Year: 2019

COUSIN BETTE by Honore de Balzac

Let me tell you, it all goes on in this one.  There is bribery, and affairs, and sex addiction, and Brazillian plagues, and that’s before we even get to all the lesbianism, Algerian grain, and unidentified STDS.
Balzac himself vouched for this being pure quality: “It is one of the finest of my finest works,” he noted, modestly. 

At the time of writing it, he was apparently pretty pissed, because here he was with all the fine works, meanwhile all the money was being made by some hack who was writing fantastical novels in installments for the newspapers.  Thus he decided to get in on the action.  He thought he would be fine giving the newspaper 14 days of material and then writing the rest as he went along, for the daily installments.  This blew up in his face a bit.  He ended up needing to write 16 hours a day and actually sleeping at the presses, which may account for the singularly feverish atmosphere of this book. 
Balzac in this novel tells us what he really thinks, and I lost track of all the groups he insulted.  Polish people, female people, poor people (especially house servants, who are all thieves), and rich people (Speaking of ugly architecture, he comments: “Money has never lost the least opportunity of showing how stupid it is”). You name it, he slams it. 
The plot is almost by-the-by, but there is certainly a lot it.  Cousin Bette is a poor relative of a wealthy family.  She is consumed with jealousy of them, and while appearing to be their friend actually continually plots their downfall.  She doesn’t really need to bother, because the father labours under some kind of sex addiction, entertaining a series of mistresses with money he doesn’t have, and effectively bankrupting himself and his family.  His wife knows all about it but does nothing to stop him because she is ‘virtuous’ (?).  She is practically the only character in the book that Balzac approves of, apparently because he likes doormats. 
Actually thinking on it it is not quite true that he insults everybody.  One group he commends.  Yes guys, he gives it up for the ‘real artists’ who are:

taxed with aloofness, unsociability, rebellion against the conventions and civilised living; because great men belong to their creations. The entire detachment from all worldly concerns of true artists, and their devotion to their work, stamp them as egoists in the eyes of fools, who think that such men ought to go dressed like men about town performing the gyration that they call ‘their social duties’. People would like to see the lions of Atlas combed and scented like a marchioness’s lapdogs. Such men, who have few peers and rarely meet them, grow accustomed to shutting out the world, in their habit of solitude. They become incomprehensible to the majority, which, as we know, is composed of blockheads, the envious, ignoramuses, and skaters upon the surfaces of life

I think we all know who he includes among the real artists and his initials are HdB.

Anyway, the father eventually gets really carried away, sending his wife’s uncle to raise money for him by cheating Algerians in grain deals.  When the swindle is discovered, the uncle needs 200 thousand francs to get out of jail and save his honour; otherwise he will kill himself from the shame   The virtuous wife now decides to try and sell herself for the 200K, to save her uncle from suicide, but unfortunately can’t find a buyer.  Meanwhile the husband is now really far gone, egged on by Cousin Bette, with a young woman called Madame Marnaffe.   Eventually he realizes his folly and is reunited with his family (suffice to say it involves the Brazillian plague I mentioned and Madame Marnaffe’s repentance, of which the latter is even more unlikely than the former). 

The reunion doesn’t last long: last look, he is heard promising a chamber maid: “My wife hasn’t long to live, and you can be a Baroness, if you like”.  Wife obligingly dies.  By this point you are so sick of her you only feel relief.   

So there you go: that’s a summary of one of the more unlikely classics of nineteenth century French lit.   BOOM. Added bonus, enjoy picture of where I read it, by the pool in the Gambia

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER by Rebecca West

In this novel a man returns from the first World War unable to remember the last fifteen years of his life, which includes his wife.  It feels like the set up to a romantic comedy.  Oh guys: it is not.  

Chris is 35, and the last thing he remembers is being 20, and madly in love with a working class woman.  He tries to be polite to this stranger his wife, and to pretend to like the ‘improvements’ he himself made to his family home.  He also insists on seeing his old girlfriend.  Things have not gone well for her:

She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.  

We learn that they were only separated by a misunderstanding, and it becomes clear that he would have been much happier with her than the woman he actually married.  Without his memory, he is overall a much happier man; he has the woman he loves, and he does not remember the war at all.   Then comes the really tough question of whether it is even right that they help him remember – whether they stealing from him fifteen years; or giving him the gift of the life he should have had.  


