Year: 2015

God what is it with me and books about alcoholics? Every book I pick up at the moment seems to be about sad men with drinking problems.

And the problem with a drinking problem is that it is fairly dull. You get drunk. You promise yourself you won’t drink again. You do. Etc. I appreciate it must be terrible to live through, but after the first three or four books it is pretty terrible to read through too.

I couldn’t even finish this book, not just because it was boring, but because it was really A LOT. Try this extract, which is, I’m sorry to say to you, about sex:

But he could feel now, too, trying the prelude, the prepatory nostalgic phrases on his wife’s senses, the image of his possession, like that jeweled gate the desperate neophyte, Yesod-bound, projects for the thousandth time on the heavens to permit passage of his astral body, fading, and slowly, inexorably, that of a cantina, when in dead silence and peace it first opens in the morning, taking its place.

I mean: ASTRAL BODY?

This is my third re-read in a row. I’m not sure I’ve ever done this much sequential re-reading. It’s like I don’t have the energy to meet anyone new. I can’t handle the degree of choice required in choosing and then actually continuing to read a new novel. And what can you say about PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? It’s a marvel. PERSUASION is my favourite of her books, but reading P & P again I was struck once more by her perfection. Dead at 41, and only 5 novels; but each a marvel. Truly, I think she is the perfect novelist.

Another re-read. Mostly between 2am and 4am.

Re-read. I’m totally addicted.

This book has a fantastic title. But that’s about all I find to commend. It’s a war novel, and when you set out to write a war novel you’ve got some very serious competition. I suspect ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT has said everything that really needs to be said; the rest of military fiction is mostly footnotes. And this is a pretty minor footnote. It’ written by a 24 year old who, once drafted, saw service mostly in the military kitchen, and it shows. The book is full of the glamour of war, and not much else. Even the traditional scene, common to all war stories, in which the young recruit is killed near the beginning, is glamorous. I’ve never read about brain splatter in so romantic a vein. Wikipedia tells me that this book spent 62 weeks at the top of the best seller lists in the 1948, but is ‘rarely read today,’ and I can see why. But what the hell. Lucky Norman Mailer. It’s not every 24 year old who manages a best seller.

Recently I have come to feel concerned that probably over the course of my lifetime I’m only going to be able to read about 3000 books, which is a tiny 0.00002% of all the 130 million books ever published. I feel I need to be more selective. Thus, my abandonment of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY by Michael Chabon. This despite it having many fine turns of phrase

“the fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings”

and comic comments, here about a salesman

“who had read widely in the literature of sales and was in fact eternally at work on a treatise-cum-autobiography he referred to sometimes as The Science of Opportunity and other times, more ruefully, as Sorrow in My Sample Case”

not to mention effective foreshadowing of the holocaust, here a Jewish child

“whose encyclopedic knowledge of the railroads of this part of Europe was in a few short years to receive a dreadful appendix”

Its in this mention of railroads that we see why I couldn’t keep going with this book, despite its many merits. It’s just so incessantly and delightedly male. If it’s not railroads, its comic books, and if its not comic books, its detailed descriptions of fights, and if not that, its just general adolescent boy friendship. SNORE. Not that some girls dont like railroads, and comic books, and fighting, but I guess I’m just not one of those girls. Its 600 some pages I could spend somewhere else.

I love this book. It’s just so easy and fun to read. It’s one of a very few books in my life that I know will cheer me up no matter what, so it has been read variously when I can’t sleep, when I’ve got too much to do, when I’ve got too little to do, and at sundry other miserable times. I did another swoop through it recently, over a couple of sleepless nights. Fabulous.

As a side point, note her Wikipedia entry, which in its opening paragraphs feels we need to know about her love life. Compare with any male author chosen at random from Wikipedia to see if ANY of them get this kind of treatment.

. This is a fantastic novel. I have no idea how I could possibly have never heard of it before. It’s so wonderful I gobbled the whole thing down in about two days, unforgivably even reading it when I was supposed to be looking at cheetahs.

