Year: 2012

Good title, isn’t it? Also, it came highly recommended as one of the best books of 2012. THESE PEOPLE NEED TO SMOKE LESS CRACK.

Sensitive readers may be able to observe from the capitalized sentence that I may not have liked this book. Which I don’t. It involves this Jewish guy (and you will understand by the end of the sentence why I need to mention his ethnicity) who buys a nice farm house, and then finds Anne Frank in the attic. This sounds like it might be a funny set up, huh? WELL IT’S NOT. His middle class marriage is falling apart, and Anne Frank puts great pressure on it. Eventually in a useless way he loses his marriage and his job and dies in a fire. Richly deserved. This is book is possibly the apogee of that strand in contemporary fiction which uses a useless/purposeless/inadequate central character as a metaphor for the human condition. It’s depressing and annoying and more importantly makes for a boring book.

It’s also gratingly irritating that this very well-off middle class person feels that he is having a tough time due to the Holocaust. He’s immensely privileged, which truth he plays lip service to, and yet it never seems to penetrate his self-indulgent obsession with his great-grandparents experience. The part where I really lost my junk was where he asked:

“People in Holocaust books and movies were always worrying about their papers: getting them, not getting them, . . . What were papers anyway? Papers like what, like a passport?”

Also, and this is not entirely fair, he likes to go on and on about his gluten intolerance, an affliction which always annoys me anyway.

Reading back over these last two paragraphs I feel guilty about being so mean about this book. So let me mention some rather good parts. Here’s a reasonable definition about how I feel about god:

Kugel could never believe in God, but he could never not believe in him either; there should be a God, felt Kugel, even if there probably wasn’t

And on death:

Everyone shared the same final thought, and this was it: the bewildered, dumfounded statement of his own disappointing cause of death. Shark? Train? Really? I get hit by a train? Malaria? Fuck off. Malaria?

This is a gripping story about a man doing nothing.

Newland Archer is engaged to be married to a beautiful and innocent young lady, the flower of nineteenth century New York society. Then her cousin Ellen arrives, a slightly older lady with the whiff of scandal hanging on her. Archer begins to fall in love with Ellen, and so pushes forward with speeding up the wedding, so as to be safe. Once married, he realises that he is not at all safe, and is only falling further in love with his wife’s cousin.

I won’t tell you more, so as not to ruin if for you, but I will tell you that basically nothing happens. And so good a writer is Wharton that it is as compelling as watching a car crash. It’s also an awful meditation on what it means to accept what is given to you. Here’s Archer considering his marriage, his career, and his life in New York:

“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.”

It’s a similar theme to the equally scarring ETHAN FROMME. I met someone at dinner last night who told me that everytime things are going well with a girl, he starts to worry there’s going to be a sledding accident. This is the effect this book can have when read at a tender age, and AGE OF INNOCENCE is the same. I can only wonder what awful personal choices Wharton is working through in these books.

Don’t however get the impression from this the book is not funny; it’s often extremely witty. Here is an obese old lady:

“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.”

The book is also interesting on the subject of gender, raising a question I have often wondered about: why did the men of the nineteenth century want innocent virgins so much? Wouldn’t it be boring? Wouldn’t you rather have someone who’d been around the block? I guess there is an evolutionary piece of this puzzle, but it is interesting to see Archer worry about it.

“It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?”

Edith Wharton clearly fought the hard fight for women of her period, and it’s depressing to reflect that that battle still has to be fought. Google Jonathan Franzen’s barf making reflection on Wharton’s career, in which – believe it if you can – he goes on about . . .HER APPEARANCE. Here’s LA Review of Books reflection:

And later,(Franzen says) “Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”
Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.

I mean, Franzen. Franzen. Be serious. I didn’t even know what Edith Wharton looks like. How you be grading weird old nineteenth century pictures of dead women?

Olive Schreiner was a most interesting woman. Born to a poor and conservative family in 1855, she became a freethinker, a feminist, a vegetarian, and astonishingly, South Africa’s first important novelist. Her claim to fame rests on this book, THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM.

It’a superlatively odd novel. It begins with the story of three children living on a farm in the Karoo, then takes an abrupt left turn into an extended meditation on the existence of god – related bizarrely in the first person plural – and then staggers back to follow up on these children as adults.