I won’t tell you what they choose; it’s a good question for us to think about though.  On my side, if it ever happens to me, please don’t hesitate: I’m happy to miss the First World War and the marriage mistake, even if it means missing out on my adulthood.  That has been a dubious delight in any case.
Let’s take a moment to give a shout out for west, who was just 24 when she wrote this novel, and sounds a real character.  Enjoy this, on feminism:

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiment that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute

BOOM!

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER by Oyinkan Braithwaite

I’ve never read a novel told from the perspective of the accomplice before, and it was weirdly compelling.  For Korede, that her sister is a serial killer is buried in a complicated mass of other feelings.  I can kind of believe it: how can the fact of some recent and anonymous killings compare to the complex mass of sibling rivalries?  It’s not even a contest.  Thus Korede spends much more time worrying about her how much prettier her sister is than how about much more homicidal she is.

Korede is the older child and the good one.  Here’s what’s in her handbag:  

One first aid kit, one packet of wipes, one wallet, one tube of hand cream, one lip balm, one phone, one tampon, one rape whistle.  Basically, the essentials for every woman.  

That’s a high bar: I only own one of these things.  

Her younger sister is wild, and pretty, and very dangerous to men.   It all gets personal for Korede when the man she has a crush on falls for her sister, putting him in imminent danger.

It’s a fun, twisty killer, and remarkably enough is marketed as such.  That it is advertised as a genre novel is I think a testament to its quality.  I say this because it is set in contemporary Lagos, so it ran a very serious risk of being consigned to the world literature shelf.  This is the death knell.  So well done Oyinkan Braithwaite!

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT by Graham Greene

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a rollicking comedy about realizing you have wasted your life. 
It’s as if Greene somehow put his writing through some kind of lens to find the funny side of his classic themes: guilt, secrets, Catholicism, Sierra Leone, sexual hangups. They’ all there, but somehow hilarious.  
I found it quite disorienting.  Counting back over the blog I seem to have read a lot of Greene (7! THE END OF THE AFFAIR, THE HEART OF THE MATTER, OUR MAN IN HAVANA, BRIGHTON ROCK, A SORT OF LIFE, WAYS OF ESCAPE, THE QUIET AMERICAN) and it was strange to see the other side of his typical neurotic style.  Here for example he is having fun with funerals:  

People are generally seen on their best on these occasions, serious and sober, and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.

I am not sure I will ever be able to go to a funeral again without laughing about that last phrase.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is about a man who has lived a safe suburban life as a bank manager.  His disreputable elderly aunt appears in his life, and she whisks him away on a wild series of journeys.  Much of the joy in the novel is in the character of the aunt. Here, for example, she gives her reason for choosing a particular hotel by a bus station: “I like to be at the centre of all the devilry, with the buses going off to all those places.”  
Or here she is on saving money: 

. . I am not interested in economy.  . . I am over seventy-five, so that is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years.  . . . I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury.  . . They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete.  Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food

Or, when he shows her his prize dahlias in his garden, she comments only:  “I have always preferred cut flowers”  I find this most hilarious of all, though I can’t say why. 
In any case, the aunt has had lots of love affairs (some of them for money) and involves him all sorts of crime and drama, which is he thoroughly enjoys, though it takes some adjustment.  Here he is at a strip club on his first journey with her: I wondered what all the men here did for a living.  It seemed extraordinary that one could watch such a scene during banking hours. 
It is fun to see the banker change his life, but it is also, this being Greene, rather sad.  This is in small ways – for example he notes a thin dog following him and comments: I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope.   God Graham!  You are trying to write a COMIC NOVEL. Or worse yet, here he is on Christmas:  Christmas, it seems to me, is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling

Mostly the sadness comes from he dark shadow of the life it becomes clear he has wasted on following rules and doing what other people think he should.  It’s a lesson that you can’t learn too often.

DELIVERANCE by James Dickey

DELIVERANCE is about how horribly wrong camping can go.  It tells the story of four suburban businessmen whose weekend canoe-ing in the country goes life-changingly bad. 

Their friend Lewis convinces them all to go on a white water rafting trip, despite the fact that they don’t hardly even know how to paddle a canoe.  Even before they get on the water, things don’t look good.  They met a feeble old man, and the narrator reflects:

There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought.  In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong.The catching of an arm in a tractor park somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. 

