Year: 2021

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrente

Gianni is a girl in her early teens who suddenly begins to feel bad about her appearance, her friends, her parents, and her school. In short, she is becoming a teenager. She says:

I felt like a failure, like a cake made with the wrong ingredients

I think I’ve largely forgotten how excruciating it was to be an adolescent, but this book made me remember.

Guiliana turned and whispered: Gianni, what are you doing, come on, you’ll get lost. Oh, if I really could get lost, I thought at one point, leave myself somewhere, like an umbrella, and never have anything more to do with me.

Oh god! Poor girl. She is having a particularly rough go of it. Her parents are getting a divorce, and not in a kind of lets-all-go-to-therapy kind of way, more in a lets-scream-a-lot kind of way. She responds by wearing black clothing, giving blowjobs to unsuitable much older men, etc. She also relentlessly pursues her cousin’s fiance, with no guilt at all, as only the profoundly insecure can do.

Finally she runs away on a train with her best friend’s annoying younger sister. This last line killed me:

On the train, we promised each other to become adults as no one ever had before.

Everyone thinks they are going to break the mould.

FALSE COLOURS by Georgette Heyer

I’m starting to wonder if I’ve read all the good ones of these, because the last few have been pretty rope-y. In this one, a twin substitutes himself for his brother and ends up falling in love with his fiance. It feels like it’s going to be classic Heyer, everyone has grey eyes, the hero wears tight white breeches and etc. But it kind of gets derailed into strange ‘mystery’ plot twists. However it put me to sleep in many an overly air-conditioned motel room, which is what I asked of it.

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

The blog leads me to believe this is my sixth re-read, but I think it is more than that. I turn to this novel when I need something soothing, so it is often read late at night. I don’t very often recommend it to other people, though I love it, because I struggle to articulate what it is that I love about it so much. I think it’s partly that I find it funny; it’s partly that I can’t yet quite understand what it is about it that I find funny, so it’s mysterious; it’s partly a kind of robust pragmatism in the authorial voice that I find reassuring and that bucks me in when I feel like whining.

I did not especially like the recent TV version. I thought they softened it till it wasn’t funny any more, which was strange: a book from the 1940s is apparently too edge for the 2020s.

Let’s enjoy the first para together:

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, ….. all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash… 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.

WINTER IN THE BLOOD by James Welch

For some reason I had the impression that colonialism in North America was less bloody than in Africa, involving more diseased blankets and deceptive treaties and less outright murder. I learnt how wrong I was at the Akta Lakota Museum in South Dakota. The massacre at Wounded Knee is as stomach-churning a use of guns on unarmed people as anything Kitchner did in Sudan. I bought this book there, as the back cover told me Welch is a relatively important Native American writer.

It’s about a young man who goes on a bender while looking for the girlfriend who has left him. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but it’s profoundly not my kind of book. First of all, it’s clearly a boys’ book. I can’t defend this definition, other than to say I know them when I see them. Second, it has one of those motive-less protagonists so beloved of midcentury fiction. If even the protagonist doesn’t care what they are doing, I find it hard to do so myself.

Let me give you a taste:

First Raise got us each a cup of coffee and watched us drink. It was beginning to get light. He loved us. He watched us drink the bitter coffee down. In the living room beside the oil stove, my grandmother snored. Beneath the closed door leading off the kitchen, Theresa slept or didn’t sleep.

Perhaps there are some people who don’t find this annoying. If so, I am not one of them.

LEAVING CHEYENNE by Larry McMurtry

A story of a love triangle in small town Texas. And when I say small, I mean small. When there are only about two women in the whole place, and one of them is ugly, you can see where the triangle gets more likely.

It’s told in three sections, one for each person in the triangle. Wikipedia tells me McMurtry was married twice, both times to women, which surprises me because on the evidence of this book I would say he had never met a woman. The girl’s section of the book was just bizarre. It is clear throughout which man she ought to have married, and she chooses the other, and so I thought her section would be a ‘reveal.’ What it revealed is that McMurtry thinks women are basically irrational, don’t know what’s good for them, and can’t explain their own thought process.