The first section is for me the best, with many finely drawn characters, and a lovely depiction of the Karoo in the nineteenth century. Here is the fat and selfish woman who looks after the three kids:

“I know how it was when my first husband died. They could do nothing with me,” the Boer-woman said, “till I had eaten a sheep’s trotter, and honey, and a little roaster cake. I know.

“

And here’s the farm yard chicken:

Even the old hen seemed well satisfied. She scratched among the stones and called to her chickens when she found a treasure, and all the while tucked to herself with intense inward satisfaction.

The existential crisis that is coming casts a shadow over this part of the book, with this a recurring image:

The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning: but Doss (the dog) broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.

The existential agonising in the first person plural takes up a good third of the middle of the book, and damn, is it boring. I feel bad to say so, because it is also obviously painfully sincere. The child of missionaries, Schreiner clearly had to walk a very long and hard path before she could give up on god, and you do feel sorry for her, though you do wish she wouldn’t go on about it. It’s interesting to read it after MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, another book about this period. Now we accept that life may well be meaningless, almost as a matter of course, but there was clearly a period during which this idea was first being born, when it was for many people a horrifying and frightening concept. Which I guess it is, if you think about it for too long. But as Schreiner observes, near the end, when one of her characters is in mourning for another, and is sitting in the sun:

There will always be something worth living for while there are shimmery afternoons.

It’s as good a reason to live as any.

Perhaps five years ago I saw a one man show at the Edinburgh Festival, which was a tour de force performance by Bette Bourne as Quentin Crisp, with Crisp as an old man in his filthy London flat. I recall very vividly the fact that he hadn’t done any housework for ten years, and that his opinion was that after the first few years the dirt doesn’t get any worse – you just have to hold your nerve. Inspirational.

Crisp was an original thinker in all sorts of areas. He very early on accepted that he was gay, and rather than attempt to hide it as so many did in this period (the 1930s), he chose to flaunt it. It was astonishingly brave. I have to say, after a while, I began to find it foolish. He insisted on wearing makeup, hair dye and nail polish, and thus was beaten up on the streets frequently. It’s an odd mix of courage in who you are and flagrant exhibitionism. It also makes it clear how far the gay rights movement has come, that no one really seems to feel any more that you have to be a ‘girl’ or ‘girly’ in order to like boys.

Crisp is a person who has struggled much, and thus his book is full of a curious and rather sad kind of wisdom. As for example, when he is talking about a friend of his who worked day and night at his screenwriting. Eventually, this person had a huge and impressive career in television, and Crisp observes that such success requires not just energy but optimism. The first, Crisp says, he has; the second he does not. This is I think an interesting analysis of why it is that some people work hard, and some do not: it’s not so much laziness, as pessimism. Or realism, I suppose.

After his round the world voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin spent the next forty years in his suburban home with his family, and it was there that he did the real intellectual work that made him famous and changed the way we see the world. CREATION tells the story of this period.

The Darwin family was close and loving, and much of the appeal of the book lies in an account of their ordinary lives. Darwin is thrilled by the birth of his first child, writing to a friend in the manner of all new parents: “He is a prodigy of beauty and intellect. He is so charming that I cannot pretend to any modesty. I defy anybody to flatter us on our baby, for I defy anyone to say anything in its praise, of which we are not fully conscious.” However, he also takes the opportunity to examine genetic inheritance in action: he was “always anxious to observe accurately the expression of a crying child . . . though his sympathy with the grief often spoiled his observation.”

Darwin spent many years studying barnacles, in his study, and one of his sons “ .. . when they went one day to play with the Lubbock children at High Elms, asked where Sir John (the father) did his barnacles” The nanny, Brodie, famously once said “it was a pity Mr Darwin had not something to do like Mr Thackeray (the author). She had seen him watching an ant heap for a whole hour” Darwin’s great love of his subject, be it barnacles, ants, or other, shines through the book. He comments charmingly: “I am at present red-hot with spiders; they are very interesting, and if I am not mistaken, I have already taken some new genera”

Darwin’s oldest daughter, Annie, dies of ‘fever’ (probably TB) at the age of ten. This death was particularly important in disabusing Darwin of a belief in a benevolent god, and gave him more impetus to pursue his ‘godless’ view of evolution.