He is right to be concerned.  I won’t give too much away, but SPOILER ALERT suffice to say that someone gets anally raped.  Or ‘corn holed,’ as the author calls it.  It’s curiously dated; because the victim is male, there is a strong subtext that he ought to be ashamed, which seems very wrong to a contemporary reader.  Also dated, but more hilariously, is the discussion of some old bottles they see in the river:

‘Plastic,’ he said, ‘doesn’t decompose.’
‘Does that mean you can’t get rid of it,’ I said, ‘at all?’

And this is 1970! Anyway, back to the corn holing.  They kill the rapist and then must flee down through the rapids pursued by his scary hick friend.  One man in particular, our narrator, risks his life to save the others.
At the beginning, Lewis, who works hard to be buff and outdoorsy,  encourages the others to be ‘real men’.  (I mean, immediate RED FLAG).  Mostly the other men roll their eyes at this.  As one says:  ‘I’ll take what I’ve got.  I don’t read books and I don’t have theories.  What’d be the use?  What you’ve got is a fantasy life.’  Lewis replies:

‘That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really – really – in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized.’  

The book is I guess a twisty scary thriller, but it is also somehow something bigger than that.  I am not quite sure how Dickey manages it, but in the midst of white water and shotguns and rape he manages to make this story about that – about who you are at the most basic level, and how quickly you can go there if you need to.  I recommend it. 

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

This blog seems to think I have only read this book three times.  I am sure I have read it many more times than that, and indeed I hope to read it even more times.  I really, really, really, love this one.  And I believe it is one of those books, like I CAPTURE THE CASTLE (but much better) that inspires this kind of gnaw-your-own-arms-off devotion among some.  Others, and I see on Goodreads this is a large majority of readers, give it just 4 out of 5 stars.  This shows why democracy can’t work, why breaching the 2% on world climate is inevitable, and in general why we are all going to hell in a hand basket.  What is wrong with everyone?

I suspect the key issues here are as follows: 1) Sexism: Read in the wrong way, you could think this was chick-lit 2) Classism: Mitford was rich, and I mean really unearned income, gross kind of rich.  So are the characters.  I see where this could enrage you.  But even the Guardian was still forced to give it major props, and you know that runs counter to everything the believe in. 

It’s a hilarious and secretly rather sad story about an extended family and in particular one of its members, Linda, who goes through a number of unhappy marriages and one happy affair.  I’ve blogged it before here, but I am feeling the enthusiasm this morning, so let me give you some of my best snippets.

Let’s just start by quoting extensively from the beginning:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

I think of this bit often when looking at family photos.  It is very true.  Someone is always dead.  Or here we are on the fiance of one of the sisters in the book:

Linda pronounced the summing-up. ‘Poor old thing, I suppose she likes him, but, I must say, if he was one’s dog one would have him put down.’ Lord Fort William was thirty-nine, but he certainly looked much more. His hair seemed to be slipping off backwards, like an eiderdown in the night, Linda said, and he had a generally uncared-for middle-aged appearance. Louisa, however, loved him, and was happy for the first time in her life. She had always been more frightened of Uncle Matthew than any of the others, and with good reason; he thought she was a fool and was never at all nice to her, and she was in heaven at the prospect of getting away from Alconleigh for ever. I think Linda, in spite of the poor old dog and the eiderdown, was really very jealous

Okay, let me restrain myself or I will just type out the whole book

FREDERICA by Georgette Heyer

Honestly I am starting to worry I am going into some kind of a decline.  Why am I reading so much Heyer?  Clearly my brain is tired, but is this just a passing phase or is this what aging is?  I am not sure if I am joking or not.  Perhaps I need to be grateful I knocked off the biggies in my twenties: your WAR AND PEACE, your MOBY DICK, your REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST.  What if I have lost my mojo?  Comfortingly I note that about half the FREDERICA posters on Goodreads struggle with exactly this question, while the other half have basically no shame.

That said, FREDERICA is a cheerful Regency romance.  It has some good points: there is lots of fun with new inventions – hot air ballons, and the ‘pedestrian curricle’ also called the ‘ladies accelerator’, which is the very first version of a bicycle (internet blackhole on this here, do feel free to click if you have as poor internet discipline as I do). 

