Year: 2021

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

About ten pages into this book, I felt like I was getting into a hot bath. I just got ready to seriously relax. It’s exactly the sort of book I like: one that gives you a break from your own life, by deeply involving you in someone else’s.

It tells the story of a little boy being raised on some quite rough council estates by his alcoholic mother. I would bet heavy money that this book, while marketed as fiction, is based on the author’s own childhood. There is a certain subset of books in which the detail of daily life is so vividly captured that it can only come from a child’s eye, and ideally a child with a ton of trauma. It’s Glasgow in the 1980s, a place and a time I’ve never given a second thought to, and now I feel like I have a real experience of it. It joins such bizarrely disparate periods as Trinidad in the 1950s (courtesy, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS) and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s (courtesy, FEAST OF THE GOAT read on a particularly hallucinatory 12 hour bus ride to Acupulco).

I won’t go on about everything I thought was wonderful about this book, but let me just leave you with this:

The other taxi drivers had taken on that familiar shape of men past their prime, the hours spent sedentary behind the wheel causing the collapse of their bodies, the full Scottish breakfasts and the snack bar suppers settling like cooled porridge around their waists. Eventually the taxi hunched them over till their shoulders rounded into a soft hump and their heads jutted forward on jowled necks. The ones who had been at the night shift a long time had turned ghostly pale, their only colour was the faint rosacea from the years of drink. These were the men who decorated their fingers with gold sovereign rings, taking vain pleasure from watching them sit high and shiny on the steering wheel

And that’s just taxi drivers! Imagine everything else that’s in there

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Abbie Greaves

Here is a book where everyone involved urgently NEEDS TO GO TO THERAPY.

It begins with a journalist discovering a woman who has been sitting at Ealing station every night for seven years, with a sign reading ‘Come home Jim.’ Clearly, this woman is the first person who needs to go the therapy. The journalist gets unhealthily involved in the story, and you better believe she also really needs to go to therapy.

The lady on the bench is called Mary and we learn about her first meeting with Jim, who was her boyfriend for six years before he left. Here is how he talks to her on one of their first meetings:

“You,” he continued. “There’s something . . . enigmatic about you. Quiet but fierce. Yes, maybe that’s it. Beautiful too, which helps, but that’s not it. I want to figure you out. I missed you these last few hours.”

This for me just drips with red flags. Who talks to anyone like that, and especially someone they only just met. Could it be all is not well? And indeed all is not well. I won’t give away any more than that, so as not to spoil it. While I didn’t quite buy the entire premise of THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, it’s a good engaging mystery, and I found myself sort of rolling my eyes but also turning the pages at a great rate.

Though let me say again: let’s all go to therapy sooner rather than later, and that goes double for men and triple for husbands.

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson

Here is an example of how a great title does half the work.  Though the author’s point is not so much that we should not give a f*ck, but rather that we should only give a f*ck about what we give a f*ck about.  Easier said than done, in my experience. I often find myself getting riled up about things that I know I do not care about.  In any case, the book is refreshing in its emphasis that there is no life without problems; the point is to choose the right problems. 

I also thought this was useful:

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Here his point is, don’t measure success too much based on things you cannot control, e.g., the approval of others, promotions, etc. Rather focus on things you can control, e.g., doing your best.  Associated with this is what you should measure yourself on:

Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. . . .  Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. . . . (You should) define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented . .  . This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

I can’t say it’s the best written or most insightful book I’ve ever come across, and admittedly I lost it in an Uber before I finished it completely, but that said I enjoyed it. 

STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger

Here is a book about how bad things can get.  It’s the dairies of a man who signed up on the the day the first world war began, and, incredibly, made it all the way through to 1918.  The Somme, Ypres, Cambrai: he saw them all. 

The book was published in 1919, and it shows.  Most of the other books of this period were written at a remove of at least a decade or so, but in this one there has been no time to make sense of the war, or to do anything but just tell us what happened.  It is in parts boring, as war is boring, and in other parts horrifying.  As far as I can tell, no one whom he personally knew with whom he began the war ended it alive with him. 

It is deeply revolting.  Here he is on a patch of land that has been fought over repeatedly:

In among the living defenders lay the dead.  When we dug foxholes, we realized that there were stacked in layers.  One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under the showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place.  And now it was our turn. 

He is on the German side, and is, as ever, extraordinarily depressing to see how very similar their war was from their alleged ‘enemies’ on the other side.  He is even reading TRISTAM SHANDY in the trenches.  Towards the end, though, his war does differ from that of English accounts I have read, because he is of course, losing, and he knows it.  They start to run out of food; they are no longer sleeping in trenches, but in craters; and still he goes on. 

With every attack, the enemy came onward with more powerful means; his blows were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win. But we would stand firm.

He is clearly losing it.

A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.

