Year: 2024

CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks

Here is a novel about a female spy. It starts as a straight-forward love story, then becomes an espionage novel, and then loses its way for a bit, struggling to connect the plotlines while getting deep into French politics in WWII.

It’s engaging throughout, which is a feat at 500 + pages, and is remarkable for deep research and believable characters, even when the plot is a little shaky. I was especially struck by the presentation of how ordinary French people reacted when their neighbours were collected into railway cars and sent ‘east’. How did they react? Apparently they were not just fine with it, they actively applauded. It is pretty chilling.

Also of interest was the worldview of those who signed up to the ideas of Vichy France: that is, that German was clearly going to win the war, so it made sense to accept this early and get France the best seat possible in the ‘new Europe.’ One can see the pragmatism of this view. It is darkly funny how completely wrong they were. What I learnt from this is that when you are being ‘pragmatic’ (i.e., dividing up your neighbours clothes between yourselves) you better make sure you are making the right bet, because if you are not, you are truly left with nothing, not even your dignity.

THE SUITCASE by Sergei Dovlatov

I picked up this book in the week Alexi Navalny died. It’s like a very tiny tribute to that remarkable and heroic tradition of Russian dissent of which he was an heir.

It begins: “So this bitch at OVIR says to me, “Everyone who leaves is allowed three suitcases.  That’s the quota.” LOL! You know you are in for a good dictatorship story when it begins with encounters with bureaucracy. I myself have fond / horrifying memories of a certain 12 hour long queue to get a Zimbabwean passport in 2010.

The novel is structured around the stories of each of the items he was supposedly allowed to take out of Russia. It is both hilarious and sad. How hilarious is this:

Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin visited France.  Russian emigres there asked him: “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

A great book.

BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB by Waguih Ghali

This is a novel about an Coptic Egyptian dealing with some pretty modern problems. It’s the 1950s, he comes from money, he gets involved in the wrong side of of the revolution, he moves to Europe, and he becomes poor in that really penniless way that only intellectuals seem to be able to manage.

He suffers a lot, and I felt for him, but I also wanted to shake him. One of his big problems is that he doesn’t feel like he is ‘Egyptian,’ because he is relatively well off and a Copt (so speaks French and English rather than Arabic). There is nothing that annoys me quite so much as this unthinking agreement we all seem to have that you can only ‘really’ be part of a country if you are part of the majority of that country. When he moves to Europe he also does a lot of suffering, because he feels that while he has been on some level formed by European ideas he does not fit in there either. This also makes me want to shake him, and say: it’s fine to also not be part of Europe! A hybrid person is still a real person!!

These are I recognize all the struggles of the colonized intellectual, so perhaps that this seems so clear to me in the twenty first century is because I stand on the shoulders of those of the twentieth, who did the suffering for me. Poor Ghali, he killed himself in London in 1968.

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell

In case you feel like you have not had enough pandemic content, here is something for you. It’s about the 1918 flu, and is based on the author’s own experience of losing his mother to it when he was just 10 years old.

After the loss he was made to go and live with his aunt, so he lost not just his mother but his whole world. For this reason, the book is actually less about the flu itself and more a sort of memorial to the ordinary days of his childhood just before it.

What is particularly interesting is to be reminded of what childhood was like when boredom still existed. They spend hours in this book doing nothing much, being with their own thoughts. It’s strange to think what childhood is like now, when children have so many books and activities and phones and television. Imagine having to generate your own content!

SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

To show there has been a book written about everything, here is one on local government.  It is a touching story of a Yorkshire community in the 1930s, covering the rich, the poor, and everything in between. 

It’s shockingly contemporary in many ways.  Most affecting is the story of a very bright teenage girl whose mother dies giving birth to an eighth child, and who thus has to drop out of school at 15 to look after the other kids  Note, the doctor had told the mother she should not have another child, and she did not want one, but I guess she could not refuse her husband, who got a bit drunk and after all it wasn’t his death sentence and THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Also THANK GOD FOR VACCINATION.  The author, Winifred Holtby, died at 36, of kidney issues from the Scarlet Fever she had as a child.  She knew she had only about two years to live and dedicated it to finishing this book.  It was her fifth, and she was disappointed none had been very warmly received.  This one, published posthumously, was a huge hit and is now considered a twentieth century classic.   

Side bar, this Winifred Holtby was a dear friend of Vera Brittain (whose TESTAMOUNT OF YOUTH I read a couple of years ago).  They lived together when they moved to London after university, and then, touchingly/weirdly, carried on doing so even after Vera got married.  To answer your question, the husband did not like it, no. 

