very intimate portrait of his parents, and of their struggle to maintain not just their lives (it gets very dodgy at the end), and their land, but their definition of themselves as Zimbabwean. In the final chapters, when the father is taking considerable risks protecting the MDC members, there’s a very sweet section about how, for the first time in his life, and for the first time in the history of his family in Africa (an impressive 350 years) he is at last on the right side of history.

This books sounds quite tragic, but is largely written in the comic vein, which is I think very Zimbabwean. It also a story more of victory, than of defeat. I hope that’s very Zim too, though possibly not.

Here’s a rather sweet interview with the author.