That said, I still liked the book. The charm is in the setting, as with other books of his that I’ve read ( LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (minus the cow-rape of course)). Try this, on a hailstorm:

I guess the worst was Old Man Hurshel Monroe getting his skull cracked outside the door of the bank. They say Beulah Monroe found the hailstone that conked him and kept it home in the icebox for nearly ten years, till one of her grandkids ate it for an all-day sucker.

Or this, the very opening of the book:

When I woke up Dad was standing by the bed shaking my foot. I opened my eyes, but he never stopped shaking it. He shook it like it was a fence post and he was testing it to see if it was in the ground solid enough. All my life that’s the way he’d wake me up—I hated it like poison. Once I offered to set a glass of water by the bed, so he could pour that over me in the mornings and wake me up, but Dad wouldn’t do it. I set the water out for him six or seven times, and he just let it sit and shook my foot anyway. Sometimes though, if he was thirsty, he’d drink the water first.

I googled the author and found him to be a rather charming man. I love his transactional approach to writing. Try this:

If I could not write another word of fiction and make a living, I would. But I can’t. I live off of fiction, mostly. I have a novel coming out this year, Loop Group, and I have one more novel that I owe Simon and Schuster, about an aging gunfighter. I’m getting close to thirty novels in all, I think. That’s a lot of novels. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t even offer them to my friends anymore. They all stopped reading at fifteen or twenty. When a new one comes out, I think, “Do I really want to mail this one around?”

CROSSING SAFELY by Wallace Stegner

An unusual novel about compromise and friendship. It’s about a pair of married couples who become friends in their twenties, and follows their relationships across their lives

It’s about the fact that some people live their best lives, and some people don’t. It’s also about the subtler point that it is hard to know which category you fall in.

The husband in one couple becomes an author. The husband in the other couple would like to, but ends up a university lecturer. This is in part because his wife, who has far more energy and ambition than he does, is convinced he should do this ‘first’ before he tries the uncertain life of a poet. Seems reasonable. However he failures to get tenure, which sends his wife into a breakdown. I mean on the one hand one has to agree with the character who tells her to ‘renounce this dramatization of failure,’ but my other suggestion would be HOW ABOUT SOCIETY JUST LETS HER GET HER OWN JOB. Honestly, can you imagine how messed up things were in the early twentieth century when half the population had to try and live out the suppressed dreams of the other half?

This whole question of ‘failure’ is an interesting one. Here is the author husband:

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.

This is my third novel of Stegner’s, and I am inspired to keep going. He is a lovely writer. Enjoy this description of a hillside:

The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other side of hills.

I wonder how long it took him to come up with that.

THE TRIALS OF RUMPOLE by John Mortimer

Here is a jolly and old-fashioned comic novel about a London barrister. It’s set in the early twentieth century, and we find not much has changed since then. An inter-city train is back then, as today, “a journey about as costly as a trip across the Atlantic,” while the summer sales on Oxford street are “a scene of carnage and rapine in which no amount of gold would have persuaded Rumpole to participate.”

The book covers a number of his cases, but it is not really the legal drama that is of interest, so much as the fun narrative voice. Here he is, for example, on his boarding school:

a wind-blasted penal colony on the Norfolk coast, where thirteen-year-olds fought for the radiators and tried to hide the lumpy porridge in letters from home

Perfect holiday reading. Do yourself a favour and google John Mortimer so you can enjoy his picture on Wikipedia. You can just smell the cigarette smoke coming off the screen. Impressively, he wrote all his novels while also having a long career at the bar. (Same for Trollope, and I often think of his comment: “All the success of my life I owe to the disciple of early hours”). In interesting trivia he married twice, both times to women named Penelope, and his father went blind after ‘hitting his head on the door frame of a London taxi’ (?).

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet

This guy has an affair with a married woman when he is 15; writes a book about it at 17; and is dead by 20. Now this is what I call living. That said, I am grateful for the vaccination against Typhoid.

This lightly fictionalized story caused a scandal on publication because the husband being cheated on is away from home because he is serving in the frontlines of the First World War.

The woman is 19, and she and the author have an affair of high passion and higher risk. He goes to visit her to talk about literature (a gossamer thin excuse). Here we are:

She liked going to sleep in front of the fire with her hair unpinned. Or rather I thought she was asleep. In fact, her sleep was only an excuse to put her arms around my neck.

