Year: 2021

ALL MY CATS by Brohumil Hrabal

I can’t think I’ve ever read a book before about our love for cats. Or pets in general. This is strange, because there are books about love for people, for money, for landscapes, for cities, and etc; and I think domestic animals are as much beloved as any of those things, and perhaps more.

I suspect this reticence all comes down to our guilt about meat, but that’s a post for another time. In any case, on this book, which I think is non-fiction, the author truly loves his cats. His problem is, where the line should be. In summary, he goes deep.

He starts off with just a few cats. His favourite is Blackie:

I never tired of looking at her and she was so fond of me she’d practically swoon whenever I picked her up and held her to my forehead and whispered sweet words in her ear . . Whenever I’d look at her, she’d go all soft and I’d have to pick her up and for a moment I’d feel her go limp from the surge of feeling that flowed from me to her and back again, and I would groan with pleasure

The problem comes when these cats start having kittens, who have kittens themselves. The house is overrun. Eventually he decides he has to kill them. He does it himself, and buries them, covered in geraniums. And then the meltdown starts. He killed them by bashing them to death inside a mailbag, and he develops a real mania about this mailbag. It sounds like of laughable written down but it is gruesome and sad to read. His problem is that he can’t decide at what level it is appropriate to love animals. He wants to love them how he loves them, which is a lot, but the world is not set up that way.

He is having some kind of breakdown when he gets into a car accident, which he accepts as some kind of cosmic justice from the mailbag. It’s hard to explain but it makes him feel better. Then he chances upon a swan, stuck in a rapidly freezing river, and is unable to save it. It’s a tribute to this strange book that again, it’s hard to explain, but you somehow feel that this is a truly appalling event, and a fitting finale, to whatever it is that this book is about.

BATH TANGLE by Georgette Heyer

This blog tells me this is my 18th Heyer. It was exactly what I was looking for, a meringue of a book. It’s a Regency romance, of course, but an unusual one, as involved people cheating on each other, which I can’t think I’ve ever seen from her before.

Though the picture shows the coffee shop at the Wallace Collection, I mostly listened to it on audio book while doing DIY: ripping up carpets and sanding my Victorian floorboards. It is strange to think my flat is so old that the floorboards are almost the same time period as the story.

A BURNT-OUT CASE by Graham Greene

Here is an architect who decides that the best place to handle his existential crisis is a leper colony in the DRC.

I love Graham Greene. Going backwards through my blog, I realize this is my ninth book of his. And I’m sorry to say my least favourite. He is all about lost men racked with guilt (which usually, for some reason, I apparently love) but this one was really a bridge too far.

First of all, I’m not going to say the DRC is like an ideal holiday location, but he comes it a bit strong here, calling it ‘a continent of misery and heat.’ Second of all, it is a bit hard to sympathise with you about losing your faith when you are going on about it among lepers who have lost their hands and feet.

STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN’S CITY by Amy Stanley

Here is a touching tribute to an ordinary life.  It’s a carefully researched, incredibly detailed account of the life of a real woman in 19th century Japan.  She didn’t do anything very impressive. She got fired a lot, from various jobs as a domestic worker, and  went through husbands at an incredible rate.  And yet this author has gone into her life in such detail that we know where she lived in her first two weeks in Edo (now Tokyo); who her neighbours were; and how much she ended up owing her landlord.

In addition to learning a lot about this woman’s, private life, at least as far as she described it in her letters, there is much that is super interesting about Japan in the early 1800s.  She grew up in the countryside, and had an unusually large number of siblings.  Her parents were religious, and thus they “believed that infanticide – fairly common among other peasants – was a sin.”   (I love how casually she chucks in that families were small because babies were being murdered.)

Apparently not just baby’s lives were a luxury, so too were clothes.  Many families had fewer clothes than people.

The shogunate even commended virtuous daughters for going without clothes in the dead of winter so that their parents could wear robes. 

Manual labourers were apparently always pretty much naked, and compensated by covering their bodies in tattoos.  Some made clothes out of paper (preserved with persimmon juice, as you do).  Often the paper had already been used for its normal function, so you could still read letters on it, and for a while among wealthy people clothing with writing on it became a sort of ironic craze. 

The woman moves to Edo to work for a wealthy family, and we learn about the rigours of attending the shogun.  She is disappointed to find out that the ‘Edo hair’ everyone talked about in the countryside is worn by no one at all in Edo.  Everyone had to look the same, so bald men had to glue false topknots on; and they had to wear so much clothing they could not easily take it off, meaning they carried around brass tubes to pee into.

Okay I have a LOT of other interesting factoids.  But I’ll stop.  

MOTHERHOOD by Deborah Orr

I spent this entire memoir waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It’s written with the strong implication that the author has been profoundly traumatized by her childhood, so I kept waiting for the trauma to happen.  There are many times when she tells us she doesn’t want us to think too harshly of her parents, and indeed she succeeded, because as far as I can tell they were pretty good. 

Here is a comment from her mother, that she regards as scarring:

“When I was having you, Deborah, your dad said to me, ‘As far as I am concerned, the chicken comes before the egg.’  Wasn’t that a lovely thing to say?”

I really don’t see it.  What husband wouldn’t prioritize his wife over a fetus? 

She finds out her parents don’t have much sex.  This is not any of her business, in my view.  But it in her view:  “It’s the shocking secret at the heart of my existence.” 

I can only say: ? 