It is in this context that he goes into his last battle.  His company takes a direct hit, and twenty some young men are killed right next to him.  Then he goes on for hours, fighting, sobbing, singing.  At one point he takes off his coat, and keeps shouting  “Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat” which had the “fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard.”  He cannot remember large stretches of this last battle.  At one point he stops to shoot an Englishman, who reaches into his pocket and instead of bringing out a pistol brings out a picture of family.  Junger lets him live.  He kills plenty of others though, including one very young man:

 I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams

And all this while HE KNOWS THEY CANNOT WIN.  Guys, I would have deserted long before, and I am not even ashamed to say it.  Honour, like courage, are concepts generally deployed by rich people to get you to do what they want.  I can’t think of almost anything for which I would die.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

This was a re-read of this marvellous book about income inequality and spontaneous human combustion.

I didn’t love this the second time round as much as the first. But this still has me loving it more than most books. This time round what I concluded is that what makes it remarkable is the quality of the voice of the narrator. It’s weirdly, painfully, contemporary and disillusioned.

Try this, about her efforts to get a scholarship to a school for rich kids:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

I won’t write up the whole book again; the first read is here. If you are looking for something to read, I recommend it.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry

In this book some teenage boys have sex with a blind cow. And this is not even the climactic center of the book. Apparently this is just part of normal small town life in Texas. The author is famous for his novels that draw on his own upbringing in small town Texas, so I guess this is based on true events. This just goes to show you what I have always thought, which is that small towns are not charming as people try to claim, but in fact dangerous and creepy. (See also scarring movie WICKERMAN, but only if you want to be scarred.)

“We could go on down to the stockpens,” Leroy suggested. “There’s a blind heifer down there we could fuck.” . . . . The prospect of copulation with a blind heifer excited the younger boys almost to frenzy, but Duane and Sonny, being seniors, gave only tacit approval. They regarded such goings on without distaste, but were no longer as rabid about animals as they had been. . . In the course of their adolescence both boys had frequently had recourse to bovine outlets. At that they were considered overfastidious by the farm youth of the area, who thought only dandies restricted themselves to cows and heifers. The farm kids did it with cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever else they could catch . . . It was common knowledge that the reason boys from the diary farming communities were so reluctant to come out for football was because it put them home too late for the milking and caused them to miss regular connection with the milk cows.

IS HE JOKING. At least in the play EQUUS this kind of thing is given the dignity of being a major plot point. Here it’s not. This story is about this young man, Sonny, who is graduating high school. He is having an affair with a middle-aged woman who is in a marriage people casually assume is abusive. (Sample: “I don’t understand how Mrs Popper’s lasted,” Duane said). Sonny drops her the second the local popular girl shows an interest. It’s a sad as it sounds. As a middle-aged woman myself, it fills me with renewed gratitude to be alive now, with my own income and my own Tinder if I want it.

Even all the side plots are sad: he falls out with his best friend, who then blinds him in one eye (?) before heading off to fight in Korea. The only apparently positive figure is the local poolhall owner, Sam the Lion, who looks after a young disabled boy called Billy (you don’t want to know how he is involved in the cow thing). Then he dies. Because this is the kind of book this is. It’s so sad it gets into the ridiculous. Everyone was lonely , everyone was not getting enough sex, or getting the wrong sex, or etc. Life is not all sad, just like it is not all happy.

Larry McMurtry is a great writer, so still I enjoyed it. But if you’ve never tried him, I recommend you start with his Pulitzer winner LONESOME DOVE (which this blog tells me I read a solid ten years ago)

SOME TAME GAZELLE by Barbara Pym

This book is about a pair of middle-aged spinsters living in an English village. It’s a sad, wise novel about the kind of small fantasies we need to keep ourselves going, especially when life has not turned out as we hoped.

Bizarrely, it turns out the author was just twenty-one when she wrote it. Apparently it progress forward her, and her sister, thirty years in the future. Their various university boyfriends also appear, older, fatter, and having rejected them.

The title is based on a poem by Thomas Haynes Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:

Something to love, oh, something to love!

One sister is still mooning over the local ArchDeacon, who decided to marry someone else decades ago; the other is always developing crushes on much younger curates, who are continually disappointing her by leaving to evangelize the Africans. Here are the kind of concerns, on knitting for the ArchDeacon:

When we grow older we lack the fine courage of youth, and even an ordinary task like making a pullover for somebody we love or used to love seems too dangerous to be undertaken. Then (the wife) might get to hear of it; that was something else to be considered. Her long, thin fingers might pick at it critically and detect a mistake in the ribbing at the Vee neck; there was often some difficultly there. . . . And then the pullover might be too small, or the neck opening too tight, so that he wouldn’t be able to get his heard through it. Belinda went hot and cold, imagining her humiliation.

Curiously though, both women do receive proposals over the course of the book, and both turn them down; there is an unacknowledged but clear view that in fact, if they could but see it, they are happy as they are, with their gardens and their puddings and their choice of corsetry.

It’s a very delicate little book, almost entirely about women, and domestic matters. I’m amazed, patriarchy being what it is, that it ever got published, because on the surface the concerns it embraces could not be smaller. The point being I guess that life is made up, mostly, of small concerns. And you have to find a way to live it anyway.

