Year: 2015

As I am in Egypt I am making an effort to read Egyptian books. Helpfully, the tour company gave a suggested reading list. Horrifyingly, not one of these was by an Egyptian. This is particularly appalling, as Egypt is one of the few African countries to have a Nobel Laureate in Literature – Naguib Mahfouz (along with Zimbabwe – thank you, Doris Lessing). I’ve read Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, so I decided to go with another Egyptian, Aswany, whose THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING was a huge best seller in the Arab world at the turn of this century.

The books centres on the inhabitants of a single building in Cairo, from the poor people who live in slum conditions on the roof to the somewhat wealthier people who live inside the building itself. I was described as Dickensian in scope, so I was all ready for a really good long read. In the end, it was hardly more than a tasty snack. A huge cast of characters was introduced, I was just getting interested in them – and then it was over. What there was I enjoyed – the hard working poor young man who becomes an extremist, the dissolute old man who surprises himself by falling in love, the businessman who gets in too deep with the military – but I wish there had been much much more.

This is a great book about something we all have to face at some point: death. It’s written from a doctor’s perspective, which is interesting, because you would expect doctors to be experts on the subject. Gawande however makes it clear that they are not. Doctors are really focused on life – on sustaining it at all costs – and really have little training on what to do about death. It’s unfortunate then that death in our culture is now very much in their hands, as the end of lives are increasingly medicalised.

And the end of our lives are getting longer and longer, with us all facing decades of frailty. Incredibly, average life expectancy in the Roman Empire was just 28, and in the US in 1900 it was still under 50, and its only recently that the 80s have been reached, so really we are very new to all this. Right now our solution is: hospital. As recently as 1945, according to Gawande, most deaths in the US occurred at home, but now they mostly happen in hospital.

The book really made me think about what I hope will be my long old age. Currently many care homes ‘protect’ the elderly to the point that they rob them of all the things that make life worth living – they are not allowed to dance, to keep pets, sometimes even to walk. For the terminally ill, there is very little understanding of how to talk about the inevitable, with many patients not entering hospice when they probably should. Amazingly, studies are now showing that those entering hospice sooner actually live longer than those who are ‘treated,’ reporting greater levels of happiness – and – get this – their relatives reportingt a more manageable level of grief after they die.

I highly recommend this book. We’re all likely to live a very long time, which means we have a lot of years to be old and ill. As Philip Roth cheerfully put it: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

Here is a book about Estonia during the second world war. First question: where is Estonia? It’s one of these little countries, always about to be gobbled up by larger powers, and this is pretty much what their war was about. They support the Germans, because they don’t want to be subsumed by Russia, and it’s interesting to read for once a book in which the Germans are the heroes. It’s all extraordinarily Eastern European. Enjoy this:

Maybe life was so fragile and meaningless that there was no need to add to their troubles. There was headcheese to be made, lard to be rendered; there were intestines to be salted for next year’s sausage – so much work to do, all to maintain the fragile lives of others.

I love it! The despair, the disgusting food, it’s everything you want from that part of the world.

The story is about a family in which one cousin fights for Estonian independence (does not go well) while the other strategically flip-flops from Communism to Fascism, depending on who is winning (goes very well). It’s very well written, and very engaging, but left me with sort of a bad taste in my mouth, as the traitor/pragmatist succeeds at every turn, with the final wages of sin for him being a nice lifestyle (which in this context is access to restricted shops, where the mincemeat is not mixed with rat). I guess in fiction we expect the triumph of the underdog; I found it upsetting to see the underdog executed.

Oksanen is a gifted writer, though for me her style is sometimes overblown. Here is a good sample, which moves from the ridiculous to the sublime:

The stars sifted through the clouds into her eyes, and her eyes were like forest doves bathed in milk. Darkness covered my awkwardness; I didn’t open my mouth. Tender feelings didn’t fit the time. I put my hand on her neck and wrapped a curled wisp of her hair around my finger. Her neck was soft, like peacetime.

These are the diaries of a woman from her adolescence to her old age. They are a record of her entire life, across 60 years. They are therefore almost impossible to review, being a comprehensive picture of a life as it was actually lived. I had a bit of a weep in Luxor airport after I’d finished all 700 pages. Not because she died in the end, obviously. This being real life and not fiction that was how it was always going to finish. It was also not really because of how she lived; she didn’t really achieve anything major. She was not heroic in the war. She always wanted to be a writer, but the one book published in her lifetime did not sell well and was remaindered. It’s the very ordinariness of her life that made this book so touching. At its heart was an extraordinary struggle to lead a life of meaning, which is at the heart I suspect of every life, however ordinary. We just don’t usually get a chance to get such a close up view of it.