Overall though, I did not enjoy it very much.  Unusually for Heyer, the dialogue between Frederica and her love interest was sort of repetitive.  Also, I found it (again unusually for her) a bit anti-feminist.  Frederica is so ludicrously innocent that she doesn’t notice she is in love with the love interest until the last page.  It is hard to admire some one so totally disconnected from the guidance of their crotch, which in my experience is usually pretty clear.

Also, though this is not Heyer’s fault, I read this on Kindle, and really the publisher has gone for a most depressingly tasteful cover.  You know what I want, and it is total contempt for female readers, and it is here.

DAISY JONES AND THE SIX by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This book is curiously more-ish.  It’s the story of a band’s ascent to stardom and then immediate implosion, mixed up with a couple of love stories. 
The author presents the story as a series of snippets from documentary interviews with the band.  I found this a little gimmicky.  I also didn’t think it was used as well as it could have been.  Everyone’s story was inconsistent, but not nearly as interestingly inconsistent as it would actually be in real life, when we all remember the version of the story that makes us look either best or worst (depending on our specific hang-ups). 
That said, as I said: it’s more-ish.  Like a packet of Java Cakes, I kept on going when I should have stopped, for example to go to sleep in a hotel room in Madrid so I could wake up early to work.  It made me realize how fabulously elemental the classic rock’n’roll story is.  Your classic rock star story, which this is, is a mash up of some the great achetypes.  It’s almost always an underdog story; it involves a steep unexpected rise, and a satisfying fall; usually it involves a comforting homily of the dangers on getting what you wish for (which is very nice for the rest of us, who haven’t managed to be rock stars.  Makes us feel like we’re not missing out, though of course we are.  I’m sure large quantities of transactional sex must be really fun for at least the first decade).  Add to this that this novel also had a couple of interesting love stories, and no wonder Reese Witherspoon has optioned it for TV.
One of the interesting love stories was about a woman who decides to work through infidelity with her husband.  I can’t think when I last read a contemporary American novel in which any one was so sensible.  It’s always a load of nonsense about once-a-cheater-always-a-cheater as if life was an after-school special you could manage with rules, instead of a chaotic mess. So I liked that too.
In summary, a great book for a long flight.

KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER by Sigrid Undset (Trans. Tiina Nunnally)

This book is a story of a 14th century woman, from birth to death.  It’s a thousand pages of incident, but as always with books of this historical distance all you come out of it thinking is THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL. 

Kristin is born to a well-to-do family in Norway.  She is a major daddy’s girl, and bar one unrequited love affair with a servant boy leads a pretty ordinary life until she falls in love with a handsome older man named Erland.  Unfortunately she is already betrothed.  She sleeps with him anyway, which I did not find an especially big deal, but this is because I am not from the 14th century.  Guys, it’s a really big deal for everyone but especially for God. 
Eventually she is able to marry him, and go on to have seven sons in eight years.  But this is only the beginning, and I won’t try and summarize further, because the book is really the story of her whole life, and as such is packed with all kinds of things: the ups, the downs, all the in-betweens. It is like a real life and thus hard to summarize neatly.   Lives, I notice increasingly as I get older, really have no thematic unity – this is one thing that makes them so difficult.  The problem you are solving keeps changing.

I was struggling with myself to describe the appeal of the book, but the Introduction did it well, I think:

(It) achieves an exceptional sense of accumulating dailiness, of momentous actions concatenating  in all sorts of minute and unexpected evolutions

Also very appealing is the level of research, that creates in intense domestic detail a really distant world, of dogs, and mead, and un-medicated births.  In addition to birth control you thank god for vaccination and antibiotics, because people die at incredible speed and in large numbers. One major character gets a minor cut from a blade, and his arm swells up, and everyone knows: that’s it.  Quick as that.   
Side bar on the author: Sigrid Undset was an impressive workhorse.  Her father died at 11, pushing them out of the middleclass, and so she abandoned her dreams of university to take at 16 a job as a secretary, that she held for ten years.  She wrote furiously at night, stories as she put it about  “you or myself or any of us office-worms”.  She then went on to fall in love with a much older married man, take on board his 3 children as well as have 3 of her own, 2 of whom were disabled, and get divorced, all while pumping out multiple books and winning the Nobel. 