On the picture, by the way: it’s my first audio book!

EARLY WORK by Andrew Martin

This is my third reading of this amazing book (first two are here and here). This time round I re-read it to try and understand how it works. I hoped to understand something about the mystery of good writing, but I am left even more mystified than before. It is so WONDERFUL. How did Andrew Martin DO it? Every other line is funny, and the remainder are either touching or insightful. Did it take him ONE THOUSAND YEARS? A further mystery is this, WHY DON’T MORE PEOPLE LOVE IT? Like how can it be that someone can write such a near perfect novel and the world not close down? That’s the arts for you, I guess. You achieve something near impossible and nobody much cares.

AN OBEDIENT FATHER by Akhil Sharma

I had to give up on this book because it was just too believable. It tells the story of a child abuser, from the perspective of the child abuser. Fiction exists to help us understand others. This is a noble goal. But I guess I just don’t really want to understand all others.

In theory, I suppose we all agree that everyone’s human. Like, even Hitler. And Ted Bundy. And I guess I’ve read quite a few books from the perspective of dictators and serial killers, which I’ve never found it too revolting before. This one though: wow. It’s enough to make me wish there is a hell, so that fathers who rape their children can go there.

As I debated whether or not to give up on this book , I spent quite some time thinking about why it was so unreadable. I think its because at least a serial killer, you think, okay, you are crazy. You are working out some mania. And dictators, okay, they kill people, but at least they are like obsessed with a greater Deutschland or whatever. This guy: he rapes her for a while, and then when he gets caught he stops. So he’s not a maniac. He just wanted to rape her and so he did.

Anyway, I feel gross just writing about it. If you think you can stomach it, though, I will say it is startlingly well written, just like Akhil’s previous book FAMILY LIFE). It’s set in India and in addition to the abuse is also a grim look at how unavoidable petty political corruption is. God no wonder I had to quit.

THE INVENTION OF NATURE by Andrea Wulf

In this book a man with a large unearned income has a great time and inspires lots of others to do the same.

Alexander von Humboldt was so famous that at his centennial in 1869 there were huge parades for him across cities in Europe and America.  He has more things named after him than anyone else who has ever lived (rivers, plants, geographical features, a part of the moon).  And yet, today, it is a bit: Humboldt Who?

Humboldt did not identify or discover anything in particular.  What he is famous for is his worldview.  He put forward the idea, revolutionary at the time, that nature was fragile, heavily interconnected, and at great risk from human intervention.  It’s an insight that was so influential that today it sounds obvious. 

It was not an easy road for Humboldt.  Okay, I lie, it was a pretty easy road.  He had a wealthy mother, so the second she died he stopped pretending to study medicine and was off to South America with his boyfriend (or as he liked to call him, his botanist).  He went there allegedly to discover the tributaries of the great Orinioco river, which surprised the locals, who knew them well and to his disappointment could describe them in detail.  While there he studied everything from the colour of the sky to the nature of the soil, and came to a forest of conclusions, almost all of which are correct: he invented isotherms, he identified deforestation, he called it on tectonic plates; he even flagged the dangers of ‘great masses of steam and gas’ coming from cities.  He categorically condemned slavery and the idea of racial inequality in terms that are almost shockingly modern.

After covering Humboldt’s long and cushy life, the book goes on to cover all the many other naturalists who were inspired by him, including Darwin, Thoreau, and Marsh.  Probably not coincidentally, these guys also had a ton of unearned income.  They also had disapproving parents, who either died or got worn down by their sons’ enthusiasm.  And there is a LOT of enthusiasm.  Here’s Darwin to his father:

I am at present red-hot with Spiders!  

Humboldt got so excited that when he ran out of paper he would just scratch away at his desk rather than stop writing, and he did begin to worry he was losing his mind.  Muir, meanwhile, is reported by a guest to have run out of his cabin when the earth started to shake shouting happily: “A noble Earthquake!!!”   He was apparently excited to study it.  But one does wonder on his methods, as he later wrote to Emerson that “he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and they had replied ‘it’s all love’.”

Marsh was probably my favourite, partly because he was one of the only ones who had to find a way to fit his passion in around actually having to work for money.  As he put it, earnestly, in a letter, explaining the kind of job he was after:

small duties and large pay . . .

I mean aren’t we all.  Eventually he gets a job as an ambassador, which gives him lots of time to consider irrigation around the Nile, but still he complained:

I have been entirely disappointed as to the rest and relaxation I looked for

Oh sweetheart.

I have been strangely educated on many topics by this book. That there were 15,000 ships a day entering London in 1802; that the state of Nevada was nearly called Humboldt; etc.  But I think what I mostly take from it is the fact that you can for sure live your best life.  Now, I am rather jealous that probably no one can ever be as true polymath, as Humboldt was, as there is now just too much to know.  And of course, the money thing is a problem. But I am inspired by the joy these guys took in what they were doing, how they poured all their lives into having a wonderful time. 

As John Muir put it:

I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me-ee-ey

And who cares what anyone else thought.