Author: sarahwp

THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT by Laila Lalami

I’m apparently really feeling shipwrecks at the minute.  I just finished THE WAGER, a total shipwreck shocker where a rich guy makes bad decisions.  Today, and on dry land, those people usually get promoted.  Back then and when the ocean is involved, outcomes are harsher. In this mind-bending novel, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, based on real events, a Spanish expedition lands in Florida in 1527.  The genius running it, Nantes, decides it will be a good idea to send all the ships onward to a bay (that he assumes probably exists) while he leads 300 people to find a lost city of gold that he has tortured some native Americans into telling him exists.  No surprises, everybody dies, and cannibalism absolutely plays a role.  Only four people are ever heard from again.  They turn up eight years later, having completed an incredible tens of thousands of miles to end up all the way at Mexico City. 

This story is told from the perspective of one of the four, an enslaved man called Estebianco. The other three all wrote accounts of their journey, but he is only known from one line, which lists him as one of the four survivors.  The novel is a really impressive feat of imagination, taking him from Morocco through enslavement and on to this truly wild journey.

I just want to say one thing that really made me LOL, and gives one more sympathy for this Nantes. You will recall (maybe) that Cortez conquered the Aztecs and became fabulously wealthy, finding so much gold that he crashed the value of gold in Spain.  Apparently Nantes was supposed to have lead that expedition, but Cortez just basically got organized and left before they could make it official.  Poor guy. I just love his bad temper and his feeling that he somehow deserved a city of gold.   Don’t we all.

ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This is a book about a recession. In it, a young woman works a job she hates and is extremely grateful for. It’s a story humming with economic anxiety.  This part made me laugh:

Early on he (her boss) called me his rock star.  This was funny to me, since in actuality rock stars get onstage, perform, fuck many girls, wreck the hotel room.  I, meanwhile, sweated competence, a hungry efficiency. 

How often have I sweated competence!  OFTEN.  It’s curious how very few books are written about office jobs, given so many people spend so much of their lives in them.  It’s like we don’t think it’s a real part of our life.

I also really like this part:

All my life, when I imagined the future, I thought of each of us as small atoms, individuated, settling down, getting a flat somewhere, wearing out one job and then another, like successive pairs of shoes.  You grew up, you were found a person to marry, you went sullenly to work, you kept a house running, you did the requisite paperwork or paid the price, and then for two hours of the day you might cultivate a pastime, like yelling at sports on the television or forcing the lawn into submission.  It took bravery to imagine something even slightly different, let alone follow that imagining through.

Ouch. 

One piece of whining, there was a lot of weirdly specific descriptions of food.  Try this:

Some people find it harder to forgive you for not actually being wrong, Tig had said in her Tig way over bowls of bisque served with ragged pieces of country loaf.

?!? ragged pieces ?!? country loaf !?!

THE PRIVILEGES by Jonathan Dee

I’m really reading intensely and fast at the minute. For unclear reasons my attention span seems to be BACK. This one was about a couple who get married and get rich the gross way, i.e., banking. I wish I could get rich the gross way. I enjoyed the early part, where they are young, but once they got their millions, I felt the book sort of turned moralistic, like it couldn’t just let rich people be happy. Like somehow it wouldn’t be right to have book about how people got really rich and that was great. I have news: I think many rich people are really happy.

AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST by Iain Pears

I am apparently well mad for the seventeenth century at the minute. Here I am with another book about the English Civil War. This one is a murder mystery. It tells the same story from four different perspectives. It’s a really fun mishmash of all kinds of ideas: Venetian travelers, cadaver acquisition, Royalist plots, Quakers, mental health problems, you name it. The part I found most striking was the fierce debate about whether experimentation was the right way to build scientific understanding. This sounds bizarre: like, obviously it is? How else are you supposed to know anything? But in the seventeenth century this was a revolutionary idea, with most people thinking it was presumptuous to question the wisdom of the ancients. It’s a bit like when I found out that people used to object (!) to handwashing. There is something so fun about finding out how constructed your worldview is.

SYBILLE BEDFORD by Selina Hastings

Here is a book that presents the mind-boggling idea that you may not have to work at anything to be a worthwhile person. This is a biography of Sybille Bedford, who is is a writer I am familiar with through only one book (A LEGACY, which I randomly found in a second hand store). Bedford was born rich, but her family lost their money, and then she went ahead and lived off the money of her various friends. She didn’t seem to find this weird, and neither did they. It is just bizarre: she goes from summers in Provence to balconies in Rome, to English salons. She is gay and sleeps with everyone in a fifty mile radius. Basically, she focuses on having a wonderful time, and everyone thinks that is just fine. WHERE HAVE I GONE WRONG. It is totally inspirational.