How much do you love this line from the introduction, about how Winifred was in 1935 “staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue of life in London  . . .”  The distractions and fatigue of a life in London!  I hear you Winifred, I hear you. 

AT FREDDIE’S by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald is such an extraordinary writer that I really did not care this novel did not have a plot.  It is about a childrens’ theatre school in the 1960s, run by a woman call Freddie, who is an institution, and knows it. She gets away with a lot :

. . . only because Freddie cared so much, and so relentlessly, for the theatre, where, beyond all other worlds, love given is love returned.  Insane directors, perverted columnists cold as a fish, bankrupt promoters, players incapable from drink, have all forgiven each other and been forgiven, and will be, until the last theatre goes dark, because they loved the profession.  And of Freddie – making a large assumption – they said: her heart is in it.

The story, which does not matter much, is about a new young teacher in whom Freddie discerns: “that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster.”

This made me laugh, as did her first flat in London where:

The interior smelled powerfully of feet.  Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. 

What a writer!

OLAV AUDUNSSON: VOWS by Sigrid Undset

I just had to quit this book, even though it was well-written and impeccably researched.  It was set in thirteenth century Sweden, and was fun journey into that very different world.  It starts with a teenage couple having sex after a night of drunken feasting.  They know they shouldn’t be doing this, as they aren’t formally engaged, but they do it anyway.  And things start to unravel from there.  It may sound unreasonable, but I just had to stop.  Like I appreciate that if you make a bad decision you have to pay the price, but do I need to read a whole book about it?  Like I get it okay ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES and it sucks. 

Especially actions you take when you are young.  When you’re young you end up writing these blank checks (I’ll choose this career, I’ll marry that person) and then life, like some kind of loan shark, just keeps cashing it for decades.

THE WRONG KNICKERS by Bryony Gordon

Here is a memoir that I thought would be a fun canter through someone’s twenties in London. In fact I found it rather triggering. Will sound dumb, but I guess I had never really thought about what it would be like to come up in this city and not be an immigrant. And let me tell you: it’s very different.

It’s wild to imagine what it would be like to feel free to live in your overdraft. The author was of course not happy about struggling to pay her bills, but she kept doing it, because she enjoyed booze and clothes and cigarettes more. I mean: don’t we all? But I guess if you know full well you have a Plan B, in terms of a family home in Fulham to return to, you have that freedom.

If she is in a flat she doesn’t like, she just leaves. Because she has somewhere to go to. Imagine! One time she gets mugged, and she regards that as a good enough reason to go. And so, wildly, does everyone she knows! I can’t even imagine a London with so much mercy in it.

THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears

I chose this on impulse as an audiobook to listen to on a long car ride, and I did not expect to emerge as TEAM BRITNEY. I am not sure what I thought the #freebritney movement was all about, but WOW I did not realize how right they were.

I knew that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was quite common to get rid of difficult women by putting them in asylums, but did not realize how very much this is exactly what happened to one of the more famous pop stars of our generation. Britney’s father knew exactly what he was doing, because both his mother, and his step-mother, were put in asylums by his father. I am not saying Britney is 100% well, but she was well enough to be forced to do Vegas shows 7 times a week, tour the world, go on morning TV shows, etc. She certainly was well enough to have her own cell phone and choose her own boyfriends and eat french fries if she wanted to!

I can’t believe it went on for thirteen years! It is an appalling story. I recommend it. Britney had a wild and interesting life even before she was imprisoned in plain sight by her father, and it makes for a great memoir.

NORMAL WOMEN by Ainslie Hogarth

There were lots of bits of this book that I liked. Try this:

One of the cats levitated to the porch railing, where it lifted its leg, long and straight as a geometry compass, and made a noisy, jubilant feast of its asshole.

Or this, in a mall food court:

They saw men’s pale legs. Frail as roots. Buried all winter. Exposed, now, too soon. Cold. Tortured. Standing in line for fast food. Bringing their trays to small tables, tucking in the attached chairs, alone, knees pointing in opposite directions. Too much thing. Unsettling tendons. Dry knees. Leg hair. White socks. Sneakers.

But in the end I could not finish it. I just got too irritated. It was about a rich woman who never organized herself to have a real job, and now that she is married and a full-time mom, is anxious about unlikely scenarios in which her husband can no longer earn money. I mean I sort of feel for her but on the other hand she is so checked out she doesn’t even know whether their mortgage is expensive for them or not. I mean?!? It just seemed super-whiny. Suffragettes did not go to jail for this I can tell you that much.