Year: 2014

Apparently I am in the mood for novels about mid-century men losing their wives. Herzog has recently been dumped by his wife, and is slowly losing his mind. He endlessly writes letters to different people, with the novel moving around across his entire lifetime. Usually I find this kind of thing deeply annoying in novels, but Saul Bellow is a remarkable writer and manages to hold it together. Here for example is Herzog’s lawyer:

Simkin, sitting in his office, occupied a grand Sykes chair, beneath enormous rows of law books. A man is born to be orphaned, and to leave orphans after him, but a chair like that chair, if he can afford it, is a great comfort.

Hilarious.

Less hilarious is the reminder of world population in the 50s:

I know its no cinch to manage the affairs of this planet with its population exceeding 2 billion. The number itself is something of a miracle and throws our practical ideas into obsolescence.

Apparently in forty years since we’ve managed to triple world population. That is something of a miracle.

It was also interesting to see in this novel, as in THE SPORTSWRITER which I read recently, that in the past, the wife got to keep the children, no matter what. It’s pretty disgusting and sexist. So is Herzog’s view on a twelve year girl he sees riding a horse:

In jodphurs, boots and bowler she had the hauteur of a female child who knows it won’t be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt.

I have some experience in the twelve year old girl area, having been one myself, and I can assure you that your nubility (?) never crosses your mind.

Herzog eventually attempts to murder his wife. I can’t tell you if he succeeded, as fifty pages from the end, my shampoo burst on the book. Sorry Saul Bellow.

This is among the first ever accounts of drug addiction, and is as boring and as glamorous as every other account of drug addiction.

Every druggie’s story includes an awful lot of banging on about taking drugs, I guess because the authors are drug addicts. I was amazed by the similarity between this book, written 1821, and BAD NEWS by Edward St Aubyn, written 1997, which I read earlier this year. Apparently the druggie experience has changed little in the last century and a half. It’s truly incredible how interesting De Quincey thinks the number of drops he took on each day is. Unusually, he isn’t shy to elaborate on why he took so many drugs – that being, he really liked taking drugs.

I speak from the ground of a large and profound personal experience: whereas most of the unscientific authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of those who have written expressly on the materia medica, make it evident, from the horror they express of it, that their experimental knowledge of its action is none at all.

Indeed, his entire first half of the novel is called THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM, while the second half is THE PAINS OF OPIUM

I found this book a trifle boring, but also rather charmingly well written. Try this, on walking around London:

Some of these rambles led me great distances, for an opium eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical priniples, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I cam suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I concieve, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.

It makes you wish he hadn’t wasted his time being an opium fiend, and instead actually worked on being a writer.

This novel is an interesting window into New York in the 1920s. It tells the story of two mixed race girls, Clare and Irene, who were friends in childhood. As adults, Clare now ‘passes’ as white. She is married to a white man, and is lonely, so takes the dangerous step of mixing once again with the non-white community. Irene is married to a black man who is a doctor. Their marriage is in trouble, and she begins to suspect that Clare is having an affair with him. She ‘outs’ her old friend to her white husband, and there is a strange interaction at a party, where Clare dies by falling from a window, and it is unclear if her husband kills her, Irene kills her, or she kills herself. It’s an interesting little book, but I’m sorry to report that I read it so long ago I can’t remember much else about it . . .

The sub-title of this book is “The Classic Account of One Woman’s Epic and Eccentric Journey in the 1890s.” This is understatement. This one woman is BONKERS.

Mary Kingsley was one of these unfortunate English women who are forced to say home to look after their elderly parents till late in life. When they died within 6 weeks of each other, in 1892, this lady, who had never left her small provincial town suddenly decided that obviously her next steps were to travel to West Africa.

She had no experience, no supplies, and very little money, but off she went, allegedly collecting fish for the British Museum but mostly just having a fabulous time, slogging her way through jungles full of malaria, wild animals, and actual cannibals. One night, when sleeping in a hut, she decided to open a bag hanging from the rafters.

I then shook its contents out in my hat, for fear of losing anything of value. They were a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears, and other portions of the human frame. The hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled

These Victorians are incredible. I can’t even handle dirty public toilets! How will I ever be epic?

The book is basically a diary, and is essentially written in the comic mode, and is full of the joys of travel. Here she is after crossing a swamp:

One and all, we got horribly infested with leeches, having a frill of them round our necks like astrakhan collars, and our hands covered with them, when we came out. It was for the best that we had some trade salt with us. It was most comic to see us salting each other; but in spite of salt’s efficacious action I was quite faint from lost of blood, and we all presented a ghastly sight as we made our way on into N’dorko.

You could almost forgot how awful it must have been, because she writes so joyfully, but then she will casually mention how her face is bleeding from sun tan when she smiles. As she says:

There is nothing like entering into the spirit of a thing like this if you mean to enjoy it, and after all that’s the wisest thing to do out here, for there’s nothing between enjoying it and dying of it. The sun is broiling hot; everything one has got to sit on or catch hold of is as hot as a burning brick, and there is no cabin, nor even locker, on our craft; so I prop myself up against my collecting box and lazily take stock of the things around me, and write.

