Year: 2022

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO by Iris Origo

Here is a book to make you feel like indeed all your problems are insignificant and death its on its way. It’s non-fiction, based on the 140,000 letters, 500 ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, and various other paperwork left behind by a 14th century Italian merchant named Francesco Di Marco Datini. This is apparently one of the largest records left behind by any medieval person, and it is truly astounding. His business ventures, his house, his food, his clothes, his private conversations with his wife, his worries, his medical problems, his religious crises. It’s all in there. I don’t know what I thought medieval people were doing with their time, maybe like religious mania and starvation, but apparently they were living full and rich lives that are now completely lost.

Let me give you a flavour. He is a super anxious guy, and here he is to his wife:

Remember to go to bed betimes and rise early and let not the door be opened until you have got up. And look well to everything; let them not go a-gadding. You know what Bartolomea is; she will say she goes one place, and then goes elsewhere. Ghirigora, too, has little sense . .

And here is someone else writing to him when he is getting really carried away with renovating his house, something that even today in Tuscany is called ‘rubble disease”:

Other wise and virtuous citizens do some building, but all except you in moderation! One man has a bailiff, another a friend or a paid overseer. But you are so greedy, you will allow no single groat to be misused, nor a single brick to laid lengthways, when it would look better upright – as if your little house where to be the dwelling place of your immortal soul!

I acquired some interesting historical info too. I was surprised to find that Italians had slaves at this time, actively acquired to replace people who died in the Black Death. Then at another point some town is ‘sacked by a company of free lances,’ from which I guess we get the word freelance? Also, how amazing is that it was standard to write on the first page of all your business ledgers: “In the name of god and of profit”

But I think this history stuff I will quickly forget. What I will remember is the density of his life, the huge anxieties and sufferings and drama, him and I suppose millions of other medieval people, and millions since, all forgotten.

YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart

This author’s first book, the wonderful SHUGGIE BAIN, was all about being poor, gay, and Scottish, while also being a mummy’s boy when that mummy is an alcoholic. This book, YOUNG MUNGO covers the same ground. I often think that if, as they say, we all only have one story to tell, most of us have decided what that story is by the time we are sixteen. It’s interesting also that while the first was lightly fictionalized memoir, this one is clearly more of a novel – and you can tell – because in this one we have PLOT.

Fifteen year old Mungo is forced to go away on a fishing weekend with two strange men his mother meets at AA. They go to a loch which is “as near tae heaven as you can get on three buses.” Things get progressively more dangerous and creepy and eventually SPOILER it emerges they are recently released sex offendors, who end up assaulting Mungo. This is all intercut with flashbacks of the development of Mungo’s relationship with his first boyfriend, and the two stories intertwine, both escalating, one in a horrifying way (SPOILER Mungo kills them, but its not as soap opera as it sounds), and one in a very sweet way.

I just love the writing . . . three examples. Here his mother coming back from her boyfriend’s:

Every five days or so he would return her like an overdue library book, and she would reappear so dog-eared, so sodden with drink, that it looked like she had been dropped in the bath

And:

There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.

And, on the eyes of a deer:

As dark and wet as two peeled plums

IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz

In this book a man attempts to walk from San Francisco to New York.  It does not go well.  It is the nineteenth century, and he is a young Swedish guy called Hakan, who intended to go to New York with his brother to make their fortune.  Unfortunately, he became separated from his brother on a city street (they had never seen a city before). He assumes they will meet on the boat they are supposed to take, and asks for the boat to ‘America.’  Sadly this is boat to the west, not the east coast. 

On arrival he decides just to walk it, like you do when you miss the night bus.  And so begins a bizarre odyssey.  He first joins up with a deranged gold digger, and then is captured, held hostage, and raped by a toothless prostitute, and then when he escapes, meets a naturalist obsessed with finding the very first creature to come out of the primordial swamp, then we have a con man who may or may not be leading a caravan to their deaths, then we have got some kind of murderous cult, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through but I will stop. 

On the one hand, this sounds kind of unlikely.  On the other hand, perhaps not so.  You have to wonder who decides to do anything so insane as move to a foreign country with a one-way ticket.   You would for sure get a much higher proportion of nut-jobs, and lets face it that proportion is not low even today.  Hakan eventually gives up, and spends many years alone in the wilds, before eventually deciding to find a way to walk from Alaska back to Sweden.  Clearly while he learnt a lot over the decades, his geography did not improve. I want to laugh, but really it was kind of a sad book.  The part that I think about the most is not strangely all the crazy incidents once he got to America, but the very beginning, in Europe – that first mistake – losing his brother on a city street.  Imagine a world without internet, and without much literacy, where you could – completely believably – lose someone like that, and then never, ever find them again. 

THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman

In this book, a girl at university gets all het up about the philosophy of language, about whether words have meaning, and if so if we can ever understand them.  Of course it all boils down to some guy.   

She meets this guy in Russian class, and he begins to write her terribly clever emails. She replies with terribly clever emails.  It is all very intellectual but also very boring, just like it always is to be up close with someone’s crush. 

The things kept accumulating – the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal.  It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone.  Whoever it was would jump out of a window from boredom.  And yet here I was, watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about.

Eventually it emerges that he for real has a girlfriend, but somehow all this suffering carries on, and this is when she starts to have problems with the structure of reality and what it all means.  The solution is offered to her on a plate, by the crush.  Here he is, talking to her:

“My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly towards you.  He said I was – what was it, it was a funny expression.  Leading you on.  He said I was leading you on.” 

It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. 

.. . .”I tried to explain to Imre that it’s not like that, but was really dismissive.  He said I was starting to sound banal, and like a real asshole.”

Like seriously what is up with this girl?  Words do have meaning, and here he is explaining everything pretty clear.  No need to worry about the structure of the universe, this guy just an asshole.

Sidebar, the epigraph of this book is Proust on adolescence.  I’ll just end by quoting it at length because it is so fantastic:

But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality.  In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind.  There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul.  Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them.  In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. 

MICHEL THE GIANT: AN AFRICAN IN GREENLAND by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

Here is a book about how you can live the life of your wildest and most eccentric dreams.  In this memoir, a Togolese teenager in the 1950s discovers a book about Greenland in the only book store in his village.  He is inspired, and spends the next seven years travelling slowly up Africa and through Europe, raising money as he goes, till he gets to live in Greenland. 

Someone asks him how he will benefit financially from spending his early adulthood on this project, and like iconoclasts everywhere he is appalled anyone could ask a question so crass.  There is also a whole thing about how he nearly dies after getting bitten by a snake, but is saved by a priestess of a snake cult, so his family wants him to join this snake cult.  This I think also came into the whole run away to the Eskimos idea, but so wildly weird is this book that this is the least strange part of the story.

One reads many travelogues where Europeans travel to Africa and are titillated by its foreignness or disappointed it is not more foreign.  It is really fun to read it the other way round, and Kpomassie has plenty of both experiences.  These Greenlanders are just leading incredibly rough lives.  Take this:.

“Hans and Cecilia took me to dinner with Augustina and her husband Jorgensen, their neighbours and friends.  When we reached the house no meal was ready, but a whole seal, caught by netting, was waiting for us.   . . . As soon as we sat down at the table, Cecilia (went to the seal and started cutting it up pretty efficiently.  And then using her hands). .  . tore out bits of the lungs and then the liver.  These were the hors d’oeuvres.

BLEARGH!  They often eat raw food, still frozen.  Apparently you come to like the ‘crunch’ of ice crystals.  It is also very cold, so they keep the bucket to poop in in the living room, and don’t even pause their conversations while they use it.  BLEARGH!  He also finds out that the huskies, far from being the noble animals he imagined, are kept half-starving through the summer, when they are not needed, and only barely fed in winter.  Drunk people often get eaten by dogs, which is fair enough, as people often eat the dogs too.  BLEARGH!

On the upside, there is a lot of free love.  Married women offer themselves to him, or are offered by their husbands.  Apparently this is partly considered insurance, in case your own man does not make it back from the hunt.

I can hardly do justice to this strange book. I love this guy.  He is wildly original and did all of Africa incredibly proud. I think I am fondest of this part. When he first crosses into the Arctic circle, everyone gets a certificate.  You’d think he’d be excited, after working seven years to get there. But here he is:

This distribution of printed forms struck me as so grotesque that I didn’t bother to collect mine, preferring to savour the strange thill of that striking landscape.

What a man!

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY by Richard Llewellyn

Here is a classic novel of the Industrial Revolution.  It is a coming-of-age story set in the early twentieth century in a small Welsh mining village.  It captures a prelapsarian time of community and honest work that from our current perspective seems wildly imaginary.  Some light Googling tells me it is kind of imaginary, as apparently this famously Welsh story was written by an Englishman with only tenuous links to Wales.  Still, it works. It really works.  It is a little dated today, but I can still see why it was a huge bestseller. 