This lady just LOVES TO HANG OUT. Here she is in an interview: “I love food, good food, simple, authentic. Taking food with friends has a sacramental dimension for me. It is part of the love of life. ” I just love this conscious focus on enjoyment. And it continued throughout. Even approaching seventy we are told she “had amassed a large number of friends, and was constantly adding to her social circle, going out most evenings, coming into contact with new worlds and sections of society.” In her nineties her girlfriend is in her fifties! Totally baller.

IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn

I started this book at 10pm, in bed, and next thing I knew it was past midnight. I hadn’t even looked up.  It’s a long time since I got absorbed in a book so easily.  It reminded me of childhood, when I used to often read for hours.  I finished the whole thing the next day, despite being kind of busy.  I chose long bus routes on purpose so I would have time to read, and it’s a long time since I enjoyed a London bus so much. 

The story starts in a boys’  boarding school in England.  The one boy, Gaunt, is in love with the other boy, Ellwood. It’s hard enough at the best of times to tell if someone likes you back, but it’s especially hard for Gaunt, because its 1913, and despite all the boys sleeping with each other in this place (?) it’s also profoundly homophobic.  And that’s the other part: it’s 1913.  Gaunt enlists when the war starts, and we go to the trenches.  Ellwood follows him out there. 

The book is inspired by the IN MEMORIAM section of boarding school newspapers, that used to carry reports of deaths of old boys.  Before the war, this section was short, but after 1914 it became lengthy, there as large numbers of teenagers from the fanciest schools started dying.  It’s sad to think, for the younger boys, waiting to turn 18, how they went from the it’ll-be-over-by-Christmas enthusiasm of 1913 to just-waiting-for-my-turn-to-die in 1917, 1918. 

Reading this book gave me some hope that my phone has not permanently damaged my attention span.  What I need to be doing is spending more time on finding books I might actually like, because when I do, it’s like I am nine again, the internet’s not been invented, and my mind is still my own.

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

A novel showcasing a really remarkable skill. It tells the story of Sherman’s march south during the American civil war through many tiny vignettes of people of all kinds. What artistry! What ability! I don’t know who this EL Doctorow is, but he is amazing.

Writing aside, it was also interesting to learn more about the war. Sherman apparently went along burning down houses and towns to get the South to surrender, only not burning them down if the Southerners had already done it themselves. Particularly extremely heart-breaking to read about is how the slaves waited on their plantations for Sherman to arrive, and when he did, simply followed him away. It is just wild and sad and happy to read about their first days of freedom

THE MARCH by EL Doctorow

A novel showcasing a really remarkable skill. It tells the story of Sherman’s march south during the American civil war through many tiny vignettes of people of all kinds. What artistry! What ability! I don’t know who this EL Doctorow is, but he is amazing.

Writing aside, it was also interesting to learn more about the war. Sherman apparently went along burning down houses and towns to get the South to surrender, only not burning them down if the Southerners had already done it themselves. Particularly extremely heart-breaking to read about is how the slaves waited on their plantations for Sherman to arrive, and when he did, simply followed him away. It is just wild and sad and happy to read about their first days of freedom

THE L-SHAPED ROOM by Lynne Reid Banks

A novel about someone who gets pregnant before abortion is legal. Surprisingly, it is kind of uplifting. The woman concerned is middle class, and is offered an abortion by a proper doctor in a hospital. She decides this would be ‘taking the easy way out,’ (?!?) so keeps the baby. A lot of crazy things happen, such as jaw-dropping rudeness from strangers, getting fired for being pregnant (?!?), and similar. I can only say again: THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM.

Despite all this, it is curiously mostly a story about how going outside your comfort zone – in this case, she moves into a working class bedsit, and becomes friends with black people and Jewish people – can actually provide you with new opportunities and new freedoms. It’s a strangely happy book.

There was much to admire in the writing. As a little sample, here she is coming to her father’s office to tell him she is pregnant. She got pregnant the first time she ever had sex, with a fellow actor in the small-time repertory company she is with:

My father often said he didn’t know where all my ‘acting nonsense’ came from. If he could have seen himself putting on his head-of-an-industrial-empire act in that shabby, poky office, he’d have known it came straight from him. They way he glanced up from his work, looked at me for a second as if trying to place me, then let a tired smile play around his lips – it was a perfect performance of the weary tycoon smiling tolerantly at the carefree daughter who knows no better than to interrupt his Atlasian labours. . . . In some strange way I was almost looking forward to telling him now. I was glad I’d decided to do it at his office. I wasn’t afraid of him here. I saw him here, not as my father, perpetually demanding strengths and achievements of me, but as a supremely unimportant cog trying to pretend it was the whole dull wheel

KINTU by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

A pretty unusual book, being a story of four generations of a Ugandan family. It was a sophisticated piece of writing, moving between the pre-colonial and the contemporary period. Historical fiction set in Africa is pretty rare, so I enjoyed the ambition of this book. My challenge was the same as for all multi-generational stories, which is that it can feel like a series of short stories, and I am not a big fan of short stories. They feel to me like getting dumped: you are just starting to care and then all of a sudden it’s over.