As the book goes on the determined cheeriness almost starts to seem insane, and indeed at one point, when considering whether or not to climb a mountain, she sends her men down, but carries on her self, saying “if she dies it will not matter a ha’penny worth to anyone”. You begin to wonder how much of the trip is for fun, and how much for suicide. And yet there is so much charm in her small personal account of her crazy adventure, I can only hope she was as happy as she tells us:

I went to my comfortable rooms, but could not turn in, so fascinating was the warmth and beauty down here; and as I sat on the verandah overlooking Victoria and the sea, in the dim soft light of the stars, with the fire flies around me, and the lights of Victoria away below, and heard the soft rush of the Lukola River, and the sound of the sea-surf on the rocks, and the tom-tomming and singing of the natives, all matching and mingling together, ‘Why did I come to Africa?” thought I. Why! who would not come to its twin brother hell itself for all the beauty and the charm of it!

Typhoid got her in 1900.

It’s a strange oversight that I’ve never read this classic of twentieth century American fiction. Having read it, I now wish it was an oversight that had continued. It tells the story of the doomed attempt of one family to bury their dead mother in her family’s homeland. This sample tells you everything you need to know:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when youar eemptied for sleep, you are not. And when are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and what he is not.

Doesn’t it just make you want to tear Faulkner limb from limb and drink his blood? Likewise the literary establishment? Or how’s this, on a young girl:

Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of the three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.

WTF, FAULKNER, WTF.

The other thing I particularly hated was the fact that everyone and everything in this story was miserable and/or mean. When people write comedy, in which no one is miserable or mean, we all know that this is fantasy; for some reason, in the opposite case, it’s often considered gritty realism. I totally disagree. I am quite sure that there are funny bits in everything, even a hotel room suicide, and any novel that doesn’t acknowledge that fact is poorer for it.

Regular readers of this blog will know how I love MY STRUGGLE, a 6 volume, 4000 page account of the life of one ordinary Norwegian man.

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY is Book 1 of the series. I had been avoiding it now for about a year, reading Books 2 and 3 first, because I thought that its central plot, of the death of Karl Ove’s father, might be a little too close to home for me. You can certainly tell its the beginning, because it kicks off in fine Karl Ove form, with that typical opening for any autobiography: a reflection on death

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the blood will begin to run towards the body’s lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whiter skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain.”

Oh Karl Ove! You’re such a kidder. Then he goes on to the storage of dead bodies:

“A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our dead. . . .no, the way we remove bodies has never been a subject of debate, it has always been just something we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but everyone feels: if your father dies on the lawn one windswept Sunday in autumn, you carry him indoors if you can, but if you can’t you at least cover him with a blanket.

“

In this novel, Karl Ove’s father, a reclusive alcoholic has just died, and himself and his brother Yngve must go to clean up the filthy home he was living in with his senile and also alcoholic mother – Karl Ove’s grandmother. We hear all the mundane details: going to the grocery store to buy bleach, stopping for cigarette breaks, etc; but also a horrifyingly honest assessment of Karl Ove’s family relationships:

When we were growing up, I chatted all the time with Yngve and we never had any secrets, but at some juncture, perhaps as early as when I was a gymnas, this changed: from then on I was immensely conscious of who he was and who I was when we were talking, all spontaneity vanished, every statement I made was either planned in advance or analysed retrospectively, mostly both, apart from when I was drinking, then I regained the old freedom. With the exception of Tonje and my mother, that was how I behaved with everyone: I couldn’t sit and chat to people any more, my awareness of the situation was too actute, and that put me outside it. Whether it was the same for Yngve I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so, it didn’t seem so when I saw him with others. Whether he knew that was how I felt, I don’t know, but something told me he did. Often it felt to me as I were false, or deceitful, since I never played with an open deck, I was always calculating and evaluating. This didn’t bother me any more, it had become my life, but right now, at the outset of a long car journey, now that dad was dead and so on, I experienced a yearning to escape from myself or at least the part that guarded me so assiduously.

This impresses me as a really good account of how some people I know manage their lives; but it also amazes me, when I think that Karl Ove’s brother is very much alive and well and reading Karl Ove’s books. Can you imagine writing and publishing this sort of thing about your most intimate relationships? Karl Ove always makes me feel better about everything. It’s so very rare to hear anything even close to the truth about how people really are, inside. One’s more likely to get this kind of honesty in literature, than in life, but in either case its a special thing, and immensely comforting; it makes you feel less alone in this world. He’s even honest about luggage:

Even though the case was heavy I carried it by the handle as I walked into the departure hall. I detested the tiny wheels, first of all because they were feminine, thus not worthy of a man, a man should carry, not roll, secondly because they suggested easy options, short cuts, savings, rationality, when I despised and opposed wherever I could, even where it was of the most trivial significance.

And about his childhood relationship to plumbing:

He also knew I was frightened of the sound the pipes made when you turned on the hot water, a shrill screech that quickly changed to knocking, impossible for me to cope with, I had to take to my heels, so we had a deal whereby he wouldn’t pull the plug after washing in the morning but leave the water in the sink for me. Accordingly, every morning for perhaps six months I washed my face and hands in Yngve’s dirty water.