Most effective for me is the creation of an entire community.  The story is written by an older man, re-creating his boyhood and early manhood.  It oozes loss.  Whether he was Welsh or not, he was clearly struggling to find a way to keep alive the people he has lost.  Here is the last paragraph, remembering his father who died in a mining accident:

Did my father die under the coal?  But, God in heaven, he is down there now, dancing in the street with Davy’s red jersey over his coat, and coming, in a moment, to smoke his pipe in the front room and pat my mother’s hand, and look, and O, the heat of his pride, at the picture of a Queen, to his eldest son, whose baton lifted voice in music fit for a Queen to hear. 

. . . For if he is dead, then I am dead, and we are dead, and all of a sense of mockery.

How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone. 

It was crushing.

However, side point, I do always find it difficult when people who live in communities totally dependent on one thing (coal, copper, whatever) act all surprised and betrayed when that one thing ends.  Like what did you think was going to happen?  How did you think this was a good idea? DIVERSIFY PEOPLE DIVERSIFY.

DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED by Seamas O’Reilly

Here is a memoir by a man with TEN SIBLINGS.  For added drama, he grew up in Ireland during the Troubles and he lost his mother when he was five.  You can see where the pitch for this book wrote itself.

It had some funny parts.  For example, the title  DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED?, refers to the question he kept asking people at his mother’s wake. He was too small to understand what it meant, and was rather enjoying being the bearer of important news.  He was bouncing on his bed when he told his aunt:

“‘If you want to see her, she’s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this sombre death notice with a commemorative belly flop”.

He also described one Irish village as so picturesque it was as if it had been ‘bitten by a radioactive postcard’ which I found hilarious.   This book has been something of a bestseller, and I can see why.  And yet somehow it did not quite work for me.  I am not sure how to explain.  I think it was because it lacked heart.  In some ways, this does not make much sense, as there is much here that is sincere.  He talks a lot about his grief for the mother he hardly remembers. He is still ashamed, strangely, of his behavior at the wake.  And yet still, I could not really enjoy it.  Perhaps it is just that bit too polished?   It’s was a bit like reading a few hundred pages of a dinner anecdote that has been told once too often. 

GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell

GONE WITH THE WIND is a book both profoundly woke and un-woke.  The un-woke part is very famous.  The main characters are slave owners and slave apologists, and it is fascinating to see how they construct a world in which they can still live with themselves. It’s wild to see people living their daily lives while committing atrocities.  The woke part I rarely see discussed, but for me it’s pretty woke: and that’s the character of Scarlett O’Hara. I can’t think of a book previous to this that has a female character who clearly and explicitly manipulates being female to her advantage.  I also can’t think of an earlier female character who makes her own money and is proud of it.

Also interesting, and I think something you rarely see written about, is the really horribly mean act of keeping someone dangling.  Ashley Wilkes does it to Scarlett O’Hara, and it’s really sad. I think this happens a lot: you enjoy someone else having a crush on you, because you like the attention, so instead of doing the kind thing (making it clear they have no hope, so they can get over you), you keep it going, enjoying the validation, and making them go slowly crazy.  Meanwhile you act all innocent like they are the pathetic one.

STOLEN FOCUS by Johann Hari

It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be.  For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.  

There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too.  One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes?  Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself.  Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing.  Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years.  Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.

The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal.  If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end. 

Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about.   This book takes it to the extreme.  When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone).  Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.

OF LOVE AND HUNGER by Julian MacLaren-Ross

In this book we learn all about being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.  It involves a surprising amount of day-drinking.  The author, Julian McLaren-Ross, was apparently a true bohemian, and had much experience as a door-to-door salesman, and also of day drinking.  This book captures a certain seedy life in the early twentieth century very well, all petty debts, horrible rooming houses, and trying to avoid buying your round.  It is structured around a love affair the salesman has with a colleague’s wife.  He is not that into it, at first, and then gets super, super, into it.  Then she goes off him.  It’s sad, as love affairs that peter out always are, not helped by all the debt.  It has a kind of uplifting side though, in that she encourages him to write, and to think about politics, and to generally better himself.  People roll their eyes about crushes, but I think they can sometimes be powerful engines for growth.  People are always joining the drama club to meet girls, or joining the gym so boys will look at them, and etc.  At least it keeps us going forward, even if it all blows up in the end.