The diaries start in 1925, when Jean is 15. She studies architecture and journalism in college, but has a small amount of inherited money, and so never really sets to any work with great seriousness. One of the fun aspects of the book is seeing how, as with everyone, Jean’s judgement of herself changes drastically day to day. Here she is:

For the sort of jobs I am after I lack, at the age of 33, experience.Oh God, those wasted years! If this is ever read by posterity, let posterity ponder on this: You cannot run away from life. If you try, life will only catch you in the end, and the longer you’ve been running the more it will hurt. Learn to be hurt as early as possible, welcome being hurt; face pain, humiliation and defeat in your teens; accept them, let them go through you, so that you cease to be afraid of them.

Then a day later she quotes from a letter from a friend: Lot of nonsense about your wasted years. No such thing if carefully analysed.

We can’t all be ready to make a spring off the board on leaving college. Think of all the advantages of the spirit you have had in the past years

.

It’s also enjoyable to be part of her private moments:

Alone again. Curtains drawn. Little cat out saying hullo to the new moon. Some woman drivelling on the radio.

Or the mix of her tiny life with the big world:

A light fall of snow and Japan’s declaration of war surprised us on Sunday night.

Jean never marries, and what she sees as a failure worries her very much for a large part of her life, though she is aware that she was of a generation where two world wars left too few husbands to go round. Weirdly it is only when the money runs out that she really starts to find contentment. She is forced to find an income, and so opens a book store. This draws her into the life of the community, and the happiest portion of her life is that after fifty. She gives up the idea of writing, she realises how much she likes to live alone, she develops a great love for her cats and for her garden – here she is on her gardening:

This sort of thing is what delights me and make me feel fulfilled – I am ‘creating’. A slow developer, but now at last coming into full flower. And to discover, you silly young idiots, that sex does not matter!! Shut up, you argumentative neurotic lot. One can live a full and joyful life without it and still stay reasonably unshrivelled and unembittered. Believe me!

I really recommend these diaries. They powerfully reminded me of that Alan Bennett quote, which is to the effect that when we read we feel a hand reaching out across history to touch our own; we read to know we are not alone.

If you are Zimbabwean it is really pretty rare to read a book, or see a film, that is of your experience. I’m quite jealous really of Americans, and Indians, and Nigerians, with their Holly, and Bolly, and Nollywoods.

So I particularly enjoyed this book, which is not just a story of Zimbabwe, but a story of my Zimbabwe; it’s the the story of a girl who went to my high school, Harare’s Donimican Convent, and ended up in Chikarubi, Harare’s largest prison. Luckily I can only relate to the first part of the sentence. But if I could not relate to any of it, I would still have enjoyed the book, for it is a complex and interesting work.
Memory is an albino woman who at nine years old leaves her poor black family to live with a wealthy white man. Many years later she is falsely convicted of his murder, and ends up in jail. The book is her account of her life, in which we learn that all is not what it seems, both about her old family and her new father. More than the plot, I enjoyed the twisty, elaborate dialogue, which is specially Zimbabwean. I’ll quote at length – here’s a woman telling how she came to be in Chikarubi:

I was just coming from the shops, ndazvitengera zvangu yekera yangu, ndazvitengera drink yangu, it was the first time that I had seen Cherry Plum in ages, from the time I was a girl I have always liked it even though it makes your tongue purple, so I bought some and I was so happy, and I bought it with my own money, and I was drinking it and laughing with my friend Shupi who lives in Jerusalem when this woman called Rosewinter who lives in Canaan walked past us, and I know her because she tried to take my boyfriend, he used to live close by Shupi in Jerusalem, in fact that is how we met until his landlord kicked him out for not paying rent on time, but I can’t really say that he was my proper boyfriend as such because he was married even though his wife lived at their village. So as she passed us she was talking and I heard her say to her friend, ndiye uya anoroya, and I said what did you say, and she said, ehe, I said you are a witch who eats people, what are you going to do about it, you witch? And I said, what, what do you mean I am a witch, and I said to myself, no, I cannot allow this, how can I allow this Rosewinter person, mumwewo mukadzi zvake akabarwa seni, to call me a witch while I just stand here drinking Cherry Plum like nothing is happening, and she said again, you are a witch, and then I took my bottle even though it still had some drink in it and I took it and I hit her with it and she screamed maiwe, the witch is killing me, and that made me even angrier so I hit her again and the bottle broke on her head; you have never seen anything like it because the bottle broke and there was this blood now mixed with the Cherry Plum and I turned to Shupi for help but she and the other woman’s friend were busy fighting, but when the police came, they both of them managed to run away even though Shupi left her new wig behind, it was a boy-cut style, which was a pity because kanga kakmufita zvisingaiti kawig kacho, and this woman was now shouting my head, my head, my head, kani my head, like I had killed her.

Now I’m homesick.

This book is a reminder to me not to get sour in my old age. The story has nothing to do with old age, but it’s still the lesson I take: it’s more about the author than it is about her book. I expected to enjoy this novel, as it’s the third in a trilogy, and I have read and re-read the first two THE PURSUIT OF LOVE and LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE may times. They’re fatnastic, fun, clever books, great for reading when you can’t sleep, and I re-open them often.

