Year: 2017

Heyer created the historical romance genre and writes enjoyable escapist trash.  What I particularly enjoy is the cynicism and efficiency with which she creates it.  She has various types that she recycles across her 50+ novels.  Here’s wikipedia: 

“Heyer specialised in two types of romantic male leads, which she called Mark I and Mark II. Mark I, with overtones of Mr Rochester, was (in her words) “rude, overbearing, and often a bounder”. Mark II by contrast was debonair, sophisticated, and often a style-icon. Similarly, her heroines (reflecting Austen’s division between lively and gentle) fell into two broad groups: the tall and dashing, mannish type, and the quiet bullied type”  

VENETIA is basically a Mark I, with the bullied type.  I can’t recall much about it other than that, but it filled up a dull afternoon most pleasantly for me and most remuneratively for her estate. 

 

Read for work

This is the fourth of five novels written about an English family during the second world war.  It gives the strange thrill of time travel, because it was written by a woman who was an adult during the war, and so can remember it well, but who only wrote about it fifty years later.  It thus combines detailed historical record with a modern sensibility; it bursts with period detail but also with lesbians, abortions, and urine.  I’ve never felt so much like I was actually getting chance to know what the past was ‘really’ like.  

The cast is huge and covers multiple years.  It’s a remarkable feat of imagination and detail.  At the end, when a character mentions a childhood prank, I felt myself tearing up, as if it was my childhood; in fact it was only about two thousand pages previously.  I sped through these books at disgusting speed.  It was like I  was mainlining plot.

I had assumed in reading it that it must be in some part autobiographical. The characters are so specific and eccentric, that I felt it could only be drawn from life.  I learn from Google that indeed it is largely based on the author’s family.  A central character is married at 19 to a man of 32, just as the author was.  Unsurprisingly, this did not work out (though bizarrely her real life husband was the son of Scott of the Antartic, whose journals I read just before this – it’s a small world among the wealthy British).  

I learnt a great many things from these books about the middle years of this century, including that people had abortions without making a big deal about it; that women entered the workforce in huge numbers; that most girls didn’t expect to enjoy sex; that the war meant most homes were very cold and that powdered eggs are a thing.

The patriarchy and sound commercial judgement mean these novels are packaged like some kind of particularly twee and mumsy chick lit (just like Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy), but don’t let that put you off – these are wonderful books.

See summary of this quartet here

See summary of this quartet here.

See summary of this quartet here.

This is a doom-laden little book.  From the first page, you know things will go wrong: and not in a good way; not in a the-evil-will-be-punish’d kind of way.  It’s more in a modern, literary kind of way, that is: life is unfair and we are all incapable of making change in ourselves or in the world.  Utterly unsurprisingly, this book was shortlisted for the Booker.  The Booker loves to reward novels with this kind of message. 

I can’t deny it is well and tautly written.  It draws you horribly into the tale of a deeply pathetic attempt to organise an outing at a Factory.  The outing is organised by a girl named Freda, and as she is the only hopeful or impactful character in the piece naturally Bainbridge ensures she is punished by the narrative.  She dies on the outing, and of course not through any actual choice, but just in a stupid accident.  Then the other workers are afraid this will get them into trouble, so they cover up the death.  And that’s it.  God I loathed this book.

Sometimes after I have greatly enjoyed a book by a little-known author, I am tempted to read more from them.  This is almost always a mistake.  I really enjoyed Diana Athill’s story of her big break-up, INSTEAD OF A LETTER, and so threw caution to the winds and purchased STET, the story of her career in publishing.  I should have held on tight to that caution.   I can’t quite tell why it was so dull, as the raw material is promising: plucky young Hungarian (ie Andre Deutsch) and disappointed English debutante create publishing start-up that goes on to big success. 

“The story began with my father telling me: ‘You will have to earn a living.’  He said it to me several times during my childhood (which began in 1917), and the way he said it implied that earning one’s living was not quite natural.”

I wonder if this is part of the problem.  She was not of a class or a gender that ever had to work, so doesn’t seem to regard work as part of her own personal story.  She is bizarrely disconnected from the highs and lows of the journey, and descends to that lowest low of the upper class English memoir, name-dropping.  (Nadir of this style: Antonia Fraser’s horrifying MUST YOU GO: MY LIFE WITH HAROLD PINTER).  I did however find it useful for recommendations on what to read next, and so am picking my way through Deutsh’s back catalogue, finding such gems as the deeply obscure Zimbabwean memoir THE TOE-RAGS.  So that’s something.

The subtitle says it all: “The story of a strange upbringing in Southern Rhodesia.”  Strange it certainly is.  South Rhodesian, not so much – at least today – as Southern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe.  I would summarise by saying this is basically a story about being a poor white.  But I mean a really poor white.  The author and her siblings grow up in the rurals outside Rusape.  They get close to starving.  Their mother walks out on them when they are in junior school, to run off to Joburg with her husband’s brother.  Now there’s a novel I’d like to read, and I don’t find her behaviour so very indefensible in itself, except she runs off when both her husband and her domestic worker are away.  Luckily the worker comes home early, so the kids end up at the police station rather than the morgue. 

Then its on to their relatively wealthier aunt’s home in Salisbury, and then on to better schooling (at the Convent, my high school), and finally an almost white collar job.  As an adult the author leads a strange social life in Salisbury before the second world war, providing an interesting window into a largely forgotten world.  During the war she marries a soldier on leave who she has known for just nine days, and on this bizarre decision this strange novel ends.  (After all, don’t most women’s stories end with marriage?  What else could there be?) 

I enjoyed this book, both because it is well written, and because it is rare.  If you are a tiny minority from a tiny country it is almost never you read a book by your demographic, but here we are: a book by a white Zimbabwean woman.  Admittedly, the bar is high, as this small group includes Nobel laureate Doris Lessing; but this is a worthy addition.

These are Sedaris’ diaries from 1977 when he is in his early twenties, on through 2002.  What I mostly learnt from them is that you can waste a lot of years on hard drugs and still end up achieving something with your life.  I’m not really sure why I’ve been putting so much effort in.  I also learnt that he had a lot of free time.  It made me reflect on my own life.  He has time to ponder very (and I do mean very) minor events, and write them up to mild comic effect.  Having read quite a lot of his essays, especially in 2011, it’s interesting to see the raw material of his life that he massaged into money.    Here’s an example of what formed the basis of  the SANTALAND DIARIES.  It’s from when he was working as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s.  Here’s some men leaving the grotto:

“And, hey, Santa,” one of them said.  “Look after our boys in the Gulf, will you?”  He said it with such gooey poignancy, Santa and I laughed merrily after they’d left.

And here he is working as an entrance elf:

The job amounts to hustling up visitors, and I thought I did a pretty good job.  “Patronize Santa,” I said.  “Behold his chubby majesty.  Santa was born and raised in a small home.  Hail him.  Santa’s patience is beyond your comprehension.  Come test it.”

I tend to love a diary, for the intimacy it gives you with someone else’s life.  These dairies are not like that.  They hold you at arm’s length.  But I didn’t mind.  They were entertaining at a distance, which is quite how I like relationships in real life.