THE KNOWN WORLD tells the story of a slave owner in the late 1850s. The oddity of this story is that he is black. His parents were slaves who managed to buy their freedom, and their son – now free to do whatever he pleases – chooses to own slaves himself. His parents are horrified, and when they visit him refuse to sleep in the ‘big house’ with him, but instead sleep in the slave quarters. The book is interesting then as an unusual take on what we think we understand about slavery; but what makes it really compelling is the really incredible vividness of the world created. There are – I would estimate – at least fifty to seventy unique characters in this book, each expertly written enough that you feel that you are getting an overview of an entire community. Characters appear and die in a paragraph. “My daddy made it for me,” a slave child, Tessie, responds to a question about her doll. In the next sentence she is dying. “She would repeat those words just before she died, a little less than 90 years later.”

To say therefore that the novel is ‘about a slave owner’ is over-simplifying – it’s about an entire world. And it’s gorgeously written. Here’s a man giving another man some sweets for his children:

He went into the jail and returned with a small burlap sack no bigger than a puppy’s head. “Some sweets for them chaps, Barnum. Some horehound. A little peppermint for the chaps”

Puppy’s head? Horrifying metaphor. I love it. Or here’s man planning the gravestone for his cousin, who he just murdered to acquire some gold coins:

“All the gold would mean that he could buy a giant tombstone for John’s grave, one as large as the man himself had been. He envisioned a tombstone so big that wild and insane men would come down from their lairs in the Virginia mountains and worship at the tombstone, thinking it stood over the grave of someone who had been a god.”

Apparently Edward P Jones thought about the novel for some ten years before he wrote it, and then put the whole thing on paper in just twelve weeks after getting made redundant from his job at a tax journal. This amazes me. It’s only January, but I think we can be sure this book will make it onto my “Best of 2015” come December. Unfortunately it’s his only novel, so now I am back to reading works by lesser mortals.

I wanted to like this book. I’ve been meaning to read it for years, as it is quite famous as a commentary on Jane Eyre (my A-level set book, and thus probably unhealthily formative). It tells the story of Rochester’s ‘mad wife,’ Bertha Mason, before she comes to England. It therefore is obviously a feminist and post-colonial critique of the novel. It is also unfortunately a bit dull and tortured. Or it is so for my tastes anyway. From the moment Rochester meets her in the West Indies its clear all is going to go horribly wrong, and the deepening sense of doom makes the two hundred pages seem very long.

I felt bad not to enjoy it, because poor Jean Rhys, like another author I just finished reading, Barbara Pym, had a long period in her life when he books where out of fashioned and neglected, and she was in her 70s before she finally hit really huge success with WIDE SARGASSO SEA. The book won a major literary award, about which her only comment was “It has come too late.” Heartbreaking. Makes me wish I liked the novel.

As a side point, it’s interesting to note that it was another author in this blog, Diana Athill, who took the risk of publishing the book.

This is the story of one of Lobengula’s sons, who ended up married to a white woman and working in factory in Manchester. It’s an interesting story. In the 1890s, an impresario hired Prince Lobengula to be in a show he was taking to London called Savage South Africa, which included live presentation of major events from the Anglo Boer war (including trains and real horses) and a deeply problematic presentation of the South Africans themselves ‘exhibited’ in their kraal.

The show was hugely successful and a young woman named Kitty fell in love with the young Lobengula. They were married in the face of much opposition, and much wonder that she could love a dusky savage, etc. Check out his picture above, and you certainly won’t wonder. This man is gorgeous. Run through in your mind the other Victorian men you know – all beards and glaring – and you will not be surprised: Shaw, Dickens, Darwin . . . especially Darwin. Horrifying evidence below.

On a side point, one interesting fact I learned was that the Mormons are an important resource for historical investigation. Apparently they aim to convert as many people as possible to Mormonism, including the dead. Thus they need to know the names of the dead:

It is estimated that the Mormon Archives contain the particulars of about a sixth of the people who have had names of their own since human first developed language a hundred thousand years ago – some ten billion people, nearly all born after 1500. . . . .Their enormous database of births, baptisms and deaths is now stored on microfilm under Granite Mountain, near Salt Lake City, Utah, in a vault which can withstand the Flood predicted for the Last Days, to say nothing of thermonuclear war

The marriage ended somewhat messily, with odd accusations of finger biting, but it’s certainly an interesting episode in early international travel by Africans.