Year: 2024

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry

This is fun genre romance. I have never been much of a reader of genre fiction, but I like this lady Emily Henry. She writes quick, funny novels that make a vacation fly by. She is an enormous best seller, and I was interested to read how she thinks about the ‘romance genre’ tag. See below, from CBC. It is continually weird that somehow Stephen King (genre: thriller) is so much more respectable than any female genre writer I can think of

For Henry, it’s important to call herself a romance writer because she’s tired of people looking down on the genre and dismissing its value. 

“There is still a lot of snobbery around the genre and I find it really bizarre because it’s one of the very few genres that is so centered on women,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not just for or about women, but the authorship is dominated by women, the readership is dominated by women and I just don’t think it’s really a coincidence that it’s the genre that gets dismissed so readily…. Romance is so significant because it values women’s stories.”

MONEY by Martin Amis

This was one of the more famous books of the 1980s. I cannot say I am feeling it. It tells the story of an author whose book is being made into a movie. He has an alcohol problem and rolls joyfully/miserably through various excesses of his private and professional life. It is a novel of voice, the exuberant voice of the alcoholic, and I think we are supposed to be shocked and titillated by how transgressive he is. A woman at a bar is a ‘big bim,’ he has lots of thoughts on black New Yorkers, etc. I just found it kind of snore.

SIDE BAR: I am 100% sure that this author has daddy issues, just on general principles, because men like this always do. I note that Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, was also an author and wrote the book LUCKY JIM, also a novel in the voice of a disillusioned man. This one, just as transgressive, is wonderful and heart-warming and made me feel free to hate my life. I am sure these two books are in some kind of dialogue, but can’t be bothered to Google to find out how.

ADVENTURES IN MASHONALAND by Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman

Clearly I did not really understand what total ballers some Victorian woman were.  This book is the first-person account of some young nurses who decided to come to Mashonaland in the 1890s, and it is some hair-raising stuff. I thought they were all at home wearing corsets and having vapours, but apparently not. 

This was when Florence Nightingale had made nursing acceptable for Victorian women, and what I got from this book is that girls who wanted out grabbed this opportunity with both hands. In this case, the nurses are asked to go to Mashonaland when there is no road or train, and after various efforts by boat, (and being abandoned by the Bishop), they get tired of waiting and decide to walk – from Beira!  Here is a discussion with the various men telling them not to try it:

No women he had known had ever walked in Africa; even men found it trying, and sometimes died on the way.  We told our excellent advisors that we could only  die once, and that dying was just as disagreeabale in a room as on the veldt.  If women had never walked in Africa there was no reason why they should not begin

It’s an extraordinary walk, and when they get there the hospital is hardly a hut.  They spend two years dealing with ‘fever’ (I assume malaria?), and with all kinds of other wild problems, lions, etc.  One of them finds someone to marry.  I liked this line:

Africa is the land of the unforeseen. . . ‘Questions,’ ‘wars,’ ‘difficulties’ spring up at an instant’s notice.

So true still today, though we call them ‘challenges.’  So tough are the conditions that when the next batch of nurses arrive to take over (a road having been built) half of them turn around and go back to Beira! 

An amazing story of people leading big crazy lives against the odds.

COLD CREMATORIUM by Jozsef Debreczeni

Here is a really stomach-churning account of the Nazi death camps.  It is written by a Hungarian journalist, who brings his professional eye to describing how he survived.  I was amazed it is not more famous. The Introduction tells me this is because it has only recently been translated from the Hungarian.  The book begins with the author, Jozsef Debreczeni, being captured in June 1944. Arriving at the first of the camps, the old, young, and female are separated out to the left.  Then the Nazis say that those on the left will get to ride in a truck up the hill, so anyone who feels they cannot walk up the hill should also go to the left. Debreczeni nearly takes the offer, but is fortunate to hear an existing prisoner whisper to him to stay.  Of course all those on the left go directly to be gassed. 