Perhaps the problem is this is my second memoir of a de-industrializing Scotland in the seventies in under a month, and the first was the magically good SHUGGIE BAIN.  They are really not in the same league.  Let me give you a sample of some insight from this one:

People.  We are so tough and so fragile, both at once, we humans

OKAY.  I don’t want to be mean.  But it really wasn’t my favourite.

LITTLE EYES by Samantha Schweblin

In this novel, a company comes out with a small toy. It is special because each toy is controlled by another customer somewhere else, who can see through its eyes and move it around. It can’t speak. It’s a series of vignettes of the toy’s owners and the toy’s controller.

It sounds like an interesting premise, all about disconnection, technology, our loss of physical contact, etc. However, for me, it ended up not very interesting. Every story ends badly. In a shock finding, having an anonymous stranger in your house is not a great idea. In another amazing insight, we find out technology is not always positive.

I mean: really? That’s it?

I guess I shouldn’t say every vignette ends badly, because I didn’t get to the end. Maybe there was some kind of reversal, some how. However life is short so I didn’t find out

UNDER THE SKIN by Michael Faber

Here is a fantastically wonderful book with an amazing twist, so I recommend stopping reading this post right now and getting the book, because this is going to be full of SPOILERS.

The book begins with a woman picking up hitchhikers. This is so abnormal in the modern world that you can only assume she must be a serial killer. The hitchhikers do indeed die, and there is an extremely clever, slow reveal as to why. SHE’S AN ALIEN AND SHE’S ABDUCTING THEM AS A CULINARY DELICACY FOR HER HOME PLANET.

You’d think, based on this, it would be a science fiction story. It’s not at all. Mostly you are in head of the woman. Like many non-aliens, she hates her job, hates her boss, has a crush on someone who isn’t interested. At one point, some of the captured hitchhikers escape. They have been with the aliens for a month:

Removed from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under its dark acorn of a penis. A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground between its legs. Its fists swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue.

  ‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried.

She has occasional moral scruples about how they are treating the humans. But as she explains at one point, they “couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan . . . And when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.” It’s clearly, among many, many, other things, a meditation about vegetarianism, and how we train ourselves to not have compassion. And not just for animals, but for sweatshop employees, for children affected by air pollution, and all the other things that make the world go round.

At one point we do visit the processing plant, where one of the recently de-tongued hitchhikers writes the word MERCY on the ground. The alien pretends to a wealthy visitor that she does not know what it means, as she does not want do-gooders getting hysterical. And indeed there is no such word in the alien language in any case. Later, when things go wrong with a hitchhiker, and he is trying to rape her (luckily she lacks human genitals), she is terrified, and tries to remember the word. “Murky!” she screams. It’s not everyday you laugh at a rape scene.

The aliens’ home planet is some kind of toxic stew, where oxygen and water are expensive and must be fought for. Thus, much of the book is spent with the alien marvelling at beauty of the countryside around the A9 highway. It is tragic to see our ‘ordinary’ world through her eyes. She is amazed we have still got sky and sea to enjoy. For a little while, anyway.

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

This is a book about a man who does not succeed in blowing up his life.  He is an insurance salesman, married with two children, and labouring under a mortgage.  (In a sign that things were better back then, the mortgage is only for sixteen years.  WTF is up with London housing)

One day he conceives a desire to go fishing, as he was an avid fisherman as a boy. He has not however fished since he was sixteen.  Here’s why:

In this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do.  It isn’t because we’re always working. . . . It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies.  There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.  Think of something you really care about.  Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent doing it.  And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railways junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers. 

He bunks off from his family to go and spend a week in the village in which he grew up, which he has not seen in twenty years.  In his mind ‘as permanent as they pyramids,’ he arrives to find it now just an outer suburb of London, and not an especially nice one at that.  He buys a fishing rod and does not use it.  He sees an old girlfriend, and is horrified and how old she looks.  Fat and with false teeth himself, he assures us that men never go so far downhill as women do.  Sometimes the patriarchy is really adorably deluded.

He ends up going home, concluding there is no escape from his life.  The year however is 1938, and the book has hanging over it very explicitly the coming war.  You feel he will almost welcome it.

Side point. Orwell published a bunch of books you’ve never heard of, including this, and then in 1945, Animal Farm; and in 1949, the novel 1984.  Then in 1950 he was dead, at 47.  Imagine: he managed to squeeze in two seminal classics just before the end. Imagine what would have come next.  Imagine how close to the wire he cut it. 

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman

My third time through this excellent book, and I like it even more on the re-read than I did before.

It’s the story of a four month relationship between two New York hipsters, both aspiring writers. It tries to answer the age-old question, is it you or is it me, and the answer is, as it always is, that it’s both. Or it’s neither.

Part of the power of the book is that it is written from the man’s perspective, but the author is a woman. I have tried and tried to figure out what is so powerful about this book, and I think somehow this is part of it: there is a giant effort of imagination to see it from the other side. I note I am struck once again, as I was when I first read it in 2013, by this:

As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honor too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought she could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of writing, was that too often she wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as it if mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a ‘rushed job’ or an ‘editor who’d mess it up anyway’ . . .”

I’m also struck this time through by the complexity. He meets the girl randomly at a party, some time after breaking up with her, and drunkenly goes home trying to figure out why he dumped her. He wakes up feeling happy. The last few lines are:

In a few days, it would be as if this night never happened, the only evidence of it an unsent email automatically saved to his drafts folder (“Dear Hannah … “). He’d no more remember the pain – or the pleasure – of this moment than he would remember, once he moved into the new apartment, the exact scent of the air from his bedroom window at dawn, after he’d been up all night working.

I love this. It’s so true how hard it is to figure out how you really feel.