All six books have already been out in Norwegian for some time, but the last three are yet to be released in English. HURRY UP TRANSLATOR!!!

It’s never a good sign when I look back at a book in order to blog it and see I have not highlighted any passages as being of special interest. Indeed, I did not find this book to be of any special interest.

It’s a novelisation of Ernest Hemingway’s four marriages. His first is to a nice young woman he meets in Chicago; the second to a much wealthier woman who can fund his career; the third to a hotshot journalist, who proves too successful for his taste; and the fourth to an unfortunate lady who gets the booby prize: a fat, alcoholic old man whose writing days are behind him.

Sounds like a good basis for a book, right? And yet somehow it was dull and I’ve already forgotten that I read it.

This is a novel of the First World War written by a veteran of it. I hate to say it, as it seems disrespectful, but it is deeply dull. I guess it shows that simply having lived through something does not give you the ability to explain it.

HER PRIVATES WE tells the story of a man named Bourne who is in the front lines. Because this is a British novel, the main narrative tension (other than that of being randomly killed) is around . . . wait for it . . . class. Apparently he is of a slightly higher class than the other privates, and thus should be in a higher military rank. I think you must have to be British to find this compelling.

The book is also extraordinarily dated. Here’s a sample:

“In the shuddering revulsion from death one turns instinctively to love as an act which seems to affirm the completeness of being. In the trenches, the sense of this privation vanished; but it pressed on men whenever they moved back again to the borders of civilised life, which is after all only the organisation of man’s appetites, for food or for women, the two fundamental necessities of nature”

Ladies, that’s giving it to us more frankly than we usually hear it.

The book ends abruptly, mid-narrative arc, with Bourne’s death. It is quite random, with no literary foreshadowing, no build-up, no resolution and no meaning, and he is quickly forgotten by his lower class colleagues. In some ways this was the most interesting part of the book, where the author abandoned the conventions of literature for a taste of real life / real death.

This book tells the story of one weekend in the life of a divorced man. It won the Pulitzer, and is about more than just a weekend; it’s about how you accept the scope – be it limited or large – of your life.

The man’s divorce still smarts, and much of the book is about absorbing that loss. Here he is, rather beautifully, on his marriage: “We paid bills, shopped, went to movies, bought cars and cameras and insurance, cooked out, went to cocktail parties, visited schools, and romanced each other in the sweet, cagey way of adults I looked out my window, stood in my yard sunsets with a sense of solace and achievement, cleaned my rain gutters, eyed my shingles, put up storms, fertilized regularly, computed my equity, spoke to my neighbours in an interested voice – the normal applauseless life of us all.”

I just love ‘in an interested voice’ – sometimes I think that’s my whole life. He is full of dreadful, despairing wisdom, like:

“For now let me say only this: if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or you life will be ruined.”

and

“Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.”

So, full mid-life crisis mode. Curiously, he’s only 37. This book was written in the 1980s, and I guess people married and had children sooner then, so also had the mid-life crises early. After a while, I started to find it annoying. I wanted to say: protagonist! you are living through the last golden days of being a middle class American man. Enjoy it! Feminism and China are coming to end it.

But who can fail to enjoy this description of air travel, for which I can forgive him everything: “It must be said, of course, that the interiors of all up-to-date conveyances of travel put one in mind of the midwest. The snug-fitted overhead bins, the comfy pastel recliners, disappearing tray-tables and smorgasboard air of anything-you-want-within-sensible-limits. All products of midwestern ingenuity, as surely as a waltz is Viennese.”

THE GRASS IS SINGING is Doris Lessing’s first novel, and in it she comes out swinging. The book opens with a snippet about the murder of a white woman by her ‘houseboy,’ and Lessing’s first line is: “People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.”

Ouch. Thanks Doris. I guess if Zimbabwe is only to have one Nobel laureate in literature, I am glad it is her. It is a fiery book and I admire her courage in having written it in the Rhodesia in the 40s. It has the distinct smell of burning bridges to it, having been written just before she left the country forever. She was not yet 30, self-educated, and had just walked out on a marriage and two children.

The story focuses on one Mary Turner, who marries because she feels she must, and leaves her happy life in Salisbury for a remote farm. Her husband is rather a failure as a farmer, and she becomes increasingly eccentric/insane over time. She becomes a little obsessed with her domestic worker,and when she dismisses him at last he returns to kill her. If this seems like an odd summary, this is because this is an odd book. It’s stressful to read, pulsing with complicated feelings about race and about the land.

Like most people from small and poor countries, I have little experience of fiction about my home, so I found it very interesting in that way. For example, there’s something about the solidarity of the small community that’s still there:

“It’s not customary in this country, is it?” he asked slowly, out of the depths of his bewilderment. And he saw, as he spoke, that the phrase ‘this country’ which is like a call to solidarity for most white people, meant nothing to her.

A powerful and unusual book. It made me glad Independence came when it did, so I could grow up in Zimbabwe, not Rhodesia.