Interestingly, Darwin had ten children. Or to be more accurate, his poor wife had ten children. The last eight were back to back in twelve years, making her life a

“treadmill of pregnancy, delivery, suckling, weaning and waiting for the next conception. After bearing her fifth child, she wondered if she might have ‘the luck to escape having another soon,’ but Charles did not seem to have appreciated her feelings. She was pregnant with the sixth a few months later.”

This is really, really, unattractively Taliban of Darwin. Mrs Darwin must have been totally psyched to menopause.

I confess, I didn’t quite finish this book. It got a bit boring and blah-blah-blah towards the end. The author is the great grandchild of Darwin, and this is his only book, and it shows. I suspect I’d much rather read a book by someone who came to Darwin through great love, than through luck and inheritance. This is why I like Paris Hilton. She could just have relied on her family money, but she went ahead and at least she made something of herself, even if that something is sort of horrifying.

Stop the presses, it’s a Booker winning novel that isn’t crap! I’m amazed. It won in 2004, so maybe back then they were still awarding actual good novels, and since then it’s been getting gradually more pretentious.

THE LINE OF BEAUTY tells the story of a middle class young man named Nick who after attending Oxford moves into the family home of one of his wealthy classmates. He lives there for some three years, and the novel follows his time with them. It traces two romances: his romance with his idea of the upper classes, and his exploration of gay life in London.

It’s immediately absorbing, with everything seen through the lens of Nick, who is a highly sensitive, highly self absorbed young man. It’s also immensely well observed. Here is Nick leaving a party: “He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day.”

It’s also Victorian in the exuberance and detail of its characters. There’s Gerald, the father of the family he’s living with who knows the “price of nothing but champagne and haircuts,” (this is definitely a goal I have), or Lady Partridge, a family friend, who examines what Nick is reading with “the mocking contentment of the non-reader.” I also enjoyed the gentle influence of the Victorians in the moral voice of the narrator. (For example, Nick at favourite cruising spot ” preened in pardonable ways” we are told)

There’s some awkwardness when the book bounces ahead a number of years, but Hollinghurst manages to resolve the book’s arc neatly and satisfyingly. A great book, that while very long is over far too soon.

Sometimes you begin a novel and immediately feel comfortable. You know right away that this novelist understands the importance of plot, of interesting characters, of climax and resolution. For some readers, this will mark him out as a second rate. Some readers, clearly on a different intellectual plane to mine, feel that the truly quality novel should require more effort to read than it took to write – that is, be plotless and boring.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP has plot galore. It begins before Garp’s birth and follows him through childhood to his career as a successful writer, to his murder at the hands of extreme feminists. It’s absorbing from the first page. Occasionally Garp’s short stories are inserted in the text, which usually is for me – like dreams – something to be skipped. However so able is Irving as a writer that he manages to mix these fictional fictions with his fiction and still keep the arc going. Amazing.

An important theme of this novel is the impact of feminism on American society. One realizes, when seeing how hard Irving has to work to engage with feminism, how central the oppression of women was to the functioning of that society. It’s hard to understand now, from our perspective, all this agonizing; and it’s an interesting counterpoint to the last book I read, Simone de Beauvoir’s MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, which is about the very birth of feminism.

Garp, in a typical male-author-of-the-70s kind of way, is happy in his marriage but still has a bunch of stupid and mildly gross affairs (babysitters etc). This is not a very successful part of the novel. I think that certain experiences of certain demographics should be considered as having been entirely described. Certain authors have entirely covered certain areas in detail, and should be considered as owning those areas. Eg: unemployed families in the Midwest during the Great Depression (Steinbeck; childhood in France at the end of the nineteenth century (Proust – take note de Beauvoir). Unfortunately, adulterous men in late twentieth century America is John Updike, not John Irving, I’m afraid.

I became familiar with the private life of Simone de Beauvoir about a decade ago when I read the three volumes of the Sartre’s letters to her. I know these two are central figures in the existential movement, which redefined modern consciousness, etc etc, but what I really got from his letters was that Simone really needed to break up with Sartre. They were having an ‘open’ relationship, allegedly, which mostly just involved Sartre sleeping with lots of skanks and describing it to her in dreadful detail, e.g., her pubic hair was brown, (I am not exaggerating). Oh GOD Simone. Break up with him.