KRISTIN is thought to be her masterpiece. The introduction comments on the special sadness that comes from leaving a long book you know you are unlikely to read again.  I feel that way now.  It was a success at least for this office-worm.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH by Vera Brittain

This is a story that you wish wasn’t true. 
It’s the memoir of a nurse in the First World War, and is an awful journey from innocence to experience, so perfectly archetypal you almost can’t believe it’s real.  The poor woman is just 18 when the War begins, and her contemporaries are exactly that group who enlisted immediately, in a sort of ludicrous innocence that today is almost unimaginable.

Also unimaginable is her adolescence, brought up to be a Victorian lady, a nightmarish condition I am glad I will never have to experience.  She fights hard to be allowed to go to University, and eventually makes it there, so:

 When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans
 She only stays a year.  She can’t bear to be safe while her boyfriend, brother, and friends are risking death, and decides to join the military as a nurse.

Anyone would have found nursing really horrific at that time, but due to her upbringing it is particularly hard for her.  For example, she does not know what venereal disease actually is until “1917, when in a Malta hospital I watched a syphilitic orderly die in convulsions after an injection of salvarsan”

Her boyfriend is given leave for the 24th of December, and she waits for him excitedly on Christmas Day, but instead of him she gets a telegram, telling her he died on the night of the 23rd.  It’s something you would rule out of a novel, as too melodramatic; it’s her misfortune it is her real life.  She then loses two of her friends, back-to-back.  Her brother lives on till almost the end of the war; but then she loses him too.  How is this for horror: after her boyfriend dies, she receives many notes of condolence, but after her brother almost none.  This is partly because people are exhausted by death, but also because potential letter writers are already dead themselves: Didn’t get any letters partly because fellow officers had ‘gone west’ before him in previous offences – the Somme, Arras, the Scarpe, Messines. ..
She tries to find out every detail of his death, but the only other officer in his battalion who survived with him from 1914 to the end is strangely uncommunicative.  Later she learns that this is because the military got hold of a letter of her brother’s that made it clear he was in a relationship with one of the guys in his battalion.  He was likely to be court-martialed,so he may have chosen death on the battlefield rather than the ‘shame.’
No surprise then that she never, at any time in the book refers to ‘winning’ the war without quotation marks.  Eventually she has to leave nursing because her mother becomes unwell, and her father, a healthy retired man in his fifties feels he cannot possibly run a home without her, ‘servants being hard to find’.  Thus she leaves men dying on the front to tend to him.  What’s truly bizarre is that no one finds this bizarre.
Her life after ‘victory’ is bleak. 
However deep our devotion may be to parents, or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire, and from June 1918 until about April 1920, I knew no one in the world to whom I could speak spontaneously, or utter one sentence completely expressive or what I really thought or felt. 
She pays no attention to the peace negotiations. 
I was beginning already to suspect they my generation had been deceived, its young courage cynically exploited, its idealism betrayed, and I did not want to know the details of that betrayal. 
In the end she returns to University, changing her degree from English to History, out of a desire to understand how Europe had ended up in this slaughter, and to see how it might be prevented in future.  She finds it almost impossible to relate to either those just younger than her, or just older, who never saw combat.  She graduates, and becomes a writer, and a feminist.  Your hair curls to be reminded of what women went through for suffrage, and then everything else (who knew the age of consent for girls used to be 13!).  Just as 2018 is the centenary of the end of War, it is also the centenary of women getting the vote; and apparently it was ‘granted’ to us in a wave of appreciation of women’s war work.  It’s amusing to read how politicians suddenly jumped about like cats as they realized that they suddenly had to appeal to the female voter.
Eventually, she marries.  You’d think it would be strange for her husband for her to write a book that is so deeply about her first boyfriend.  Let me note, that while my summary may make you think there is plenty of incident across the 600 pages of the memoir, actually at heart this book has only a single theme, and that is the deaths of her boyfriend, her brother, and her two friends. As she said in a letter: If the War spares me, it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four – which she has clearly done.  Her poor boyfriend, dead at 20, has a road named after him in the French town where he died (the Allee Roland Leighton). Her book made him famous, though even as she writes it she tells us: It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice again

Her husband however, is a veteran; and clearly she is right that we who are not cannot understand what it is like.  She chooses to carry on her wedding day the type of bouquet her boyfriend used to give her, and her husband is completely unconcerned: That it is I, he wrote to her, who shall stand there is but the end of a long story.
And it has been a long story.  What a life, and what a woman.