I should have been wary of the fact that DON’T TELL ALFRED is not typically sold with the other two. The publishers clearly know that something’s not quite right. In this book the satire has become cruel, and the laughter unkind. The first books are set in the upper class English world Mitford grew up in, in 1920s Britain and are a charming account of a world that’s long gone. This latter book, written decades after the first two, is set in the 1960s, and Mitford is clearly not able to accept what she’s lost. She talks a great deal about the modern world, from eastern religion to rock ‘n’ roll, and comes across as nothing so much as bitter. Here she is on her son speaking: “Basil went on in this curious idiom, which consisted in superimposing, whenever he remembered to do so, cockney or American slang on the ordinary speech of an educated person.”

There’s lots of other humourless stuff like this, on Buddhism being obviously ‘bunkum’, and so on. All a bit much from a woman who accepted as a charming eccentricity her uncle’s love of the ‘child hunt’ (that is: when the foxes were not available for hunting, he’d use her and her cousins as prey, and chase them across the fields with dogs). Sorry Ms Mitford. It’s not such a big deal after all; there’s still the other two, and they’re fantastic, some of my favourite night time companions.

I’d never heard of Anne Tyler before, which surprised me, as she’s a prolific and well regarded author, and a Pulitzer prize winner. This novel tells the story of a long marriage, centred around a house that was built by the husband’s father.
I typically struggle with these very domestic stories, but this is as good an example as any, with believable characters and well observed moments. Here we are when they are young, with the husband-to-be watching his sister in irritation: “ (She) would be eagerly nodding her head in her demure new pillbox hat, giving a liquid laugh that any brother would know to be false”
And here’s a description of his family; “Their leanness was the rawboned kind, not the lithe elastic slenderness of people in magazine ads, and something a little too sharp in their faces suggested that while they themselves were eating just fine, perhaps their forefathers had not.”
For me in the end while I enjoyed the novel I cannot say it moved me. After watching the couple’s whole lives unfold I was left a little – blah. And yet still I can only admire Ms Tyler’s artistry. Here we are, at the end, with the husband in a car. The wife is dead, so the husband is moving into a care home, and his grandchildren have just had their last Haloween at the house. The decorations are not yet down: “Look past him out the rain-spattered window. Focus purely on the scenery, which had changed to open countryside now, leaving behind the blighted row houses, leaving behind the station under its weight of roiling dark clouds, and the empty city streets farther north with the trees turing inside out in the wind, and the house on Bouton Road where the filmy-skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with nobody left to watch”
See what she did there? It’s a bit barf inducing but I admire it.

This book is based on the true story of a tiny Derbyshire village that was stricken with the plague. Rather than flee, the villagers decided to quarantine themselves, to avoid infecting neighbouring communities. They succeeded in saving their neighbours, but about two-thirds of the village died. In short, it’s kind of an apocalypse novel. And I love a good apocalypse novel. It’s chock full of terrible moral questions, which is of course the best part of the apocalypse (at least in fiction. In real life, the best bit will be still being alive).

Early on the villagers make the brilliant plan of killing the only people in the village with any kind of medical knowledge – the female herabists (aka, witches). You then begin to feel really grateful for modern medicine, as the villagers try and cure themselves by randomly eating various bits of leaves and bushes in the hopes that something will work. Big props to the Enlightenment, you guys. And big props also to Fleming, for the invention of antibiotics, which is still the only cure for the plague.

I enjoyed this book very much. However I struggled as I did with Brooks’ MARCH that it works more as an interesting collation of research than exactly as a novel. There’s a also a bit of challenge in how contemporary the characters feel. They are all busy enjoying roses and whatever, but I am quite sure that in reality the inner life of people of the seventeenth century was more along the lines of “it mislikes me not when the devil does be upon the bacon” or whatever: inscrutable historical weirdness.

This book is about a time travel machine repair man. I thought for sure I would like it. But I should have been warned by the fact that the protagonist’s name is Charles Yu, the same as the author’s. This kind of thing is always a RED ALERT that you are going to have a clever-clever novel. And indeed it is CLEVER-CLEVER. There is all sorts of pretty predictable stuff about selfhood and blah blah can I read a book before I have written it and blah blah. I had to give up part way through.

This book feels kind of imitative. Perhaps this is because it sparked a lot of imitators, and I read these imitators before the original. It tells of a dystopian future society where the populace is kept entranced by television (all four walls of the rooms), by fast cars, etc. Books and thought are basically planned, and the public don’t feel their loss very much. Cue joke about today.

Ray Bradbury had a long life, and in the Forward he reflects on the book FIFTY YEARS after he wrote it. Apparently he finished it off in nine days in some kind of typewriter room in the local YMCA. Imagine living so long that you wrote a major book half a century ago? It gives me hope I’ve still got time. For what, I’m not quite sure.