Anyway, this memoir covers her early life. To learn how she was brought up, in what a conservative and repressive environment, makes you all the more amazed that she managed to become who she was: a central figure in twentieth century thought, and, incredibly SINGLE. Take her father’s compliment to her: Simone, he said, you are fit to be a companion to a hero. Wow.

The young Simone loves Jo, the independent hero of LM Montgomery’s LITTLE WOMEN. I found this quite charming, as lots of studious spotty girls have loved Jo. There’s something very charming about LM Montgomery reaching out to Simone de Beauvoir, who reaches out to us today. It’s the thin line of smart and overly serious girls through history.

She graduates from pleasure reading to very serious philosophical reading, attending the Sorbonne. Simone and co. were just on the verge of developing that godless cosmology which has given birth to our tired, cynical LOLcats age, but they still worked on it in the spirit of their times, which a tireless and touching optimism, totally foreign to us today.

Here she is on socialists: I thought the word had an evil ring; a socialist couldn’t possibly be a tormented soul; he was pursuing ends that were both secular and limied: such moderation irritated me from the outset

. Or on her boyfriend, who is not sure what to do with his life:

Afterall, I told myself, I have no right to blame him for an inconsequence which is that of life itself: it leads us to a certain conclusions and then reveals their emptiness

There are glimpses of the later, letter writing Simne with whom I am familiar. Here is a man off to the war, and leaving her his favourite clock for safekeeping. She barely knows this man, and he confesses, apropos of nothing:

. . .he was a Jew, an illegitimate child, and a sexual maniac: he could only love women weighing more than fifteen stone.; Stepha had been the one exception in his life: hehadhoped that, despite her small stature, she would be able to give him, thanks to her intelligence, an illusion of immense size. The war swept him away; he never came back for his clock.

And on Sartre:

He was still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini.

Clearly I am still young, I feel emotional about everything after just one martini. Maybe I’m not young, just a lightweight.

Also touching is Simone’s friendship with Zaza, a girl she met in high school, who renamed her friend throughout her early life, fighting with her a brave battle against family and society. Zaza dies of meningtius, which Simone believes is exacerbated by her battle against her family’s marriage plans for her. The last line of the book is a tribute to her:

She has often appeared to me at night, her face all yellow under a pink sun-bonnet, and seeming to gaze reproachfully at me. We had fought together against the revolting fate that had lain ahed of us, and for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death.

The battles of these early feminists puts into rather harsh relief women today who can’t even face having a little argument with their own husbands about having to do the dishes. Nice work, twenty first century ladies.

This novel begins with an elderly lady deciding to get married, and broadly follows the impact that this has on her immediate family. I found this to be a very carefully executed and tightly edited modern novel, so well-behaved as to be entirely forgettable.

I use my Kindle to note interesting passages or ideas in books, and it’s rare for me not to find any at all in a book; but I’m afraid that this was case here, and I don’t think it’s just because I read it on a 17 hr drive from Cape Town to Joburg. It found the family dynamic to be entirely ordinary, the arc predictable, and the themes old hat. I almost feel bad to take such a dislike to a book so ordinary.

I’ve read and loved ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and THE ROAD. The latter I finished in tears as the bath water cooled around me. In this case, third time is apparently not the charm because I found BLOOD MERIDIAN a disappointment.

I suspect this is because I can now see the book as part of a pattern of the author’s interests. It is set in the American West, and is about a group of men who ride out to kill some other men. Just like THE ROAD and ALL THE PRETTY HORSES were about men on a quest to kill other men. Two are sort of horse related, one more cannibal related, but that’s the basic MO. It’s violent, everybody’s silent, everybody’s men.

I guess I found it sort of dull. I mean just try this:

They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry rounds of turds of goats and they road with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

The choice of the word ‘enfilade’ was the one that cracked this camel’s back. I mean REALLY, CORMAC MCCARTHY REALLY? Do you really need to use a shooting term for describing people walking in single file? And when I say people, I mean men. Because Mr McCarthy sure as hell is not interested in women. I can’t recall off hand any women in these books, but if they do exist and I’ve forgotten I bet you any money they are rape victims.

There were still beautiful bits.

The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.

I love that about the mountains. I can hardly look at them anymore without hearing that line.

What makes me especially sad is that I think this may have ruined THE ROAD for me, which was previously one of my favourite books. It’s no longer a great book about meaning in the face of adversity, but rather some plump middle aged man sweating out his fantasies.