Those on the right go on to hard labour, which is pretty horrifying, but not nearly so bad as what happens when he is somehow sent on to a hospital camp.  Here he lies naked, 2-3 to a bunk, in huge dormitories with almost nothing to eat, and with no one clearing up the sewage, so it is ankle deep at all times.  They do hear news of the front, so they understand that the Nazis have lost, but the question is if they can stay alive long enough for the Russians to get to them.  When the Red Army appears with sausages and throws it on his bed I felt like weeping. 

One thing that really surprised me in this story was his account of how much of the camp order – and how much of the decisions on who and how to deprive of food – was made by fellow prisoners. Apparently the Nazis created a hierarchy, and those prisoners at the top were, in his view, quite merciless to those below.  They loom as much larger villains than their actual captors.  Once the Nazi soldiers decide to run away, what is interesting is the prisoner hierarchy run away too, and while none are caught in the author’s camp, in others they were hanged by the other prisoners.

THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER 1864-1875 by William Finaughty

As always with these kinds of books one is just left stunned by how very much more wildness there used to be in the world.  Try this:

We had scattered out, Mr Price being on my right, when he came racing along by the side of about 300 to 400 giraffe.  It was a wonderful and beautiful sight.  It seemed  a pity to shoot them, but we bottled up sentiment and got five of them.

300-400 giraffe?!? I’ve never seen a group larger than about 10. I didn’t even know they would naturally herd in that size, because I guess there just aren’t enough of them alive to do so. He also at one point sees an elephant herd a MILE AND A HALF LONG.  Even if he’s exaggerating, it’s still enormous.

I learnt a lot from this book, not least that older male giraffe do not make good eating, and so are colloquially known as ‘stinkbulls.’  It is sad to note the collapse of the ecosystem even in his lifetime.  When he first came, he could shoot into a herd and elephants would not even run, they were so unused to bullets.  After ten years, if you sounded a gun anywhere, you wouldn’t even see any elephants for days. 

Apparently he went on to gold prospecting and gambling addiction.  A full life.

SALLY IN RHODESIA by Sheila McDonald

If you are from London, you have many books about past life in your town. If you are from Harare, not so many, in part because Harare is just that little bit younger than London.  This is a book created out of letters sent home by a young wife after moving to what was then Salisbury in 1909, shortly after the city’s founding. 

I am struck by how very little seems to have changed.  People are in and out of each other’s houses, without calling in advance; people take pride in not being thrown by accidents and emergencies (I am not quite Rhodesian yet, she confesses at one point, when she weeps after an unplanned 10 mile hike with a baby); and people love a little drink at sunset.  ‘I’ll never think of Salisbury without the sundowners,’ she says, and 110 years on it’s still the case.  Her mother, who she wrote the letters to, was obviously worried about her moving from England to the colonies, and the letters are remarkable for the enthusiasm with which she adopts her new country.  I guess pioneers are self-selecting.

I was also very interested to learn that Rhodesian women were thought to be ‘fast.’  She assures us this is the wrong impression (sadly I agree). Apparently it comes form a book called VIRGINIA AMONG THE RHODESIANS, which was a huge hit.  I am naturally in hot pursuit of a copy to find out that hot 1900s goss

A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim

The review I first read about this book was illustrated with a photo of a young Asian woman holding the hand of a much older European man.  The review spent much time discussing whether or not the book is revenge porn, and to my surprise the pornographer is in fact the young woman.

Basically, the guy was married, and had an affair with this lady, and this is the story of that affair.  This is all sounds very salacious but in fact for a book with really a lot of sex in it, it is remarkably straightforward.  There’s a lot of chat about what she wore, and when he did or not text her back.  It was drafted in real-time, as the relationship was happening, which gives it an interesting kind of immediacy.

What I found especially interesting was what this lady did for a living, which, as far as I can tell, was nothing too much.  She had previously been with another much older man, Malcolm McLaren, who she met when she was a student at Yale, and after his death (about which she is clearly heart-broken) she mostly curates his artistic legacy.  She spends her year going between New York and various European capitals, having dinners, going to openings, and wearing designer shoes. I tried not to think the word ‘parasite,’ as of course that is uncharitable.  I guess I like my artists starving.

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.