They end up making out, and eventually, after she gives him a bit of help, having a lot of sex. However, they know their love is doomed. Not because she is married, but because she is apparently too old for him:

In fifteen years life would still be just beginning for me, and women of the age that Marthe was now would be in love with me. . . . I was too well aware of the attractions of youth not to realize that I would leave Marthe when her youth was beginning to desert her and mine was still at its height

Truly, we have no idea how long an uphill battle feminism has had to fight in the twentieth century. Meanwhile he has some other interests. Try this on for an extra taste, when he is alone with a friend of hers :

I did not assume from her silence that my kisses had given her any pleasure; but she was incapable of indignation and could think of no polite way of rejecting me in French. I nibbled at her cheeks, fully expecting a sweet juice to squirt out, as from a peach. . . . Her only gesture of refusal was to move her head feebly from left to right, and from right to left. I did not delude myself, but my mouth took this t be the response it desired . . . I was naive enough to imagine that things would continue in the same fashion and that I would succeed in raping her without difficulty

I don’t even know what to comment on this.

In an unrealistic and abrupt turn of events the woman he is having an affair with dies. In real life, she lived, and her husband spent the next fifty years trying to prove to everyone the book was fiction. He was eventually buried with his wife’s letters and a book that celebrated the heroism of the soldiers of WWI. I feel bad for him, but then on the other hand he did get that extra fifty years to protest his wife’s virtue, while the author got fifty years of being dead.

LOVE LETTERS by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

This book, a collection of letters, gave me a lot of sympathy for people who fall in love with great writers. Poor Vita Sackville-West was an author herself, and her admiration for Virginia Woolf knows no bounds. Virginia, on the other hand, thinks Vita is kind of cute. Ouch.

Both these ladies were married, and both husbands were aware of this affair. I would like to say what I got from these letters was insights on art (there were these) or history of Tehran (there was that) but mostly I was interested by the gossip on how these intricate relationships worked. The love letters to each other are highly passionate, and then intercut with letters to their husbands. Here is one from Vita to her husband:

But darling Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way (of being in love). There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven’t shocked you. . . Please make a comment of all this, and say you understand. But don’t say you understand unless you really do. My darling, you are the one and only person for me in the world; do take that in once and for all, you little dunderhead.

This would an impressively open relationship for the 2020s, and these letters were from the 1920s. Meanwhile Vita is also having side affairs with all sorts of others. No wonder she had no time for improving her writing. Meanwhile Virginia is continually writing, in part because unlike the wealthy Vita she needs the money (we learn that she spent much of the money from MRS DALLOWAY on a new toilet).

I stopped before the end, because I know Virginia killed herself, and I just didn’t want to go there. Letters carry the real life of someone, and it was just too sad to see it unravel.

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark

Here is good writing put to little effect. It tells the story of a woman called Lise who goes on a mini-break, hoping to meet ‘the one.’ The author tells us from the beginning that Lise will end up murdered. The ‘one’ she is looking for is the one who will kill her, as she wants to die. Eventually, she lucks out and meets a man recently released from an asylum. Here they are shortly after meeting:

“Sex is normal,” he says. “I’m cured. Sex is all right.”

“It’s all right at the time and it’s all right before,” says Lise, “but the problem is afterwards. This is, if you aren’t just an animal. Most of the times, afterwards is pretty sad.”

Yes, it’s red flags galore.

She tells him she just wants to be murdered, not raped; he can do that ‘after.’ However, once they are alone in the dark park, he does his raping first. As to why, there I can’t help you. Men will need to be explaining their issues on that one.

Anyway, I found it kind of lame, despite objectively being unable to deny it was wonderfully written. Partly, not to be all woke about it, but all of this begging to die seemed a bit victim blame-y. You can die on your holidays without going looking for it. I think though my issues were less socio-political than artistic. The whole book was written at a sort of bizarre kind of remove. I think the introduction has it:

. . .the great flaw in post-modernism, however, has always been that the writer’s freedom to expose the fictionality of fiction tends to be precisely paralleled by the reader’s freedom not to care what happens in the book.

I mean, yup.